Sam Altman accused of sexual abuse by his sister (opens in new tab)

There's no problem with plain language about rape or other topics on HN. Plain language is preferable.

The issue here is not whether people are allowed to use specific words, it's whether the story gratifies intellectual curiosity, as the site guidelines require for a story to be on topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). The community verdict, arrived at via the standard tug-of-war between upvotes and flags, is that it does not. Some users are unhappy with that and are seeing it not as a community verdict, but as suspicious behavior by the mods.

I think the solution is for us to explain what is happening, what users did and what we did, and what the underlying principles are. If past experience is any guide, this won't satisfy all of the suspicions, but it will help with some of them, and it will satisfy the bulk of the community, which is the most that can be hoped for.

Internet is getting worse every day, who knows what kind of censorship they are or will be using. Maybe it isn't necessary to censor the word here but still good as kind of a trigger discipline I guess.

That's what happens when upvotes put a story on the front page and then user flags take it off the front page. This is standard stuff. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639323 and the other links there.

Unlike other stories critical of Sam Altman, it's very suspicious the way this is so quickly and systematically downvoted and flagged every single time it's posted.

This happened the last time this was posted too. Sam Altman deserves the right to defend himself in court as does Ann to tell her story (who personally I believe).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072

The good news is that with the lawsuit it will be in the news more and much harder to silence, maybe at some point we can have a proper discussion about it on HN without people (or more likely bots) trying to memoryhole it every single time.

This is democracy and freedom we get these days.

and yup... the thread is gone.

You know this same story has been posted on this place for at least 2 years? Every time (since the first couple at least) it gets flagged, called a dupe, and people in the comments wring their hands about WHY that is.

What's the interesting conversation that's supposed to emerge from this? "I believe her." "I don't." is about the limit. There's no new info other than a suit being filed, there's a ton of heat, but almost no light.

So people flag it, then other people act like there's a conspiracy to flag it.

I don't know, but it seems to be something he says on every iteration of this article, which keeps getting posted and reposted. Looking through Annie's story certainly didn't leave me with a sense of certainty about anything, and the notion of "recovered memories" is more than just controversial.