Who Are the HN Censors?

Question

If we look through "new" we see lots of stories that are already Dead. For some, there's no obvious reason why they needed to be killed (as opposed to just being not voted up). For example:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41025897So who are these users going through the New submissions and Flagging stories? Shouldn't they at least have a daily limit, or be charged some karma points, or something?

AlbertCory · Accepted Answer

[flagged] LOLThe responses could have been reasonable and calm, like OP was, e.g.1) You know, he might have something there. Maybe we should be more transparent about the ways we moderate stuff. -- OR --2) Let's just circle the wagons and attack this person with everything we have, except the actual data he asked for. This IS a little club, after all.It's too bad that you choose (2).

ThrowawayR2 · Answer

([EDIT] Mere speculation but) The user account for the example you use has a history of self-promotional posting for that site (all of the postings for a site whose domain is denominations come from the user named denominations? Not very subtle.) and a couple of low quality comments. Seems like a legitimate [dead] by the HN moderators to me.

r721 · Answer

I think stories which are marked "[dead]" right after posting (and not "[flagged] [dead]") were killed by algorithm - I guess possible reasons are shadow-banned user, shadow-banned domain, "bad" IP address, ...

slater · Answer

Also, from the guidelines:"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nullindividual · Answer

Censorship assumes you have the constitutional right to free speech on this platform.You don't.

basementcat · Answer

Careful, you wouldn&rsquo;t want this post to get flagged, would you?

slater · Answer

Dang, and some other admins, and a few aLgOriTHmS

Who Are the HN Censors?

I think stories which are marked "[dead]" right after posting (and not "[flagged] [dead]") were killed by algorithm - I guess possible reasons are shadow-banned user, shadow-banned domain, "bad" IP address, ...

Also, from the guidelines:
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Censorship assumes you have the constitutional right to free speech on this platform.
You don't.

Careful, you wouldn’t want this post to get flagged, would you?

Dang, and some other admins, and a few aLgOriTHmS