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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I know how beloved that old standby is to some of you, but it breaks the HN guideline against name-calling. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, so please don't.

No, this isn't because we love Zuckerberg, serve corporate overloads or whatnot—it's because repeating the same things over and over is off topic for this site, especially when they are toxic waste.

All: this is also the sort of comment we use to downweight user votes, since it's a honeytrap for reflexive internet indignation, and that is the thing we're most hoping to avoid here. If you'd like your votes to count on HN, cultivate the habit of pausing before you use them.

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If we had a more expressive way to classify posts than "up" or "down", I'd use it to indicate that "I want this post to be highly visible because it encourages anti-Facebook sentiment, which I consider to be a socially and politically valuable thing to do", and mark other posts with, for example, "this post contains good original research" or "this post makes accurate technical statements".

Why is HN voting so opaque, only explaining how votes work in scattered tidbits at the bottom of comment threads? A well-designed system doesn't work only because nobody knows how it works. The current method of "herd these sheeple through a maze they can't directly perceive" feels very patronizing.

At any rate, I'm not sure whether it's worth it to upvote the grandparent now, since it is apparently a censored viewpoint and merely shooting myself in the foot to do so.

The integrity of HN as a container for substantive conversation rather than tedious tropes matters far more (to HN, I don't say in general) than encouraging rage against some target, even one as big as Facebook which there are reasons to be concerned about.

If you want to support such concerns, there are plenty of solid comments about them to upvote. One reason such comments get posted is that HN still exists as a place for them—which it would have ceased to do, long ago, if we didn't moderate shallow snark and ragey drive-bys. Those things are not "viewpoints". They're litter. Any genuine viewpoint is possible to express seriously, and should be.

What does downweighting mean? Is it that users who upvote that comment have their votes mean less, or?

Yes. Edit: Well, it means the users who repeatedly upvote crap comments eventually have their votes ignored.

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

By 'crap' I mean something not as subjective as that sounds, which you can gather by reading those links and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Aha, thank you. You learn something new about this site every day. Sometimes I wonder just how many robots (and humans) there are, ensuring that these discussions don't fill with crap.

/me tips hat

Is there any way to identify whether or not our upvotes or downvotes are being ignored? Any way to get feedback on whether hackernews thinks our personal opinions are worthwhile?

You can always email hn@ycombinator.com and ask. But I don't like this phrasing: "our personal opinions are worthwhile". Try "violate the site guidelines". That's still subjective, but it's not as if we're trying to pick market winners. About that we really don't care, except maybe when it comes to APL.

What standby? This article is about Zuckerberg apologizing (again) for being completely tone-deaf in a manner that suggests he really has no idea how humans work beyond stimulus-response machines.

What do you suggest? That we comment on the VR tech?

This entire thread is just reaction on his behavior. You may as well just close the thread.

The "sociopath" standby, with extra anti-points for "dumb fucks" icing.

The thread of course has plenty of things to talk about other than that petrified nugget, which was getting old ten years ago.

"dumb fucks" was an event in time.

Sociopath is a quality that manifests repeatedly through different events over time, including this latest one. This entire thread is people saying the same thing in different words.

Harvey Weinsten appearing in nothing but his boxer shorts for an actress audition was a moment in time. The qualities that made him creepy and predatory remained constant.

You're doubling down on what I asked you not to do, which is casually sling accusations of mental illness with an internet swear word. If you do it again we will ban you.

Even if you were right in this case (which you have no evidence for, just a connect-the-dots cartoon, and few dots at that), this would still be so. "Sociopath" comes even before "shill" on the feces-throwing internet trigger list. Every time we tolerate such a violation of the site guidelines encourages others to do the same. That slope is both slippery and steep. Since my #1 job is to (try to) prevent HN from plummeting to its death down it, it's not like this is a hard call.

Without his comment we wouldn’t have had this whole conversation.

HN is sliding backwards due to this kind of censorship, not for lack of it.

This is not a good conversation to be having; it's a necessary one, made necessary by people breaking this site's rules and endangering it.

You're talking to someone who has been doing this same thing for so many years that I basically do it in my sleep, with about as much interest. If that's a backward slide, then (as Voltaire said when someone told him coffee was a slow poison) it must be very slow.

> This is not a good conversation to be having.

In your (sleepy and uninterested) opinion. I love it. We're all learning so much! There are more comments on this sub-thread than the rest of the thread.

> I basically do it in my sleep, with about as much interest...

That's exactly what it feels like.

Congrats.

> sleepy and uninterested

That of course was a joke, meant to acknowledge how tedious and off-topic these digressions are. A factual version of the remark would be something like 'I've done this tens of thousands of times over several years now, so any negative effect of the sort you're claiming would long have been priced into the system'.

He is suggesting that you not make 1-sentence comments that basically just call someone a sociopath. There's no real analysis there. Everyone who bothers to read your top comment basically just got their time wasted. So what the mods are protecting against is HN becoming full of these time-wasting comments, i.e. they don't want to turn HN into 9gag.

It’s not name-calling if it’s true.

And you are sitting here calling someones truthful comment toxic waste. Meanwhile the top comment here wonders if any parents are present at Facebook.

Honestly, HN really sucks at moderation. You aren’t consistent at all and the rules are completely ambiguous. I’ve actually seen you respond this exact situation before when people complained about name-calling by saying that it’s not name-calling when the person is not even here and because they are the subject of the article.

So whatever to you sir. Bad censorship is bad.

> It’s not name-calling if it’s true.

On the contrary, of course it is, and having it be "true" (which none of you have any evidence for, as I pointed out downthread) would make it worse, since then it would inspire even more feces-throwing, the overwhelming majority of which is not "true".

> HN really sucks at moderation

Maybe this is not the site you're looking for. In my world, consistency of moderation is quite impossible; for one thing it would require reading all the material.

> On the contrary, of course it is...

Calling something what it is...is just called communicating.

And there is plenty of evidence. Consider first, if you will, the fact that sociopathy is a spectrum disorder.

> Maybe this is not the site you're looking for.

Oh, well I guess I could say the exact same thing to you. That's a bit snarky don't you think? I mean, here I am and obviously I want to be here but you're telling me that maybe I don't want to be...hmmm. Nice moderation.

> consistency of moderation is quite impossible; for one thing it would require reading all the material.

Responding the same way to each incident does not require reading all the material. Having non-ambiguous rules does not require reading all the material. Having more moderators does not require reading all the material.

The reason I said that is that you recently broke the site guidelines and rejected the correction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15443444

If you continue to post in a way that makes it clear you don't want to use this site as intended, you're going to end up getting banned. Please reread https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this from now on. It's not like it's hard for anyone who wants to.

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