Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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All: if you're going to comment in a thread like this, please re-read the site guidelines first: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Then you'll know to assume good faith, to make your comments more civil and substantive as the topic gets more divisive, to avoid name-calling, and to respond charitably.

HN's rules exist for deep reasons based on many years of working with community dynamics. If you break them, you contribute nothing to resolving any social issue—all it does is rile up the other side and fan flames—but you do contribute to destroying this community. That's bad for all of us.

If you're feeling like venting about how wrong or bad someone is, don't post right away; pause until the needle goes out of the red. Then review your post and edit out any bits that still break the guidelines. That's what I do, and it's the only way I know to make this place work ok.

Hacker News is large enough that it lives in a precarious state: the forces that tear an online community apart grow with size and win by default. If HN's health points go to zero, it dies as a place for thoughtful discussion, so please take care with the health points.

Reading this has made me find words i've been looking for for months now, and maybe you will at least see these, hopefully even think about them:

As an idealistic goal your policies are great. In practice however i find they sorely underestimate the differential in effort required between:

- someone who has to censor their earnest thoughts preemptively to not be censured by you

and

- a troll gleefully dressing up words they know will hurt in dressing nice enough to fly under your radar

You're asking the former to spend a lot more time and work, than it takes the latter, for whom it's a form of playing, a game they enjoy. I don't have a solution, but i think it's true that your policies have a chilling influences on earnest voices and are creating a community where trolls are very loud.

Consider the possibility that what you perceive as "a troll saying intentionally awful things dressed up as polite language" may be a person who sincerely disagrees with you, and is also being polite about it. That seems to be the highest form of ideas interacting, no?

That consideration is baked into my post. They fall under category 1 as well.

I was a bit unfocused, but I meant my comment to suggest that what you perceive as this community having a number of "loud trolls" may be overblown. I have been on HN for many years and the number of times I've seen a comment I considered intentionally hurtful (dressed up or otherwise) is vanishingly small.

To put it another way: you say that people who are merely politely disagreeing are in your category 1, but you also believe there is a problem on HN with "loud trolls" dressing up their comments to appear civil. That's counter to my experience here. YMMV etc of course.

I have considered this before even making the post. (I also have considerable experience with these biases because i have for years run a community with thousands of users visiting each day.) I could point out examples, but i don't think that would be productive.

Right now i'm thinking that your bias in perception is that you tend to look mostly at technical topics where there is no opportunity for this kind of rift without going obviously off-topic. (What your perception of HN is is highly determined by which comment threads you look at.)

This is a very good point. I saw almost zero troll comments over a few years but realized afyer your comment that I look only at technical or non controversial topics

It's impossible to reply to that in the abstract. I'd need to see links to comments that you think are gleefully trolling while evading moderation.

If i felt comfortable discussing that in public i'd already have done so.

My point is that the state of things here is silencing voices who simply stop bothering to post, while you let toxic people and their posts remain after a slap on the wrist.

That is a risk we care about. But most people who make such claims turn out, when you look at the specific examples they come up with, mostly to want HN to be moderated to support their own side and penalize the other. Not intentionally, of course, but when you unpack what most people call fair vs. biased, that's what it amounts to. There are exceptions, but disappointingly few.

Most people have a tendency to see commenters we disagree with as disingenuous, the more so the more we disagree. This distorts perceptions. In my experience moderating HN, disingenuous trolls exist, but are less common than users misclassifying each other as such.

So while we're quite willing to moderate and ban accounts that abuse HN in the way you describe—and indeed have done so—we need specific links to evaluate. Otherwise the null hypothesis has to win.

You don't want to discuss it in public? Fine. Email them to dang. (His address is in his profile.)

And dang only lets toxic people and their posts remain for a little while. At some point, he kills their account. (His threshold may be higher than you'd like, but he does do it.)

Actually, you know what. Just ban me. This evening on this site has been another wasteful drain and i've barely even posted. I'm changing my email and password to random noise now.

> If you break them, you contribute nothing to resolving any social issue—all it does is rile up the other side and fan flames—but you do contribute to destroying this community. That's bad for all of us.

You allow flamebait political and ideological posts which riles up one side, which you then censor for being mean, but leave the flamebait post or comment up.

If you wanted HN to be civil, all you would need to do is to move the political stuff into it's own section.

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