Why are comments about twitter's censorious nature being downvoted? The two main topics here (in my view) are 1. Twitter's response to Substack and how this move will impact the two companies and 2. the fact that some of Substack's most prominent users are writers who are refugees from other platforms (Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, Bari Weiss from the New York Times etc.) who left because of the suppression-of-unpopular-speech trends that Twitter is now famous for.
So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist).
If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue.
Parler had a moderation process. It verifiably failed to actually prevent violent rhetoric (c.f. Lin Wood calling for Pence's execution days before the crowd took the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!").
> How do you suppose you prevent violent rhetoric? You can only react to it.
Look around you. Right here on HN, we discuss politics. We're doing it right now. Yet... no violence. And the reason is moderation. The moderators remove violent commenters and the community shuns them. Clearly HN/dang have been able to "prevent violent rhetoric". It works.
And Facebook and Twitter are doing OK right now. Both were very late to the game, but are engaged in a heroic effort right now to clean up their communities. In fact it was something of a left-Twitter running gag over the past week to giggle at conservatives complaining about their follower count suddenly dropping.
But Parler did no such thing. So outside forces had to apply the moderation.
Parler had deleted several of Wood's posts, and a number of users had used the "report" function to raise the flag to Parler management. I think he was close to being banned.
That particular post was still up when the site went down, I believe. I mean, sure, it's possible they would have gotten better. But this wasn't an abstract issue, we'd just had an attack on congress and there was (and remains) serious worry that something similar or worse would happen at the inauguration. Certainly the rhetoric on the site had not significantly moderated in the few days between the capitol riot and their ban.
There's a lot of space between "what violates the law" (or explicit ios/play store Terms of Use for that matter) and "what will get you kicked off twitter" and I believe Parler operated in that space. Users could post stuff that would get them booted off twitter, but that was legal speech. This was fine with iOS & play store & AWS until they all simultaneously and independently (wink wink) realized it violated their terms of use. Unless we grant that this had nothing to do with newly discovered terms of use violations, it was crushing Parler in reaction to a change in the political winds (read: this is what happened).
I agree. There are people on here seeming to argue that parler was booted “because of TOS violations” which they clearly were not. The winds changed direction and it became expedient to boot them, TOS rules don’t enter into the equation.
But the platforms aren’t being honest about this – they’re claiming that it was about terms of use violations. I’m saying “stop pretending like this argument from the platform makes any sense and let’s have a real discussion about the ramifications of banning groups from a platform when they become political unpopular.”
They are not dishonest, this is just bad faith argument. Platforms were not passive regarding Parler for long time trying to make them comply with TOS. It is not true that they would ignore issue before.
And the real world violence significantly raised the stakes - both legal and practical.
> Users could post stuff that would get them booted off twitter, but that was legal speech
I'm curious what kind of posts would definitely fall into this distinction. I see plenty of really distasteful, vile comments show up on Twitter. And AFAIK inciting violence is illegal. So the area between those seems to me like it would be pretty narrow.
My impression of Parler is more that they only deleted illegal speech of a particularly egregious nature, e.g. child porn.
Parler claimed they were intentionally not going to get into the game of defining "hate speech". We see how hard that is in the context of Twitter and Facebook. There are laws on the books in some countries criminalizing as "hate speech" the voicing of opinions that many reasonable people would consider simple truth, political or moral beliefs, mild skepticism of power, or disputing of facts/interpretations. In the US there is no definition of "hate speech" that is currently consistent with existing law. We already have laws to criminalize certain speech acts and a body of law to support them. If someone knows what "hate speech" is and can define it in a policy that isn't used to silence political opinion, then they are in rarefied company. Many people's opinions are noxious to others, of course. But who gets to decide which are which? Apple? Amazon? Twitter? Facebook? The 2020 US Congress? The 2022 Congress? The President of Russia? The CCP? The loudest keyboard activists and their online mobs? Those who are celebrating this aren't thinking it through, or have other agendas.
Not so for better or worse. Multiple people have been banned from Twitter for calling a human rights litigation troll (and Twitter troll) a man (he is male).
