@drewdevault personally, I think that the general mood of HN has actually shifted towards the left. Shitcoin believers get downvoted rigorously, and I routinely see comments critical of discrimination, large corpoeations, even capitalism itself get highly upvoted - including stuff that would have been flagged to oblivion before Covid.
@drewdevault I strongly applaud your actions but at the same time, I fear it won't lead to much.
HackerNews has always been aimed at older tech professional, who skew strongly toward libertarianism: you know, the sorts of people who deplore Trump but vote for him anyway to prevent a "Communist" like Biden from getting in.
The moderation reflects the audience. I posted there about 100 times in a couple of years, but it was just too annoying.
a fairly popular submission for FFmpeg Explorer gets mass flagged because its demo video is Richard Spencer’s stupid nazi ass getting punched. a bunch of orange site regulars argue against punching nazis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37269425
@drewdevault I find that their flame war detection keeps controversial topics from the front page. Basically if there are more comments than upvotes it demotes the story.
@drewdevault The one time one of my posts hit the front page of HN, it got brigaded for a while because I’m trans and the article was about DEI. Eventually the community won out reversing the dead flag, but it was back and forth for a while.
There were a couple unhinged comments too, one of them suggested I should die and another that more trans people ought to be laid off.
@drewdevault Does it count if it's on its Telegram channel? I took screenshots of one episode that I decided not to share in public because it was about a sensitive topic (death).
@drewdevault I think HN is pretty open about censoring political discussions as being off topic, the question is whether they are 'fair and ballanced' in this censorship or not. Perhapse if there was a way to leverage scraped data to draw statistical conclusions on this matter you would be able to better show if they censor fairly or not.
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