HN is moderated, but I cannot imagine many opinions that really would be outright banned or suppressed. It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself. That is in essence not the topic people complain about, otherwise they probably wouldn't post.
I am a free speech absolutist though, I tend to like the term too because I believe its intended derisiveness is mostly impotent. Overall I believe trying to enforce hate speech laws is fundamentally flawed. I think people should be free to express acceptance as they should be able to express rejections.
Quite a lot of opinions get suppressed over here, and rightly so. You can see a lot of flagged comments in hot threads.
I grew up with unrestricted access to internet as a child, browsed a lot of forums, and most of them were always heavily moderated as well. The thing is, the majority of audience (read-only people) don’t want to see extremely stupid content (subjective). Thus the mods, host and etc. have to play the balancing game. HN is one of those places, and they’re doing a terrific job, in my opinion.
I’m not sure how to put it into words, but Internet is not the same as public free speech. Anonymity, physical distance, not seeing others’ faces contribute to the way people talk. I completely support the former kind, but not the latter. It just becomes a breeding ground for a lot of naive people who start thinking that’s tolerable to act that way in real world too (can’t cite any sources, just observations from my nephews and others kids I know). We like to tout how everyone forms their own opinions, but I’m a heavy believer of the “nurture” side of the debate. If you get sucked into one corner of the Internet, you will start hating the other corner, and that’s basically your nurturing. I guess, the major question is, should we keep fostering this behaviour or not? And I don’t know the answer, as there isn’t “one right corner” most of the time. The best I can do is to support the crackdown on extremely obvious shitty behaviour knowing that’s against the free speech ethos.
I've not done a thorough analysis but it seems like most flagging of posters/comments here seems to be done on the basis of conduct rather than opinion. And that's a different matter.
The thought experiment is always; if this person behaved the same way but had a different viewpoint - would they still be banned/flagged/arrested? Mostly I think it's a yes here, which is a good thing.
The problem with a lot of internet posters is they refuse to accept a distinction between conduct and opinion. If you're abusive to everyone and then get banned, it's not because they couldn't handle your radical opinions, it's because you were being a dick.
> It has strong requirements to the form, but not necessarily the content of the message itself.
This is provably false.
If I write a very formal and polite message asking for some horrible thing to be done to group X, the message will be removed as soon as HN mods see it.
I am a free speech absolutist though, I tend to like the term too because I believe its intended derisiveness is mostly impotent. Overall I believe trying to enforce hate speech laws is fundamentally flawed. I think people should be free to express acceptance as they should be able to express rejections.