Calling a male troll “he” is definitely not illegal, yet you can be banned from Twitter for it. It’s not an incitement to violence, it’s not even borderline. Meanwhile that troll can ridicule one of the women in question for having a reproductive abnormality, so go figure. There’s a lot Twitter will ban you for that’s not remotely illegal, the gap is wide.
Before we had all this mess with real identities on the internet, nobody cared about your genitals when you wanted to be addressed with "he/him" or "she/her", they just did it. I wonder how we lost that.
I encourage you to familiarize yourself with this case before commenting that nobody should care about the subject being male. He went around booking bikini-waxing sessions (often in-home) from various women who provide this highly intimate service to women, then brought human rights complaints against them when they refused to wax his (male) genitals or allow him to come undress in their homes. This fellow’s sex very much mattered in this case, and people shouldn’t be forced to pretend it doesn’t as he goes around harassing and bringing frivolous suits against women. The courts ultimately agreed https://nationalpost.com/news/trans-activist-jessica-yaniv-f...
Do you still think anyone who refuses to pretend-along with this predator/troll and echo his self-image back to him should be banned from Twitter? And do you think the speech is illegal?
Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law. For example, when it comes to USA laws, Trump almost definitely did not incite violence. But lots of people would disagree with the statement that he didn't incite violence.
Sure, it's up to interpretation, but I think we're fooling ourselves a bit to say he didn't incite violence. People raided the capitol on his behalf. His rhetoric must have had something to do with that.
>I think morally he did. And he should be impeached for both that and his inaction in response to that.
And an impeachment trial is not an Article III court. Nor is it intended to be. It is inherently a political proceeding and not a criminal trial. As such, ethics and morals are certainly at issue and the rules of Article III courts are not relevant.
Nor did the founders intend[0][1] them to be criminal trials. Which is why someone who is impeached and convicted is not immune from criminal prosecution in an Article III court.
Parent is actually right, it is unlikely that Trump's speech met the legal standard for inciting violence. However most legal scholars agree that impeachment does not depend on having been convicted of a crime.
“Everyone” collectively knowing someone incited violence unequivocally is very different than proving, in a court of law, that said person incited violence. As another commented, it’s actually really difficult to do because you must prove intent and state of mind. It’s part of why I’m surprised that’s the only charge on the impeachment, despite there being a potentially more clear cut issue, legal wise, that happened the weekend before (call with Georgia election officials).
> “Everyone” collectively knowing someone incited violence unequivocally is very different than proving, in a court of law, that said person incited violence. As another commented, it’s actually really difficult to do because you must prove intent and state of mind. It’s part of why I’m surprised that’s the only charge on the impeachment, despite there being a potentially more clear cut issue, legal wise, that happened the weekend before (call with Georgia election officials).
Impeachment may be shaped like legal process, and the final act may be called a “trial” and supervised by the Cheif Justice, but its a political process, and the difficulty of proving things “in a court of law” is pretty much irrelevant except to the extent that comparisons to a court of law may be provide political rationalizations for actions in the impeachment or trial process.
(IIRC, one version of the bill of impeachment had a second article related to Abuse of Power with regard to the Georgia election call, but that was eliminated in favor of making the issues regarding the call part of the context for the insurrection charge, rather than a separate charge.)
Yeah, I agree that usually it wouldn’t matter as impeachment trials are not held to the same standards, but a senator could argue a similar angle though. It only takes one charge to convict, so I don’t understand why one wouldn’t one more options, not less.
That actually is referenced in the full text of the impeachment resolution[1]:
"President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so."
>Sure, but in the USA it's actually really hard to incite violence in the eyes of the law.
According to the Ars piece, Amazon claims that Parler users were planning violent attacks openly on the site.
That may or may not be true. I guess we'll just have to wait until the archive[0] is fully released.
If it is true, that might be incitement, but it's definitely conspiracy. And since folks died, it's quite possible that at least some folks could be charged with Felony Murder (discussion here[1]).
But we obviously won't know until we can get our greasy little paws on all those messages, photos and videos.
Respectfully, this is bullshit. As mentioned above, the question was about dollars, cents, and optics. Parler costs nothing to cut & there's little PR hit (probably a benefit), Cutting Facebook would cost the platforms money.
