zlacker

> This goes for any large web property where people congregate to communicate.

Yes, for example Facebook and TikTok.

> HN is no different in that respect.

Well, Twitter has over 200 million users. I believe that HN is much much smaller. HN also tends to be more anonymous.

>>lapcat+(OP)
HN is a lot larger than you probably think and YC has an excellent legal department and even if I do not know for sure that there has been contact between LE and HN/YC about this forum given the fact that we are looking at a decade+ of operation and many millions of interactions, including threats of bodily harm and other nonsense I would expect the chances of there having been such interaction to be better than even.

>>lapcat+(OP)
I've occasionally noticed some sketchy article flagging in the new submissions feed. (A recent article explaining how to add snow animations to HTML pages comes to mind.)

I like to think that dang's days consist of monocle and tophat shopping, sabotaging the metric system, and propping up the global media conspiracy.

However, I suspect the root cause is more mundane: Some small percentage of users treat "flag article" like the downvote button.

>>jacque+t1
> HN is a lot larger than you probably think

I'd be interested to know the user number.

>>lapcat+g8
A typical homepage link can cause between 40 and 50K visitors to your website. And that's a small fraction of the total number of users. Millions of pageviews per day, 250K+ registered users and a multiple of that in lurkers.

Does that help?

>>jacque+P9
> 250K+ registered users

That's the relevant number. So Twitter is about 1000x larger than HN.

From a surveillance standpoint, we're really only talking about commenters, on both sites.

>>lapcat+Va
True, but Twitter is mostly cat pictures, I think the average HN users could do a lot more damage to society than the average Twitter user.

>>jacque+yb
> I think the average HN users could do a lot more damage to society than the average Twitter user.

How so? How many HN comments have "gone viral"? How many news stories are about a HN comment? How many politicians and journalists and pro athletes and Hollywood celebrities are commenting on HN?

Any given HN comment can receive only a theoretical maximum of 250K upvotes, if (improbably) every registered user upvoted it, and those upvotes would be superfluous anyway, because they would only bring the comment to the top of a single HN submission.

>>hedora+H3
On mobile, I accidentally hit flag quite often trying to tap the link of the article below it. I do go back every time and unflag, but I can imagine not everyone would.

>>jacque+yb
Most technical people are not perceived a threat all because they do not pose any social damage. Tech threats can be handled in all kinds of passive or escalated to cruel and insane ways without any risk of public backlash.

Someone with 1mil+ followers is a whole other story. They have enough people watching their every move to cause problems if they are dealt with directly, so they need more attention for implicit handling over time, psychological and financial handling, etc. People with an audience can cause a lot of social, political, and ultimately financial damage to many entities just by some words. And in a world run by marketers, salespeople, lawyers, bankers, and politicians — this is the scariest threat imaginable.

Tech people can do a lot of technical damage but it is mostly just a thorn in the side of the machine. Even if they built something disruptive, an audience is needed for it to go anywhere, and most avenues for scaling anything disruptive are already tightly controlled / monitored by big tech.

I say this as what I believe the controlling authorities perspective is on the matter.