Well that's interesting. I didn't even know there was such a thing on this site.

All net forums have owners, and almost all have defacto restricted topics - things the owners simply won't allow.
In many cases, one of the restricted topics is what well known 'cultural entity' the owners are members of.

What does differ is the degree of sneakiness in what's forbidden, and the methods used to enforce the restrictions.

In a few cases it's forthright - there's a FAQ listing forbidden topics; you say what you're not supposed to, and you're banned. But that's rare. It's more often the case that forbidden topics are so forbidden that they aren't even mentioned in the rules as forbidden. And the site's operation is structured to provide means of quietly removing offending comments from public view.

It's all about controlling the perception of common public opinion, while avoiding being seen to do so. There are many tricks used.

In almost all sites, there are cliques of semi-official mods, with the power to remove/alter what's visible. The Wikipedia global warmist clique being a prime example. Even when the clique isn't officially part of the site's control system, Megaphone-like back-channel organization makes very powerful manipulation via mass down-voting and pile-on criticism possible.
Then there's the HB Gary-esque 'multiple personas' methods, by which groups of paid shills can exert far more web influence than they should be able to.

But what's really disturbing, is when forums that pretend to be open and politically unbiased, are structured to provide hidden methods of control - and they are clearly using them.

For instance, on reddit the '500 visible post limit' provides a way of vanishing politically unwelcome posts. On 4chan, the ephemeral nature of everything makes it easy to vanish posts faster than they otherwise would.

With ycombinator I thought the control method was pretty obvious, and I'd experienced it myself. Make any mention of anything related to 'topic-Y', and get instantly downvoted into the negatives. OK, I could live with that. It's a pity, but then hardly anything unique in this sadly upside-down, tiny-dot ruled world.

Now it turns out... that ycombinator is also applying 'holo-net' techniques?
Am I understanding this right? A hellbanned person sees their own posts appearing normally, but they are hidden to everyone else (unless they turn on 'showdead' - and now I have to go find out how to do that.)

You know, that's a _very_ immoral and deceptive facility to implement in a forum.
It almost reminds me of... stereotypical behavioral characteristics of... something I can't mention here, for fear of being hellbanned.

My gradually recovered vote count is now 54. I expect it to now suddenly go negative. Again.

I hope you guys realize that free, open and unrestricted public debate is crucial to the maintenance of civilization? And that deploying means of distorting and controlling debate will achieve only one thing in the end - the collapse of civilization into a hell of violence and insanity. It takes time, but it's inevitable. Special interest groups, whether ideological or ethnic, are never capable of acting rationally in the interests of the greater good. They always behave like drowning persons - strangling those who are keeping things afloat.

Of course, whether certain special interest groups actually want to bring down civilization - that's a fair question.