The "terms of use violations" or whatever BS they're referencing for booting Parler doesn't even enter into it, the action is based at least 99% on cost/benefit to the platform, not some sanitary inflexible set of rules.
Dorsey showed Twitter's rules mean nothing. Trump violates rules: "oh well he's an exception because he's a head of state [and he's the best thing that ever happened to engagement!]." Trump is losing power & allies are fleeing him: "sure he's still a head of state but this is the exception to the exception, so we're booting him [plus the tides just turned against him and dumping him is more palatable]." Soon we'll have the exception to the exception to the exception.
So let's not play dumb and assert that this is about some fixed set of rules, the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along based on "who is in power at the moment, what speech is unpopular at the moment" and above all "what will this cost us in dollars."
And the minute your speech is unpopular (I'm looking at you, anarchists, communists, and libertarians), out the door you go.
> So let's not play dumb and assert that this is about some fixed set of rules
I think that's exactly what makes this such a complex issue. It's unprecedented. Never in the past have social media companies been suddenly used as an outlet for national leaders.
> the tech chiefs are clearly making the rules up as they go along
Again, to the above point, this is obviously the case. There's no fixed set of rules to perfectly mediate this situation and appease everybody. It's going to be a bit fluid.
> I was concerned that if only partial information became available, the anti-CoC crowd might jump on this as an example of problems with codes of conduct more generally, or might point at this as part of “cancel culture” (a concept I vehemently disagree with, since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”)
haha... 'Everyone else who gets accused of some transgression and is afforded no due-process is in fact guilty and deserving of punishment. Mine is the unique case of an opaque and capricious CoC process being applied unjustly.'
I find it funny that this fellow personally experienced the injustice of being caught up in an unfair CoC enforcement process run by some petty tyrants†, but refuses to believe that this may happen to other people, that his case may not be a wild aberration but a predictable norm, given the system and culture. I wonder what it would it take for Jeremy to say "Maybe this process has fundamental problems. Maybe a lot of the other people who have been burned by this have also been treated unfairly."
If someone can keep the faith even when they personally experience the injustice of a system like this, I don't what would change their mind.
† according to his account. As jpeloquin notes ITT, little is known to us third parties about the facts of the case.
> haha... 'Everyone else who gets accused of some transgression and is afforded no due-process is in fact guilty and deserving of punishment. Mine is the unique case of an opaque and capricious CoC process being applied unjustly.'
This isn't close to what he's saying. He's saying that despite the fact that the CoC enforcement got it wrong in his case, they are still valuable. You know like laws are still valuable despite the fact that innocent people are sometimes convicted. In both cases the solution is to improve the process, not throw out the concept.
Good point. My expected reaction isn't "laws/CoC should be discarded" but "CoCs and their enforcement process is seriously flawed and needs revising."
Here there seem to be two issues: 1. Too-vague rules & 2. Unfair enforcement.
If we punished people for murder by forming a posse and summarily executing them, the reaction should be "yes murder should be forbidden but this enforcement process is seriously unfair and needs to be overhauled."
If we punish people for "being unkind" the reaction should be "this rule is unfair because it's not clear how one can go about following it and it is likely to be enforced highly subjectively which is likely to lead to enforcement based on personal bias, favoritism etc.."
What I think the author might see if he examined the situation with an open mind is that "be kind" (a rule he doesn't like) and "don't be sexist" (a rule he likes) both suffer from the issue of being vague and susceptible to extremely subjective interpretation. Reasonable people can (and do!) disagree about what is "kind," what is "sexist," or what is "racist," but these rules ignore this fact and take an "I'll know it when I see it" approach to kindness, sexism, racism etc. that is subject to the problems of arbitrariness, bias, and favoritism in all cases. I'm "haha"ing at the fact that the author refuses to consider this aspect of the problem: that it goes beyond just his case (other people think he's bad) to the cases of people that he thinks are bad.
If we change the analogy we get a different answer. Everyone agree that murder should be forbidden, but we don't want mob justice to go around lynching suspected murderers.
As a society we have laws. CoC as extrajudicial rules get judged based on their benefit to extend existing laws and append additional law enforcement on top of already existing law enforcement. If the result is bad and the additional rules causes more problem than they solve then they should be discarded.
