HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why does HN censor content?

12 points by pcarolan ↗ HN
I recently submitted a link to HN:

    Seattle Workers Pay for the Minimum Wage (wsj.com)
It was from a reputable source, the WSJ, and the study it references was conducted by the University of Washington. The article was upvoted quite a few times but then flagged and locked for comments. Can someone tell me the reasoning behind HN censoring this article?

29 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] thread
anonymousiam
I noticed that article disappear just as I tried to promote it. HN moderators have previously expressed support for universal income so it's probably a case of reality interfering with their world view. Thus they deny reality to maintain their world view.
[dead] chatnati
If you actually consider the financial implications of this, where is the money coming from? There was a write-up a while ago, an economist dug into the possibility, and did some simple income projections vs amount taken in tax each year.

I don't have the URL available but the summary was - you'd pay people for 3 months out of the year - and the country would be bankrupt.

detaro
[Flagged] is done by user flags, and while I of course can't know why other users flagged something, here are possible reasons:

a) WSJ has a paywall where the Google workaround often doesn't work

b) political topics always are at risk, especially if repeated:

c) That there have been 5 submissions with together >300 comments on that topic in the last week: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=seattle+Minimum+Wage&sort=byDa... , which seem to discuss the same study, making your submission clearly a duplicate (at least from what I can see from the text teaser, thanks to a) I can't actually read the full content)

pcarolan
Thanks,

a) doesn't seem like it should matter, that's the way the web is going. b) i saw this article as more scientific than political. This is the closest thing you get to a controlled experiment in economics research. c) Fair. I didn't catch that this had been posted. I did a simple search with the 'past' link and didn't find anything.It seems like a flagging should require a rationale from the flagger.

pliny
from the FAQ[1]:

>Are paywalls ok?

>It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

The implication is that paywalls without workarounds (like WSJ) aren't OK.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

tomhoward
I can always read WSJ articles by searching for the title in Facebook search then clicking through from the official WSJ posting.

That workaround is often mentioned in the HN discussion threads, so it's fairly well known.

majewsky
If this method accessible for people who don't want to use Facebook? If not, then I would not consider it a general circumvention measure.
tomhoward
Of course you're fully entitled to not use Facebook, but that needn't deprive everyone else of being made aware of the content and being able to access and discuss it, either by using the Facebook workaround or paying for a subscription.

Facebook has over 2Bn users. Many of them are on HN. The debate about whether or not that's a good thing is orthogonal to the fact that Facebook search is a viable workaround that allows the anyone who chooses to use it, the option of reading WSJ articles.

detaro
For a link aggregator, where people discuss the content of links, of course it matters if people can actually read the content of the submission! The mods previously have stated that easy workarounds like google search are tolerated, but that fails with WSJ and I know that not all users agree on that.
pcarolan
I agree with you in principle, but in practice you'd need to exclude all the major outlets. That's a pretty big hole in media coverage.

In either case, flagging the post with a reason would be an educational benefit to the poster and the readers.

detaro
> I agree with you in principle, but in practice you'd need to exclude all the major outlets. That's a pretty big hole in media coverage.

WSJ is (as far as I know) the only major one that doesn't meet the "easy to circumvent" rule. And the "major outlets" predominantly post general news, which is less relevant to HN.

imron
> a) doesn't seem like it should matter,

Every. single. thread. that links to a WSJ article has people complaining about the paywall, and people asking for the link to be changed to a different source.

As a result, I imagine there are plenty of people who flag WSJ articles by default, regardless of what way the web is going.

pcarolan
Thanks. That is annoying I just wish it were clearer why downvotes and flags were happening. It would probably prevent people like me from posting from thise sources in the future.
ZanrielJames
I'm down with discouraging paywall content. I've never flagged an article for it though. I get HN through the Feedly app, so I can't tell where the link goes until I hit it. It's always a nuiscance when it ends up at some paywall site.

On the other hand, those paywall sites do tend to be very high quality, with longform articles and more citations, more depth than most. I'll give them that.

pcarolan
So this doesn't come off as pithy, I'd like to explain that the reason I submitted this article to HN is that 1) a lot of startups hire minimum wage workers and will be affected by these policies and 2) I wanted to get the HN crowd's $.02 on the debate. It is clearly not clear cut as to the general or specific effects implementing a minimum wage would have, but I was hoping the debate would bring out the nuance. This seemed like a good study with findings contradictory to my original theory of what would happen, in other words a good scientific debate.
krono
I always flag these types of posts because I'm so done with US specific political posts
rhapsodic
It's anyone's guess. My guess, based on what I've seen, is that things that stories that serve to debunk left-wing shibboleths are hammered with flags. And then either a moderator or built-in rules kill the submission.
franciscop
From what I've seen in HN and IMHO, a well expressed opinion on both sides is welcome. If you do have something to add on the other side of a topic those are way better on a comment. Then a civilized discussion happens many times. That is one of the great things of HN!

However, any article/comment insulting anyone or any political opinion has its well deserved downvotes. I would expect that on both left-wing and right-wing opinions. I've downvoted comments I agree with and upvoted comments I disagree with, based solely on the respect shown and the quality of them.

Note: there are of course always exceptions, my description above is when comparing HN to the rest of the web

DanBC
[flagged] means users flagged it.

Some people have started flagging anything from WSJ because of the paywall.

This topic has been previously discussed on HN.

swampthinker
There was an article that Reid Hoffman wrote about supporting women in VC that was flagged. It was incredibly irritating.
[dead] chatnati
which part was? the article or...? :P
ximeng
Would be helpful for transparency if it was possible to see a list of flagged articles somewhere.
detaro
You can at least turn on "showdead" in your profile, which doesn't give you one handy list of everything flagged, but flagged (and otherwise killed) submissions and comments are then still visible to you.
[dead] SimonaPaloma
I am sure this article has touched all the internet people, its really really nice piece of writing on building up new web site http://www.y8gold.com/
scarface74
I flag anything from WSJ because of the paywall that can't easily be worked around.

Besides that, this topic has been discussed as nauseum on HN.

RickJWag
IMHO, Hacker News does not do enough censoring.

I'd like HN to be about programming issues. I'd love that. Instead, too often it's about news issues with some political angle, seldom to do with programming.

Enough of that and I'll pull it from my RSS reader. I can find my own political content easily enough, I don't need it everywhere.