If you have a system that relies on voting, and people vote against some things appearing, that's not called censoring! That's just the system working as intended.
So, just so we're on the same page, you are saying that users of "news.ycombinator.com" wanted to purposefully hide a story about the CEO of Y Combinator wishing the death of San Francisco politicians, as well as the actual death threats that have surfaced as a result.
You can call it censorship or not, but it's not a good look either way.
> [...] you are saying that users of "news.ycombinator.com" wanted to purposefully hide a story about [...]
No, you're interpreting things here in a specific way.
It could be that users didn't think it belonged on HN because it was politics, which is often frowned upon. It could be that they thought there was a problem with the article itself.
In any case, even if it was totally the community choosing to not want to see this news (which I doubt), it wasn't a deliberate action by the people running the site, which does make a difference (otherwise that would've been the original accusation).
I would hope that a CEO of a company that runs the forum you post in sending a drunken text wishing death upon people is both newsworthy and something that we could all agree on is bad. But not only was this article flagged by users, so were many others, as noted elsewhere in the thread.
However, I think you are making a distinction without a real difference. The company that hosts this forum set it up with an incentive structure that results in the behavioral outcomes we see on this forum. If these incentives lead to newsworthy posts concerning the CEO of the company that runs these forums getting flagged, perhaps the incentives need to be changed.
Look, I wrote a huge reply, but I ended up deciding we agree more than we disagree, so I scrapped it.
I think the only thing I'm trying to push back on is any kind of "conspiracy" thinking - this might not be anything coordinated, definitely not by HN staff, nor by HN "elite" users or anything like that.
I don't think that structural problems with incentives require any sort of conspiratorial thinking. If you give individual users the ability to flag or downvote posts to tank their discoverability, it is possible for a disconnected group of users to decide to flag a post for less-than-legitimate reasons, even if they're not communicating with each other.
It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.