It does not mean all extrajudicial rules are bad but we need to ask if they are needed, serve a good purpose, measure the outcome, and be ready to discard them when the situation calls for it.
I'd agree with all of this, with the caveat that at lot of what your saying is both called out in the article and in a lot of advice around writing a code of conduct (example: https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/howto-design-a-code-of-...), so it's not even clear to me that this is a problem with the majority of the CoC organizations/enforcement.
Even here where part of the problem in the vague requirement ("be kind"), the biggest problem is they didn't follow their own processes of having an actual dialog. It's a bit like if you walked into a US court and the Judge immediately says "I talked to the victim and your clearly guilty", it's not the process that's the problem, it's that the process wasn't followed. Maybe like the court system there should be an appeals process (not sure what that might look like).
It's mental gymnastics. I'm not convinced that CoCs are valuable. Even without the explicit language, you can still kick out people who behave badly. (IMO) The CoCs are just there to try to make a political statement about which groups of people they support and to justify groupthink.
Anyways, to those people that believe there are a few minor slippages in what the CoC was intended for. I have been banned from a public slack group for a CoC:
It was from the Confluent slack group after they ran a contest/game for their Kafka Summit conference. They did the virtual points system which could be traded for branded swag. I earned the points needed. They informed people that the swag was limited first come first serve, and they said they'd announce the store.
Well at least half of the people didn't get the email notifying about the store, half did and made their orders. There was no formal communication from Confluent, other than "we're working on it." 2 days went by, people were asking on #kafka-summit, we were given bad suggestions (by Confluent) about how to auth into the store. Then I got a letter from the store that "sorry you didn't participate and you're not eligible."
No notice about this from Confluent, so I ended up posting "I just got this letter WTF, @conferenceorgs". That prompted them being more concerned about "me swearing at their staff". Also I mentioned "I figure I'm going to already get banned so I'll say it: This makes Confluent look sh_tty" ... a few minutes later CoC banned by Tim Berglund [the head of dev adv at confluent].
I'd actually agree that banning you was probably a bit much but let's actually look at the chain of events from your own account here.
You post "WTF @conferenceorgs". They warn you about swearing at their staff (I probably wouldn't treat it this way, but we do all know what the F stands for). You respond by... swearing at their staff? When you get a warning, then respond to that warning by repeating the offense it's hard to be surprised or outraged you didn't get a second warning.
... do you think the 'what the hell is going on at [company]" is also swearing at their staff? Because I don't think anybody I know would, to me this seems pretty damn clearly like using technicalities/inaccurate definitions as a weapon.
If you say "what the hell?" directly to a representative of that company, then you are literally using profanity at their staff.
Like, we can disagree about whether that's a sensible rule or if we should make allowances for non-abusive colloquial phrases ('wtf', 'what the hell?', etc.) or something, but how can you argue it's not breaking the black-and-white rule as written?
>we should make allowances for non-abusive colloquial phrases ('wtf', 'what the hell?', etc.) or something, but how can you argue it's not breaking the black-and-white rule as written?
Because 'swear at' at specifically means using a swear _against_ somebody, not just in a statement while talking to them. If you look at e.g. any of the definitions in the free dictionary, you'll find that they're all about using abusive language towards someone, so the idea of 'non-abusive swearing' at somebody in itself is as absurd as say a 'non-abusive insult'.
It's the difference between swearing in front of your children and swearing at your children, one is possibly bad parenting, the other definitely is.
You're splitting hairs with a diamond blade here if you're claiming that "What the hell is wrong with <company>?" doesn't count as, "utter[ing] a curse or similarly vulgar or abusive language toward someone or something." [from your link]
The language was never directed at their staff. It was directed towards the communication I got from them, and how I believe it makes the org look themselves(note). The tagging was to alert them that it was going on. Attacking individuals is completely unwarranted.
--
For the sake of conversion: What counts as harassment- is the org an individual? Does exclaiming frustration for a situation and getting the attention of someone count as an attack on the individuals notified?
--
Note: I believe that if an org can't communicate what's going on and why you may be seeing erroneous emails from a third party, what is going on with their virtual currency that is traded for real world value. Why should I trust that org with $30k a year for a dev server?
