Comment by shadowbanthrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowbanthrow | Hacker News Reader

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> Also HN is mostly free of the unproductive "culture wars" discussions that have led to the heat death of so many fora.

This is objectively and demonstrably false. The wars just manifest differently and happen to lead to an outcome that you prefer.

There's a reason this site has "avoid controversial topics unless you have something new to add" or however it's phrased in the guidelines. Let me be completely and plainly clear: there is an HN culture. You will be banned, often quietly, if you wander off that reservation.

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Edit: Dan, I'm rate limited, so you get the edit here because I can't be bothered to account hop again.

Grandiose? You ban people for not adhering to a culture. How is that even a remotely controversial statement? What else would you ban them for?

There is a set of guidelines and approaches you want in place for HN behavior. When people fail to meet those, you give them a couple chances and then remove them from the community. Examples: "We've asked you to be nicer," or "we've asked you not to bring up gender politics," or whatever nice explanation you give.

There's a word for that kind of thing; that word is culture.

I wasn't even criticizing moderation, because I'm not sure what I could add there because it's your employment to manage this stupidity, but you sure showed up fast assuming I was. Is it really like that now? Nobody can speak objectively about how this site works and point out an incontrovertible fact without you taking it personally and trying to rally a bunch of usernames you've never met to believe you?

While I have you, I appreciated that you declined to share your age in that fawning profile you and Scott got. That was tacit admission of your own site's culture, and you know it.

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Edit 2: I'm really enjoying watching your comment evolve via edits into reading back exactly what I'm saying from a position of authority and then challenging me to find authority.

Comments which make grandiose claims about getting banned on HN almost never come with links. There's a reason for that: the claims exceed reality, and a link to what actually happened would reveal that. Typically, the reason why we banned someone is very different from the reason they give when they come back here to linklessly declaim about it. This is one place where absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit: it's easy to make authoritative-sounding claims, but to be taken seriously, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds. In the majority of cases, we ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines after multiple requests to stop (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (I'm talking about established accounts. We handle brand new accounts that break the site guidelines differently.)

I wasn't even criticizing moderation, because I'm not sure what I could add there because it's your employment to manage this stupidity, but you sure showed up fast assuming I was. Is it really like that now? Nobody can speak objectively about how this site works and point out an incontrovertible fact without you taking it personally and trying to rally a bunch of usernames you've never met to believe you?

I am wary of entering this sort of meta-discussion and usually I would not, but given the slightly unusual topic today, I feel obliged to defend dang here. I have been a participant in HN and various other online forums for a long time. The moderation here, or at least its visible effects, has consistently been handled better than almost any other forum I can think of. That is due in no small part to the calm and incremental approach dang typically takes when someone in a discussion is making unconstructive comments or lowering the tone.

One of the original questions in this discussion was about what makes a healthy forum. I don't really know what "healthy" means in this context, but I have found that dedicated moderators with a soft touch are something I associate with a lot of the most useful and enjoyable forums I'm familiar with, social media or otherwise. If generally constructive commenters occasionally drift towards incivility, as many of us sometimes do if we have strong feelings on a subject being discussed, I would prefer to see a gentle push to keep the standards of discussion up, rather than see the admins wielding the ban hammer at the slightest opportunity. That said, I also appreciate the admins of a forum wielding that ban hammer if someone is persistently making comments that are unpleasant and contribute little value to the discussion. Obviously I don't know what if anything happens invisibly here, but the visible part of HN has consistently tracked closer to those two ideals than most of the other online forums I know over many years.

Note I got throttled too because I got voted down for my comment.

It's frustrating, but it is a good thing.

The core way billionaires control our discourse is through spamming the agenda with junk. If we are always talking about why billionaires shouldn't be taxed (abortion, white privilege, lame woke people, ...) we aren't talking about everything else.

Rate limiting answers that. It's OK to talk about those subjects, it just shouldn't be more than 5% of the discussion or so. If things are too heated, people should get slowed down.

I've noticed that I'm more likely to get rate limited after I flag something. That makes me feel like flags are a limited resource so I use them wisely.

We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. It's not affected by downvotes or flags.

We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do so) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.

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