FYI HN does not tolerate articles on Gaza and will flag this immediately. It was allowed once or twice only and moderators required a "both sides" respectfulness toward, and "intellectual curiosity" about ongoing genocide.
Yes, it's also a "shadow banned" topic. Mods delist it from the front page before outright killing it. I suspect the Gaza keyword in particular is filtered.
Moderators said that their stance on this topic was formed by talking with lots of Israelis in real life, and a couple Palestinians online who are no longer active (maybe dead).
This can also happen automatically from the high rate of flags this topic gets from anti-politics and pro-Israel folks
The topic isn't banned. The keyword isn't filtered. HN mods said none of the things you've claimed.
What you're seeing is users flagging the articles. We've turned the flags off on stories related to Gaza several times. The people you disagree with are just as upset about it as you are, btw, and just as convinced that the site is biased against them.
This is an impossible situation, but I'm still willing to turn off flags on the story in the future—but the article is going to have to be something more substantial than an opinion piece about a meme. Obviously the users who flagged this particular submission were correct to do so.
I assume you've already seen the many explanations I've posted about how we approach this and similar topics, but in case not—or for anyone who wants to know—here are a few:
This is all standard HN moderation practice that has been in place for many years. We haven't changed it. You're welcome to disagree about particular calls (i.e. about particular threads)—I don't claim we've called everything perfectly, in fact I know we haven't. But it's cheap and wrong for you to defame us for not allowing HN to burn to the ground on this topic, just as it's cheap and wrong for others to do so because we won't suppress the topic altogether.
dang did wrote a (poorly worded IMO) comment about his views being colored by talked to Israelis, then, when called out on the biases, he replied that he also had contact with a user from Palestine that unfortunately went missing afterwards. At least that’s something that I remember as a fact.
But it seems to me that dang is engaging in a neutral manner (even if I disagree about the ethics of engaging neutrally in the current conflict), and I do agree that this article is just rage-bait, and was rightly flagged.
That’s a real shame. This is about a meme, I’d think it would be relevant. Even Paul Graham is speaking out against the genocide. It’s weird that we can’t discuss even tech stories about it here.
There was interesting news about AI tech the IDF uses to decide their bombing targets. This was also flagged out multiple times immediately.
If the HN audience universally thinks something is reprehensible, it's an acceptable topic. If there's a core group that supports the reprehensible thing, it's now controversial and disallowed here.
Paul Graham I think is now retired from YC. The current YC CEO is pro-Israel, pro-Zionism.
The topic isn't banned. The issue is how often to have a thread about it, and by what principles to decide this. HN has had clear moderation principles about this kind of thing for many years, and I've explained them many times. If you, or anyone, wants to understand what they are, take a look at the links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 and you'll find further links to plenty of past explanations. If, after reading those, you or anyone else has a question that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to hear what it is.
HN doesn't tolerate any kind of superficial political story, and this one, about a campaign tweet, is more superficial than most. But your contributions to this thread are a good illustration of why people reflexively flag stories about this controversy: HN is an engine for generating conversations, and we've seen what kinds of conversation we get when it's fueled this way.
I mean yes, it literally is. How can people make up their mind if they can’t even see it? You’re being very argumentative. If you don’t agree, that’s your decision, you don’t need to come into the thread and promote censorship.