The company that was qouted that didn't pay it. I'm not a customer, I am a potential customer. [Companies I've worked for have used Kafka, or have developed their own system similar to it]
The only thing this has taught me, never advocate for or encourage the company to stay with them.
He still isn't ready to believe that this whole movement that accompanies CoCs is pushed for malicious purposes by twisted power hungry people. That would require a massive loss of innocence and a reckoning about the nature of the world that only comes, reluctantly, from repeated exposure to and reflection on the same problem.
I have seen many people in similar situations that just completely roll over in a prey response and just bow down to these people. So at least the author has that spark of dignity where he's willing to stand up for himself.
How is thinking people are malicious a precondition?
This is a community in and around programming; if anyone can accept that well-intentioned systems can explode in our faces spectacularly, it should be us.
> To be anti-racist is to fundamentally understand the lived experiences of the Black community and how it relates to other structures of power.
I thought “fundamentally understanding the lived experiences of the black community” was impossible for non-black people. What white person has achieved this goal? If none, is it impossible for a white person to be “anti-racist?”
I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.
> I acknowledge racism is a real issue but think it’s reasonable to disagree what the best solution is. This stuff (white fragility etc) just smells way too much like “original sin” and “we are all sinners but must strive towards holiness, however unachievable” to me.
I’ve always been a “treat others as you would like to be treated” person. But a lot of this anti-racist concept is appearing on all my pod casts. And now I have to see race?
I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts. Frankly I wish we’d stop importing US culture. Australia isn’t perfect but we largely agree on things like universal health care and getting rid of guns. So I think we can combat racism without having to look at the US for guidance.
> I’m in Australia and I think these are largely US concepts.
Based on that statement alone I think I can accurately conclude you are not an indigenous Australian (aboriginal).
Seems they share quiet a lot in common with native Americans from stealing of their lands/displacement, mass killings, enslavement By colonists, to ongoing racism that continues to carry on today.
I’m not indigenous. I said we have to combat racism. I never said there are not similarities with what indigenous people went through.
But it seems racism in the US has a lot of deeper cultural implications so they came up with anti-racism. Australia needs to figure out what equality means to us and make our own cultural changes. Not copy the US.
Excuse me if I except the Australian solution to be "ignore it" for a few more decades. How can the cultural implications be worse than they are in Australia?
I'm surprised there are any natives left there at all, the way they have been treated.
American concepts around these things are not based on native Americans history, but on African American history. It is true that Americans tend to project own culture and history into other groups and then get offended when those tell them "wait our history and prejudices are different".
Even more, Americans assume that sexism elsewhere must be the same as sexism in America. They just seems to be completely confused about other countries having somewhat different gender stereotypes and different expectations on genders. The end result is that local sexism is combined with American version of sexism - end result is not more equality, it is less of it.
Yeah. It's funny how the pro-diversity, pro-egalitarianism, etc don't see their ideological blind spot when they use the same tools (propaganda and medias) to propagate their views of society, and what is Good and Wrong, in the same imperialist way as their conservative ennemis ...
I don't think that's the best example. How does one separate:
"They're treating me poorly because I'm a black person"
and
"They're treating me poorly because I'm a white guy trying to be a black person"
You just made his point. "They're treating me poorly because I'm a black person" and "They're treating me poorly because I'm a white guy trying to be a black person" translate to "They're treating me poorly because of the color of my skin".
Fundamental being the key operative here. Understanding the Black lived experience is an approximation of the actual experience. Of course there's no singular Black experience, but there are fundamentals underlying all, which can be understood and approximated by people with non-Black lived experiences.
It’s really remarkable how much downvoting one gets if one says “SV tech company cultures are strongly left leaning.” This is such a widely known thing to anyone who’s worked in that environment that I’m surprised it’s controversial. Perhaps people just don’t like having this fact stated?
The high ratio of downvotes to rebuttals is also telling: people want to anonymously disagree but not to disprove. (I have a comment further down thread to the same effect that got a similar reception.)
> Hiring based on political beliefs, or in this case, presumed political beliefs, sounds like a dangerous road to go down.
