Bubbles don't need to be harmful. HN is a bubble. There are ideas that are not allowed here. There are other ideas that are explicitly promoted. This is the value proposition of HN. You are free to go elsewhere to get other perspectives or interactions. This is as it should be.
You can't use any title you want, for example, they will regularly edit the title and thus effectively change the general meaning of the submission as read by most folks who just skim titles. Which has the knock on effect of making the post less (or more) desirable for users to read/upvote.
For example titles starting with "How I ..." are auto stripped to "I ..." there are quite a few other similar auto editorial changes.
There is no way round this that I know of, so those parts of an idea are non-negotiable and not re-workable.
I have seen instances where this practice completely ruins an otherwise excellent submission that would have been #1 on HN in days of old.
I'm not convinced the title rules on HN are having a major impact on which stories get upvotes on a frequent basis, but that's just my intuition and you may be massively right.
In which case I urge you to, when you see an example where you think the policy has indeed had a negative effect (which I'd also suggest isn't quite as basic as "did it lower the expected number of upvotes" but also "and not because it removed clickbait from the title"), either comment mentioning dang's name and saying why you feel that, or send him an email to the same effect (hn@ycombinator.com)
Not only have I often seen him engage in discussion and be open to changes for a submission when people felt a title shouldn't exactly fit HN's usual rules, but I'd also expect him to be open to changing the rules themselves if your feedback leads to his agreeing that there's a trend of submissions having the meaning of their title unfairly changed due to the generally good rules.
All that said, it's not really an example of a "HN bubble", nor of an "idea" that isn't allowed on HN.
But have you considered the countless lives that were lost due to bugs from memory-unsafe languages over the past ~70 years? A murder-for-hire app in Rust would still cost us less lives overall, if it increases the popularity and adoption of memory-safe languages elsewhere. It's a just cause, one could say.
I, for one, am very happy with how the assassination story of Rust is coming along!
I think it would actually probably hit the top spot if it was a legitimate attempt that used crypto, E2E, provable security, maybe TOR. There's only one example in history AFAIK and it only lasted a short while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
I’m not sure there are ideas that aren’t allowed so much as the way you speak, structure, and present them. I’ve tested many different ideas on topics here and some have received far more positive feedback than I’d imagine and some have been buried too.
I think so long as you follow guidelines generally and don’t outright attack individuals then you’re mainly ok. The community might downvote your idea to invisible but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t allowed - just that not enough people thought it was good. That’s fair.
No it doesn't. The rules can be based around the effort, structure, and tone of your comments. Not the ideas expressed within them. I think the only "idea" not allowed is asking for violence and I've even seen those allowed.
Politics as a subject is strongly discraged on HN.
It isn’t about Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian ideas it’s about their red button talking points. So you can discuss say taxes or abortion as long as you don't bring politics into it or get repetitive.
What most often confuses people is you can get heavily downvoted or upvoted for expressing the same idea depending on who shows up to a given discussion about say Nuclear power, Bitcoin, etc.
No I can't, because my account would get banned. Probably under the pretext of the stated rule, "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes."
Those seem to be based around the relationship of the comment to the post it is in rather than any specific idea in the comment itself. As if any comment flagged for those reasons could have the same idea expressed in a relevant post and not be flagged.
@dang has been explicit that they deem certain topics “inherent flame wars” and ban discussion because it upsets people.
Certain ideas aren’t allowed here — even when calmly stated and cited with evidence.
For example, citing the clip of the BLM founder saying she’s a “trained Marxist” would get you banned: HN was in flat out denial, even though it was her own words on film [1]. She is literally answering a question about the ideology behind BLM.
Unfortunately, that kind of censorship enabled BLM to commit the fraud they did [2].
What's hilarious is that this is still up three hours after posting with not even a reply. So much for censorship. You're totally allowed to post that here, even while conflating one charity with a continent-wide protest movement, one leader's out of context quote with the goals of that movement, and one enforcement action by Amazon Smile with an accusation of "fraud".
It was flagged and dead almost immediately then zmgsabst made another post [1] linking to the dead post and someone vouched for the dead post you see here.
Again, ignoring and censoring aren't the same thing.
Part of the reason I come to HN is that I know there are entire classes of content and ideas that I will not be exposed to at all so I don't have to waste brain cycles on sorting them.
If I wanted to provide a similar experience, targeting a different narrative, and then worked to create my own safe platform, would you disagree with that?
"Ignoring" is just choice. And that concept can either promote or extinguish fair and free communication.
I assume you and I share similar political beliefs. Call it censorship, or call it "choice", it ia clear today not all people have fair and free access.
If the government uses its power to extinguish speech (or to burden channels through unfair promotion of counter ideas), then that is censorship. And that is a problem we should all want to fix.
The "trained Marxist" phrase is so strange to me - how does one become 'trained' in Marxism? Trained in guerilla warfare, perhaps. But to be trained in Marxism has the same meaning as being "trained in Platonism" or "trained in Hayekism". The other answers she gave in the interview also indicate to me that she doesn't really know what she's talking about, and is using this language either as a LARP to claim some theoretical legitimacy or basis, or as a way to attract on-the-fence old school Marxists.
At no point did any of this 'trained Marxism' show other than in a small handful of the organization's goals, generally the most neglected ones.
To add to that, stating the fact that one of the tech titans of today, Bill Gates, was in cahoots with a convicted pedophile is either met with "this is just hearsay!" or "you're jumping to conclusions", when it's not ignored and down-voted altogether.
Even more important (not that many of us receiving our wages and dividends from probably pedophiles isn't important), the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
> the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.
Whole valley at one time was off limits to anyone from the Soviet Block.
And of course that The Economist just published this article in their latest issue: "After a long break-up, Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex are getting back together" [1] . Maybe I should submit it as a dedicated post.
Honestly I have no interest in discussing politics. It’s the social media of conversation.
I prefer to talk to people about what interests them. Sometimes it is interesting. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I agree with them. Sometimes I don’t. With most people all four are true. I form my own opinions from there. They change frequently. I vote based on my best current mental model.
