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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

You say that, yet it didn't concern you enough to let us know about it? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

The idea that if you see something unmoderated, it must mean that the moderators secretly agree with it, is a non sequitur. What's actually happening is that we only see a portion of what gets posted to HN, and we can't moderate what we don't see. That's why the site guidelines ask you to flag bad comments and, in egregious cases, to email hn@ycombinator.com. Fortunately, another user chose to follow the site guidelines and did so.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21003570 for more.

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>The idea that if you see something unmoderated, it must mean that the moderators secretly agree with it, is a monster of a non sequitur.

Yes. That's what happens when you provide a self-publishing system. You agree to that contract whether you want to or not.

And it's not just this comment. It happens all the time.

>That's why the site guidelines ask you to flag bad comments

I literally cannot do that. Surely you know that.

>Fortunately, another user chose to follow the site guidelines and did so.

You don't think it's a problem that only one other user decided to _email_ you a problem. Doesn't that indicate a problem with the site culture?

I'm one person, a consumer of this site. Not a moderator. I called attention to it using the one capability given to me on this site. Saying "that's not good enough" is extremely asinine when I literally am not able to do anything else on the site.

It's trivial to get enough karma to flag posts on HN. We keep the threshold low on purpose so that anyone who wants to use HN as intended can easily cross it. The reason you haven't is not because we're somehow excluding you. It's because your many accounts consistently break the site guidelines, causing your posts to get downvoted.

But you can always email us, as anyone can. The fact that you didn't shows that you're not truly concerned about keeping HN free of the abuse you're complaining about. Rather, you're using other people's abusive comments as an excuse to post abusive comments of your own, smearing the community—who don't support the dreck that shows up here, just like it shows up everywhere on the public internet—and trying to undermine it. When you imply that moderators somehow support the dreck, I don't believe you're doing so in good faith. Anyone who's been around HN as long as you have knows that's false. Rather, the name for what you're doing is poisoning the well. That is another form of trolling.

Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with? This site is for people who sincerely want to use it as intended, and the intended use is laid out clearly at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: intellectual curiosity and kind, thoughtful discussion.

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