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Ask HN: Ask dg what is your plan for censorship resistance on Hacker News?

by Kinnard on 5/31/22, 8:20 PM with 6 comments

As Elon Musk has duly pointed out there are issues with censorship and manipulation at twitter:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525612988115320838?s=20&t=6_KScJ9C4UP4B8iLAoc2rQ

These issues obviously affect other systems: https://twitter.com/Kinnardian/status/1526081603901874176?s=20&t=6_KScJ9C4UP4B8iLAoc2rQ

Have these issues come up with Hacker News? If so what so and how so?

Do you have a plan for addressing censorship resistance on HN?

  • by verdverm on 5/31/22, 8:59 PM

    HN is moderated, primarily by the user base, hence being censorship resistant is not the goal. We come here for the high quality filtering and curation.

    Even if Elon relaxes speech rules on twitter, moderation and "censorship" are required by local laws. There is no way around it.

    I'm curious how he (Elon) will deal with teens and cyber bullying

  • by PaulHoule on 5/31/22, 8:22 PM

    I think already HN doesn't allow some discussion types and that's one reason why we use HN.

    Please don't be this guy

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgztPP_CWNQ

    1000 years from now the last man will be dying on Earth and will be thinking... We could have made it to Mars if Elon Musk hadn't made that tweet about "Pedo Guy".

  • by bediger4000 on 6/1/22, 2:20 AM

    Isn't the real question:

    How will hacker news deal with spammers from Texas? If HN isn't allowed to moderate somehow, spammers from Texas will externalize some of the costs of advertising by using HN to store and forward ads.

    Spammers ruined SMTP email, Usenet, faxing and phone calls. They will ruin anything they can to get a few dollars more.

  • by krapp on 6/1/22, 2:22 AM

    We don't call it censorship, we call it "maintaining the signal to noise ratio."

  • by MrMan on 5/31/22, 9:38 PM

    HN needs censorship, so nothing to see here