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[flagged] Sam Altman responds to his sister's claim of sexual abuse (twitter.com/sama)
46 points by spockswrench on Jan 8, 2025 | hide | past | favorite | 30 comments


Life has taught me that you can't trust anyones memories when they suddenly change over time and the changed memories happen to carry with them a financial or personal benefit of some kind with regards to who the memories are about. Such as sudden accusations when someone you know comes into the kind of wealth that you see here. It's also interesting that his family is backing up what he is saying.

Who knows. You just can never trust anything when a lot of money or ulterior motives are involved.


Do you trust Sam Altman? If so, why? Life has taught me to believe abuse victims and Sam’s response here sounds like classic abuser gaslighting.


It isnt about trusting him necessarily. Do you have a reason to not believe his mom or brothers? Does your distrust extend to them but not her? If so, why?

We were not there so we dont know what happened. It is possible to look for motives behind the need to lie. Money motivates a lot of people. I saw pictures of them all. Taken recently. They do not portray the kind of response from someone who experienced all of this. I also do not believe anyone who years later, when motives change, suddenly remember things that they can use the way it is being used. While repressed memories are real, I do not believe they work the way it is being portrayed here. This is just my, probably unpopular, opinion.


I do not trust Sam Altman and I believe his sister. Simple as that, I’m hard pressed to think of someone I believe less than him.

I also don’t understand why someone would defend him. He has the resources to defend himself, he doesn’t need a white knight.


It is the same thought process I apply to every accusation made against someone. It is not a defense of him.


I don’t trust untrustworthy people.


What in life has taught you that? High profile abuse allegations are frequently false. Consider the duke lacross case, for which the accuser recently admitted to fabricating it. That isn't to say that such allegations are never true, but believing such allegations when all other evidence contradicts them goes against the experience of any honest person.


High profile abuse allegations are frequently false.

to make such an outrageous claim you should follow it up with more than one example dealing with college kids… bill cosby, weinstein, dany masterson… vast majority of high profile abuse allegations turn out true, not false…

100% not saying anything about this case as we are currently in he-said-she-said part of it but you claim needs more substance


He's gay, his mother is on his side, and BPD people make up lots of false accusations. There's good reason to suspend judgement.


He’s a sociopath so this matches. His mother is incentivized to sweep this under the carpet and by money.


The report from 2023 that eventually triggered the lawsuit:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QDczBduZorG4dxZiW/sam-altman...

Related discussion: https://qht.co/item?id=38311509

For the record, I believe in everything Annie says here.


I've never trusted a word Sam says so I'm going to do the same thing here and believe his sister.


Just read the statement. Looks very much put together by attorneys. Absolutely no need to air all of that publicly and disparage a family member. You have billions. Just give her a little and help her find peace if what you're saying is true.


What’s the alternative?


If this is true, it's horrifying.

To dang: Why is this flagged?


It's flagged because he has a vested interest in flagging it. He censored my account so my upvotes don't work anymore as well.


For the record, I don't believe him and think it's disgusting for someone as rich and powerful as this to attack his sister publicly.


"Never go against the family, Annie, ever"


I'm willing to put a lot of money that anything anti-Sam Altman will never make the front page.

Did you know downvotes by superusers immediately blacklists your post from the top 100? I learned that when a post of mine was getting really popular and suddenly disappeared. HN support told me a moderator had downvoted it which removed it from the front page.

HN is too pro-Altman for these comments to ever reach the front page, which is heavily censored.


> Did you know downvotes by superusers immediately blacklists your post from the top 100

That's not true, and I don't know what you mean by "superusers".


Dang, IIRC, some of these stories had 30-40 votes and no flagging. They were 30 minutes old or less, yet none of them were making it to the home page.

Is that the ranking algorithm? It felt suspicious that these headlines were getting substantial early HN user attention (double digits) but not showing up on the home page.

I know HN isn't a gossip rag, and that we don't tar and feather people, but the story did feel notable.


They did have flagging. The [flagged] marker only appears when flags overwhelm upvotes, but flags affect rank well before that. More about that here: https://qht.co/item?id=38918548.

All of the submissions on this topic are being flagged off the frontpage by users, not moderators.


Sorry, I should have been more clear.

At the time I came across these threads, none of these submissions were "[flagged]" (or at least not indicated as such in the UI). They had 10-30ish upvotes, all were under an hour old, and yet they were buried on the first and second pages of "new".

Do articles that are flagged once or twice get internally penalized and de-ranked but not shown as "[flagged]" yet in the UI until they accumulate more flagging?


Articles start sinking as a result of flags long before they get the tag.


> Do articles that are flagged once or twice get internally penalized and de-ranked but not shown as "[flagged]" yet in the UI until they accumulate more flagging?

"Once or twice" isn't quite accurate but otherwise, yes, that's how it works.


That makes sense. Thanks for this and your other post.


I'm upvoting every one of these stories to test that hypothesis.


Notice they all got flagged. I.e. removed from the front page immediately.


Last night there were a few threads about this story that had 30-40 votes and no flagging. Those should have made the front page. They were all under an hour old, some only a 15 minutes old.


They didn't make the front page because users flagged them.

It's common for sensational and/or outrageous stories to make the frontpage because those qualities attract upvotes. They also, however, attract flags. The latter take longer to kick in because many flags come from users who only see the story once it has made the frontpage.

This tug-of-war between upvotes and flags is the core of HN's frontpage is determined. There are additional factors, such as moderation downweights (see https://qht.co/newsfaq.html), but we haven't applied those in this case.

In other words, all you're seeing here is very much a community verdict according to the standard rules by which HN operates. Sometimes people make grandiose claims about sinister censorship beyond that; but they're doing that because of their own priors, which for whatever reason cause them to misinterpret what they're seeing.

None of this is secret, in the sense that people are always welcome to ask what's going on and we're happy to answer. Of course, you have to trust us enough to believe the answer, but that'll always be the case no matter what we do.




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