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Why I’m quitting Hacker News

61 points edgefield | 1 comments | 04 Jun 23 18:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.411s | source

I just shared a post about the world’s oceans setting record temperatures for 80 continuous days. After the post achieved 130+ upvotes and the top spot within several hours, it was nuked. My experience is that every post on Hacker News addressing climate change is removed or downvoted to oblivion. I don’t want to be part of a community that turns away from probably the most important threat facing humanity in the 21st century. Goodbye and farewell!
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matthewdgreen ◴[04 Jun 23 18:57 UTC] No.36188402[source]▶
I noticed how highly voted the post was, so I went in to read the comments for a couple of minutes. When I hit "back" to return to the main page the post had mysteriously disappeared. I found it fleeing down the second page, past many stories which had lower scores and had been lingering for much longer periods. It was very surprising.

These current-events climate stories are the most important pieces of news on the site. If the moderators are deliberately nerfing them (ETA: or exploitable algorithmic policy is allowing them to be nerfed), I find that extremely terrifying. I hope it is not the case.

replies(2): >>36188441 #>>36192044 #
1. r721 ◴[05 Jun 23 03:54 UTC] No.36192044[source]▶
>If the moderators are deliberately nerfing them (ETA: or exploitable algorithmic policy is allowing them to be nerfed), I find that extremely terrifying. I hope it is not the case.

Some users are flagging climate-related stories, probably:

>Although submissions cannot be downvoted, flags act as a "super" downvote and enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission, or kill it entirely (flagging is supposed to be used for submissions which break the site guidelines, but that isn't always the case in practice).

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...