A dupe of 3 and 4 day old posts, which got nearly 200 comments? No. It is not reasonable to just remove that. This is censorship. Especially when you consider that dang tends to instead just post a comment saying: "Previously discussed at ..."

> I do not understand how this post is number one. Are you saying Hacker News can promote certain posts to the top and it is not organically curated?

Absolutely, yes. The mods can influence the ranking directly and they have openly talked about this. If you search https://hn.algolia.com/ for "penalized", "demoted" or "promoted" you will find discussions regarding this.

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Since dang banned me from posting new replies:

> Maybe you haven’t been here long enough to have read the FAQ or know that generally all dupes from 3-4 days ago are marked, and only allowed after at least several months?

I've been here for many years. I just make a new account periodically. Maybe you haven't been paying enough attention to see the difference in behavior that dang exhibits when he wants to censor something? Notice how he's usually all over the comments explaining why something was removed as dupe, but now there is nothing except him linking to the older posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34559614), waiting for an hour or two, and then silently deleting the new one.

Not to mention that the subject of the post is completely different. The latest post is about the documentary being removed from archive.org at the request of the BBC. None of the earlier posts cover this.

Maybe you haven’t been here long enough to have read the FAQ or know that generally all dupes from 3-4 days ago are marked, and only allowed after at least several months?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

“If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.”

I’m confused by your comment and edits. You both asked for and complained about being given a reason why the article is a dupe. Which is it? The comment explains why using those two links. Why has this particular article gotten you so riled up?

I come here in part for the moderation, it increases the quality of discussions. It’s not surprising that if you keep making a lot of noise and trying to generate off-topic outrage, it might be met with some active moderation, that’s exactly what I would expect, and I’m sorry it’s bothering you so much, but FWIW I don’t mind that it’s happening, and it does seem reasonable and in-bounds from my perspective. BTW to me it seems like you might be making some incorrect assumptions about what’s happening and why; the news topic does seem to be covered adequately with the first one or two articles.

> You both asked for and complained about being given a reason why the article is a dupe. Which is it?

Dang posted the links to the previous stories, didn't mark the post as a dupe or say anything about it being a dupe. Because it's not. Then two hours later it silently got deleted.

It is marked as dupe, and not deleted, we can still see it. Why does it matter if there was a time delay between the two things you saw? What does that have to do with anything?

I feel like were glossing over this comment about hacker news moderators being able to influence the rankings of posts.

Are we? So I’m really curious, what are you expecting, and why? Do you think moderators should not be able to influence the rankings of posts? You believe all posts, regardless of content, should be allowed? Even if they’re duplicate, even if they’re offensive and only start flame-wars, even if they’re lying or contain graphic or illegal content?

To me, that doesn’t seem like an entirely reasonable thing to expect given that 1) the site guidelines explicitly say that posts will be influenced, and it gives explicit reasons why, 2) there are no large high quality forums anywhere that have high quality discussion without moderators deleting low-quality posts and comments, and 3) site mods on a private forum can always do whatever they want, it’s their site.

It’s often worth taking a minute to re-read the site guidelines and FAQ. I do it every few months.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Like I said above, I want and expect some posts to be influenced by moderators, it’s one of the reasons I visit HN. I’m glad that duplicates are pushed down, just like I’m glad that off-topic comments and excessive hyperbole get pushed down by moderators.

Dan is a human being, doing the never-ending job of keeping this tree pruned enough to allow high quality discussion, while in reality still allowing a whole lot of silly argument and unexceptional articles and blog posts. He’s only pruning stuff that really truly goes over the line, a line defined by site rules and applied more or less consistently. @counttheforks has said a bunch of mean stuff, has clearly made wrong assumptions about Dan (the claim about being banned from commenting immediately above being one of those), and they called Dan a liar in another thread. Even when mods see people being crappy all day every day, I’m sure that still doesn’t feel great. To Dan’s credit, he didn’t remove any of those comments.

It's not about what the BBC says but what India does to prevent others seeing what the BBC says.

Elaborate