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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.