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Comment by celticmusic | Hacker News Reader

In the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428

you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution".

You are now telling me I should be citing a source.

If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster.

I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubstantive if there's a claim against you personally?

As for allowing others to make up their mind, that would be what the poster in the other thread was presumably trying to do, and you shut him down. And that's really the point.

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A comment consisting of nothing but "got any sources for that?" is certainly "rather unsubstantive". But that is not why I replied to it. Had that been the only thing wrong with the comment, I wouldn't have. It was the following:

> Edit: lol, downvotes for asking for sources? "Hacker" "news" is just full of gems!

... that caused me to reply as a moderator, because that breaks more than one of the site guidelines, as well as being lame. This is routine moderation.

Both the original commenter and now you have given a distorted version of what happened there, as anyone who looks at the original thread can easily see. If that's what you have to resort to in order to come up with examples of moderator abuse on HN, we must be doing pretty well. Better than I'd have expected, in fact, given that we've posted 38,000 of these and no one bats a hundred.

also, since I forgot to address it in my other response.

asking for sources is not unsubstantive, not in the least. It's one of the most substantive things you can do, both as someone providing information, and as someone trying to evaluate the information being provided.

The fact that you've come to feel that asking for sources is less important than not making others feel uncomfortable goes a long way towards why I don't view HN as a place for decent discourse.

I didn't say any of those things. I'm afraid we're going in circles now.

That doesn't pass the reasonable person test.

and now you've chosen to be unfair. I don't have access to the original comment, something you know, yet you accuse me of distorting facts. You've also lumped me in with the other poster as if we're the same person or the same group.

The only thing we have in common is not really liking your work as a moderator, and the way it's stifled discourse on HN. You have to go to other places for that, I mostly use HN as a news source.

By original comment I mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428, the one you linked to upthread. I just clicked on it like everyone else.

A comment like "got any sources for that?" without adding additional context is low effort and inching towards trolling. Another difference is while the parent post of that person's comment it would be nice to include sources, it is about a general topic people can attempt to look for public sources themselves. Your comment you are accusing a forum user (dang) of something and there is no reasonable way to look for sources backing up your opinion/claim.

no, asking for sources is legitimate, it's a crazy world you live in where being asked to give a source for information is low value and/or low effort.

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