Ask HN: Why does an article critical of Paul Graham get removed?
I just saw this article (https://antipodes.substack.com/paul-graham-is-not-a-public-intellectual) that has now been removed from HN and also the Substack page shows a 404.
I read through the article, and while critical of Paul Graham, it wasn't out of line or insulting or something.
I'm also surprised that it got removed from Substack (which is a YC company) - not sure why the author himself would have removed it?
What's happening?
Edit: Yes, it looks like the author removed it from Substack: https://twitter.com/MichaelOChurch/status/1336033522327445504?s=20
But still worries me that it was flagged down on HN.
81 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadIn which case what would you suggest, should the mods make special rules that boost content critical of HN, rather than just letting the user votes and flagging play out?
I used to play a game with myself at predicting which posts I would see in the morning would be removed with in 30 minutes. My favorite example was an article on how important it is to openly talk about the impacts and causes of climate change. It made it to the FP, had lots of discussion and was removed within 30 minutes.
Posts that are likewise seriously critical of the startup world get remove very quickly.
In this particular case I don't think this post is necessarily being censored, but HN does do this very frequently so it's not a crazy question to ask.
A lot of what gets modded is total crap, though, and is low-quality in addition to simply being off topic.
Source here: https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/orangesite
Hacker News is quick to try to remove things that cause flamewars to erupt, yes. For some users this (regrettably) means that any controversial political or social topic gets a flag from them.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201207190930/https://antipodes...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25335904
It's much like how freedom of speech gives one the right to say whatever one wants without government coercion being applied, but that doesn't mean people cannot discuss whether what is said is appropriate or meritorious.
There is an ever-increasing sense of entitlement among HNers and internet communities in general. Posts like this reflect that attitude, and I think it's occasionally worth pushing back when people complain that they can't just post whatever they want -- particularly when it's critical of the people running the forum that's provided to them for free.
>He got to experience what most of us wish was the real world, as the real world.
What did really ring true for me was this line from the original essay, "Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it's really done?"
It's sad to me that any discussion of inequality has started to be so much more focused on bringing everyone at the top down rather than empowering those at the bottom and helping to bring them up.
Is there any way of empowering those at the bottom that won't take considerable energy, effort, or cost? Where should the resources come from to empower them, if not from the top?
The well-documented ballooning healthcare costs make medicare more expensive in addition to hitting many citizens directly, so improvements there would have a huge impact.
Of the rest of the budget much of it goes to the military which doesn't seem to be particularly efficiently spent either in recent decades.
If more revenue really is the answer, I'm not opposed to bumping up taxes more in certain ways. I'm definitely for ideas that make taxes less regressive, for instance getting rid of the lower long-term capital tax rate is probably good idea and a simple way to raise effective tax rates on the wealthy in a massive way.
But you don't have to demonize those at the top so much to get any of this stuff done. Doing so is a major distraction, and I do genuinely worry about the self-fulfilling prophecy of drilling into everyone's head the highly exaggerated narrative that there is no hope for anyone else because the rich have completely rigged the system. And too often these days that seems to be what people focus on, rather than the hard work of making real, tangible improvements in the lives of those at the bottom.
So you agree with my point.
The rest of your comment, I think you're making things a little too black and white. You make it sound like people can either bring attention to the wealth inequality that exists today("demonize those at the top"), or they can buckle down and do "the hard work of making real, tangible improvements in the lives of those at the bottom," but not both. I think both of those are possible at the same time. Either way, could you please share a specific example of the hard work of making real, tangible improvements in the lives of those at the bottom? It seems to me like you're echoing the old pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps argument, in a third party sense? Because I'm really not sure what sort of hard work for making real, tangible improvements wouldn't require some kind of money.
What? Nice strawman there.
>main issue is that he had a nice life and once said something a bit weird
What? No, the main issue is that this guy is so far removed from reality for >99% of the rest of the planet, and yet is preaching all manner of conventional capitalist advice.
I really don't care either way about the guy, I'm not envious of him. I generally just like playing devil's advocate to get people to see things from other perspectives. Its certainly interesting seeing your reaction when all I did was highlight one sentence from the article:
>He got to experience what most of us wish was the real world, as the real world.
That doesn't seem to match reality - every single 'pg article, "off" or "on," routinely ends up at the top of HN, often multiple times.
Note that the author was ultimately banned from HN for undeservedly calling someone a very derogatory and sexist name.
> Though I can’t separate Paul Graham these days from the toxic sludge of Y Combinator and Hacker News
I wish the political or murky topics could be separated from the clearly technical ones, I would ignore the former as much as possible.
I have no idea if this article was good or bad, mind you, but there is a point to "HN is toxic": HN'ers preach "free speech" then downvote/flag anything they don't like, so the community is "talking out of both sides of it's mouth", which is pretty toxic.
Side note, if you want my 2 cents, I'd guess the reason why your comment on the System76 laptop was downvoted is because you said "X is just better than Y" with minimal evidence and you didn't present it as an opinion. If your comment said something like "My opinion is..." or "Anecdotally" I think you likely would have gotten voted up instead. Don't take it personally, the community here tends to be very focused on hard evidence or being clear about an opinion being that.
Edit: this comment seems to corroborate that theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25336393
Maybe you're a mod, in which case I understand...
I flagged this post, just to be clear: it's drama about drama. There was an excellent post yesterday that was critical of Paul Graham: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716
Users can flag and vouch comments.
If you think a story or comment is unfairly flag-killed you can email the mods I guess. This is particularly useful when something is being talked about on HN and the author / creator makes an account to join in that conversation. They'll sometimes find their account is rate-limited because it's a new account.
it wasn't out of line or insulting or somethin
Are you sure about that?
He's not the greatest intellectual who ever lived, nor is he history's most lackluster thinker who still made it into the intellectual category.
To say he's not an intellectual is simply not factual; and non-factual cruft is fair game for deletion from Hackernews.
Furthermore, articles stating that someone is not an intellectual can be regarded as personal attacks; it's almost like saying someone is dumb.
Furthermore, HN cannot carry a story that references a dead link, for which there doesn't seem to be an archived copy anywhere. archive.org has a record of trying to access the article's URL on December 7th, which resulted in a 404.
All of the visceral reactions to the article are... very revealing. It's an opinion piece, and you don't have to agree with it. If you felt angered / hurt / offended by the author's words, I would challenge you to do some introspection – and explore the reasons why it generated such a strong reaction for you. You may find the process to be quite beneficial!
I might have been a bit premature with accusing HN of "censoring". Still, this thread seems to get a lot of discussion and interest :-)
We sometimes turn off flags when an article contains significant new information and can support a substantive discussion in the community, but this was not that.
HN hosts tons of discussion about PG, much of it negative, so that's not the issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716 was just yesterday.