You don’t think this is happening already? I’m not sure what companies you’ve looked at but most big tech firms have left wing political cultures on an official level, with “culture“ departments and events promoting and sharing various culturally left-wing talking points everyone is supposed to be on board with. Try saying “I actually don’t think america is a deeply racist country in 2020, there’s a huge amount of opportunity here which is evidenced by the number of people (ostensible victims of racism from India, mexico, etc) who line up to come here. Oh and by the way I think natal women are entitled to privacy from men in their bathrooms (like 95% of Americans believe)” during a lunch interview and see how fast you get the “thanks for your time we’ll be in touch.” Or just say “I voted for the current president” if you prefer something shorter.
Alternately, talk about supporting BLM, BDS, and how terrible America is as a country—no one will bat an eye.
For the record I hold views from both of the above “columns” but I know which ones I’m allowed to share at work (the left leaning “progressive” ones) and which ones I need to keep to myself, namely, everything else.
EDIT: downvoters: please set me straight here and let me know what part of my comment is inaccurate or untrue.
Why the moderator penalty? I ask because this is a case of someone being punished for discussing a topic (gender identity and the limits of one’s authority over the speech of others), and then it would seem discussion of the punishment is being suppressed on a second platform (here). Looks almost like “suppress the topic, then suppress the discussion of the suppression.”
Got me thinking wow, some people really don’t want anyone discussing this topic! I wonder why.
Anyway to the main point, why did this story get a mod point?
Using a throwaway for obvious reason: it’s rational to be afraid to discuss the topic openly (see TFA), these folks will put you on a blacklist faster than you can say HUAC.
Because hot, flamey, sensational threads are the cheetos of the internet, and if we didn't downweight them they would take over the site and make it a different kind of forum.
On HN we're optimizing for one thing: intellectual curiosity [1, 2]. That means encouraging threads that satisfy that quality, but it also means weeding out most threads that don't satisfy that quality. Most riler-uppers [3] don't. That doesn't mean they aren't important. They have other qualities, just not the one we're optimizing for.
Although this moderation strategy follows from the first principle of the site, it has many tricky aspects. Sometimes there are stories that have both qualities: intellectual interesting as well as rage-inducing or polarizing [4]. In those cases we tend to go by whether the community is able to have a discussion that at least doesn't burst completely into flames. We also consider whether the general topic has been discussed recently, since curiosity withers under repetition.
Sometimes there are stories that don't really gratify intellectual curiosity, but contain such important news that users will submit them over and over again regardless of how much we downweight them. In that case we yield to the community and try, if possible, to consolidate the discussion of that story into one major thread. After that, we downweight reposts until there is significant new information [5].
This StackOverflow story seems to fall somewhere in the overlapping circles of that Venn diagram; it's not devoid of intellectual curiosity (rapidly changing social/political conditions; internet community management; etc.), and it's also something the community seemed determined to discuss (to judge by how often it kept getting reposted). That gave it enough energy to hop into a different orbit than your typical yet-another-angry-dispute would achieve under routine HN moderation.
> Got me thinking wow, some people really don’t want anyone discussing this topic! I wonder why.
When people hear about story X getting moderated, if story X is something they care about, it immediately feels like story X is being singled out for suppression. Then the question arises: why are you censoring X? If you only ask that question about X, it always seems arbitrary and unfair.
From a moderation point of view, though, nothing is singled out—the strategy is systematic. We're basically like snow-ploughs or street-sweeping trucks that do their job every day to clear the roads. If we didn't, the roads would pile up with snow and/or trash, i.e. the site couldn't function as intended. There's never a particular intention to suppress a particular story—on the contrary, to the extent that a story gets particular attention, it's usually to decide whether a penalty should be waived, as in this case.
If you want to understand HN moderation, you need to understand that all this takes place at scale. We make moderation calls like this dozens if not hundreds of times a day, mostly via pattern-matching and heuristics (including in software, when we can figure out how to write code to do it), because there isn't time to do it any other way. Invariably, we guess wrong in many cases, not because the strategy is wrong, but because no systematic strategy can bat 100. Plus there will always be borderline calls, which by definition are arbitrary.
If you still have questions that aren't answered by the above, I'd be interested in hearing what they are.
So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist).
If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...