> how AI threatens natural resources for billions.

The article rests on the claim that water usage of data centers on continent X threaten water availability for humans on continent Y.

I hope you can see how self-evidently illogical that is. The article tries to bend logic into a narrative it is trying to push.

> This was from United Nations and it was flagged.

Indeed! It exposes a level of lack of rigor and critical thinking which is astounding - this is meant to be an organization that thinks clearly, which it clearly does not.

This forum tends to be visited by an intersection of technologists and the VC crowd. The HN algorithm is more open and transparent than Reddit's, but any Reddit-like platform suffers from the whims of the community. Currently, it seems like a disproportionate amount of HN users are hyped up about generative AI compared to people in the real world, so you'll see those whims back in voting and flagging tendencies.

That said, there is also a vocal anti-AI crowd here, or at least there used to be. Most of those people seemed to have left for greener pastures seeing how half the HN front page is "someone made XYZ but now with AI" these days.

There are other places that discuss tech that aren't so focused on making money, and those are probably less biased in favour of the latest AI gadget.

On the other hand, since the day ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general public, you should assume all online interaction is happening through AI and should probably be ignored. The human internet died the day we taught computers how to write a coherent paragraph.

Your second two had high comments to upvotes, which tends to get articles downranked more quickly. It may simply be that the stuff you're posting is generating disagreement without corresponding upvotes.

Actually, I found the phenomenon too. I think there are two main reasons:

1. ycombinator supports many AI companies.

2. There are too many marketers from AI companies.

It happened to this Flock post from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314962

But why do you think this isn’t the flagging system working as intended?

> Offtopic. I have a concern that this forum is removing stories that have negative connotation on AI.

The first example was flagged by users. It fits the pattern of other political clickbait stories. The top comment is calling out problems with it. This type of story pops up and gets flagged all the time on different topics.

Some people assume a conspiracy or moderation misbehavior, but when most of the comments in the thread are people calling out obvious problems with the article it leads to a lot of users clicking the flag button. Articles with poor logic or tortured claims don't last long here.

The second one is an Ask HN on a contentious topic with more comments than upvotes. There’s an automatic filter on this website designed to detect flame wars and I suspect it down ranks threads that aren’t getting many upvotes but are attracting a lot of comments. Happens to many Ask HN threads.

The third one doesn't even strike me as anti-AI. I don't know why you included it as an example of an anti-AI agenda because it's still about a future where everyone is using AI. It has other problems though because it's willfully ignoring the fact that inference is getting cheaper at a fast rate. It probably got dropped from the front page because the ratio of comments to upvotes was bad, like the other story.

There isn’t a conspiracy theory to be found in these examples. This is just what happens to tired topics on this site.

Anti-AI topics are on the front page all the time. I think that story you tried to post was just a badly written anger bait piece, it got called out in the comments, and people started flagging it.

Were they caught here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513

See anything below too?

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49290062

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49318906

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49319582

Edit: previous sibling comments explain pretty well + imagine moving the needle on AI on HN with negative coverage of it!

Concerns of this sort are best emailed to [email protected] .

Seeing the reception on the first one, maybe "removing stories that have negative connotation on AI" is not the most honest description of what happened there.

It reminds me to how various political movements will complain about being unfairly censored, pointing at their posts being disproportionately removed as evidence of this, then you look at said posts, and discover that they're simply disproportionately questionable in the first place.

There's definitely merit to monitoring something like this, so I do appreciate you surfacing this here, but there's also definitely a wheat and a chaff to this, and so based on just this much I have to disagree.

The mods (& many users) like to flag anything that could be "controversial" or lead to "flame wars". It's possible they thought that article could get people "fired up" and it could result in "arguments" in the comments. And this doesn't just apply to stories - if you have an opinion that the mods or some user doesn't like, you'll be accused of posting flame bait.

This "community" (as the mods like to call it) is really a business tool for YC. Attract nerds to the site, funnel them into the YC program, make startups, collect billions. If this was your money-making tool, you'd probably want to quash all controversy too.

During the DOGE massacres last year where various tech bros were destroying the federal government, most of the stories were flagged from the front page of this site.

There is a strong bias at play here, please remember when discussing anything pro- worker or environment.

Removing AI critical submissions is one of the methods.

The other, even more insidious one, is to flag pro-AI stories once they have attracted even a single comment that exposes conflicts of interest or other scams. Such comments need to cut deep though. Simple AI criticism like "AI didn't work in my org" is still allowed.

The censorship methods follow the general media pattern that the appearance of discussion is allowed (like you can call Trump an idiot in political discussions) but comments that expose the real flow of money or scams are not.

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