I’m grateful for those who do visit /newest because it’s a cesspit of spam and uninteresting links that, justifiably, never make their way to the home page.
/active, on the other hand, is the real insiders tip. It shows the most active submissions, irrespective of whether they’ve been flagged off the homepage by users who want to avoid “controversial” topics or by an algorithm trying to avoid the same.
You don’t want it to replace the homepage as the arguing will drive you mad over time but it’s worth checking in with to see what conversation is being hidden from you.
It's been under /lists practically since the site started, when /lists was just a dump of interesting rollups 'pg could think of. There's probably less thought put into its placement than you think.
Does it? The rules seem to suggest that the intent is to discourage arguments and grandstanding in favor of discussions, and many controversial topics and posts tend to end up as shouting matches in the comments.
> Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.
Well yea, that’s officially part of the guidelines: “ Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”
I meant before the DOGE stuff: the technical discussions on his claims about Tesla’s future capabilities, purchase of twitter and latter management, etc.
I am generally very happy with HN’s moderation, but I do feel some borderline topics that have been banned or buried missed interesting discussion. I don’t fault those responsible for not wanting to deal with the potential mess though.
It’s a shame. I distinctly remember a DOGE topic about assertions Musk was making that were easily explained by COBOL oddities. There was a great discussion about it here with knowledgable folks chiming in. And then it got flagged into oblivion. Mainstream news covered it but without any of the knowledge HN users had.
I tend to flag submissions about these kinds of political topics because it becomes clear in context that they're being submitted primarily to provide space for complaining about a political outgroup. This never leads anywhere productive. Best case, everyone agrees and they just stew about how awful the world supposedly is. Common case, people are forced to confront the fact that other people have different values, cultural assumptions etc. and can reasonably come to wildly different conclusions, even starting from the same evidence, because a lot of this is nowhere near as objective a matter as it appears. Worst case, the disagreeing people in the hated outgroup also feel that their position has been grossly misrepresented in the submission.
I could name 10 widely held societal opinions that would instantly get flagged and likely your account banned if you mention a few times. Very hive mind place here
HN wants polite discussion which lends itself well to science and technology topics. Get farther away into history or politics where opinion comes in, then it becomes impossible to debate because arguments that disagree with the hive mind (upper middle class, intelligent, center-left technology professionals) get downvoted and flagged because of popularity.
This just isn’t a site for arguing politics, if you do it too much with opinions different from the hive mind you get banned for disruptive behavior
Did you mean to post this as a reply elsewhere? You made the claim that people are banned for certain opinions and I asked for more information on that.
You will get banned if you speak too controversially, but the bigger issue is you get downvoted for wrong-think, but that’s the nature of HN and probably why it has survived so long
you'd have to do additional analysis to find which accounts stopped posting after the linked warnings though. It's not usually the opinion itself that's the problem, but that users with controversial opinions have other things going on, so the controversial opinion is often delivered in a “wake up sheeple” flamebait persecution complex “in smart and everyone here is an idiot” style, which isn’t conducive to constructive debate.
The evidence there seems to make my point? Those people aren’t being warned for the content of their opinions, they’re being warned not to engage in flamewars or insults or other forms of incivility.
My claim isn’t “nobody gets banned from HN”, it’s “nobody gets banned from HN for having unpopular opinions”.
The parallel comment has very nearly invoked Godwin’s law, so I guess I’ll concede that if your opinion is “a group of people should be killed”, then yea, expressing that opinion would likely end in a ban. We can debate how much of that ban is for the opinion vs calling for the murder of other humans.
These guys are never able to cite examples. Every time the conversation comes up, they fly in with a vague innuendo, "oh, you know those topics--I'm not going to say it!" plus a "trust me bro" and then fly off without actually getting specific.
My bet is that what gets people banned is repeatedly being disrespectful or rude, not the opinions they’re disrespectful or rude about.
We have a great example via the flagged reply in this comment tree, where somebody is complaining about being silenced and their example is full of rambling invective yelling at the moderator.
There are known groups that coordinate to flag things on HN? That seems extraordinarily silly. If you wanted to do influence ops, there are much more rewarding targets, like Reddit and X. Are you sure that the flagging that you see isn't just people removing articles that violate the guidelines (or lead to comments that violate them)?
Are you aware that people who are part of Ycombinator, as in "founders", have special HN accounts, and are able to see who else has a financial incentive to hype up startups and YC and insist there is nothing wrong with them funding multiple companies that literally plagiarize each other or just slap a logo on top of VSCode hooked up to ChatGPT, or other people that are literally personal friends and collaborators with Elon?
What else do you call such a secret in group who all have aligned financial interests and are externally anonymous?
YC sells this feature as an advantage of being funded by YC.
Personally I’m capable of disagreeing with someone’s point of view with voting to silence them and hide their view from others. Sunlight, disinfectant and all that.
No, I mean dishonest. When people gang up to push each other's blogs/startups/whatever, it's dishonest. When political groups organize to mass upvote/flag, it's dishonest. They are purposefully sabotaging the wider community for their niche interests. They are cheaters. And IME, more often than not, they are immoral and/or anti-social.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
It makes sense if you remember that Dang doesn't make the rules, and isn't in charge of the rules, and is hired to enforce the rules by YC who does control those rules. Discussing the rules is "noise" in that framing because it can never actually change the rules.
The part that I've always disliked is how Dang always just says "oh trust me, none of that happens here" as if that is a normal thing to insist, don't question the legitimacy of our system.
But it's not like I am ever going to get access to the kind of data to actually verify that claim. I don't exactly expect PG to give a random person like me DB access. I can't fault Dang for not wanting to give out tons of info either, as that aint their job.
HN gets millions of hits per day and is variously treated by outsiders as a special place of experts (it isn't), or internally by middle manager types who insist they are special while being unable to read at a high school level and are disconnected from reality but are still inexplicably in charge of decisions that affect the rest of us.
Are we really supposed to believe this place has never been attacked? Never been successfully attacked?
Your state's biggest newspaper comment section is rife with influence campaigns...
This is dishonest and incorrect. Discussing rulebreaking is not against the guidelines, which is clear to anyone who reads them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Accusations of those specific offenses (astroturfing, shilling, brigading) are against the rules, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who thinks about them for a few minutes.
/active, on the other hand, is the real insiders tip. It shows the most active submissions, irrespective of whether they’ve been flagged off the homepage by users who want to avoid “controversial” topics or by an algorithm trying to avoid the same.
You don’t want it to replace the homepage as the arguing will drive you mad over time but it’s worth checking in with to see what conversation is being hidden from you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active