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Comment by viklove | Hacker News Reader

Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. It's the American way.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it a lot lately, unfortunately, and it's not what this place is for. In fact it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Yes yes, I understand, it makes sense that y-combinator has an imperative to protect the narrative that VC and big corps are good for America. Thoughtcrime is a serious offense, I'll just delete my account, no need to ban me.

edit: Oh... seems I can't delete my account. Nice feature!

Just reading through all my flagged comments... seems like calling out any sort of inequality in America or pointing out unjustifiable valuations for companies like Bird, WeWork, Uber, etc. is "flame baiting." I was half-joking when I said "thoughtcrime," but that really does seem to be my offense.

It's now starting to make a lot more sense as to why HN is the way it is. Average people don't really think this way, but rather HN bans people who suggest VC wastes a lot of money on pointless ideas, or that there is a massive class divide in this country and that some people are very out of touch with how the average American lives...

Guess this is just the world we live in now. There's no place for free discussion, you just have to choose which echo chamber you want to live in.

Plenty of HN users post about all those issues without difficulty, and the idea that HN bans people for criticizing VCs is just silly; criticizing VCs is the house special. The issue is ideological rhetoric, internet ranting, and other forms of flamebait. We don't want that because it leads to shitty flamewar threads that are all the same and drive away the best users. On HN, the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

I know that when your comments are moderated, whether by users (through downvotes and flags) or by moderators, the temptation is to feel like you're being suppressed because of your views ("thoughtcrime" is a common term; "groupthink" is another). But if you read the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and think sincerely about the intended use of the site, you'll soon notice how your posts have been breaking that.

In terms of helping YC's business interests, our imperative is simply to try to keep HN a good place for curious conversation on the internet. That's what keeps the community happy and what keeps the best users—the users who come for intellectual curiosity, not smiting enemies. A happy, high-quality community is by far the most valuable thing about HN [1], so it wouldn't make sense for us to optimize for anything else [2]. That's one reason why we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the topic [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Is there a public log of comments and users that have been banned under this policy?

Just looking at the comments you responded to in those searches, they all seem to slant one direction -- stating that HN overmoderates anti-VC rhetoric. I can't find a single person on the other side complaining, so it seems to just prove exactly what I was saying earlier.

Can you find a single example in your moderation history where you called out an anti-Democratic Socialist comment for flamebaiting? Or where you found someone deriding wage workers and their inability to climb the economic ladder? There are plenty of these comments on HN, at least as many as the opposite, and yet I can't find one comment in your history that responds to them.

Is it possible that your political bias is affecting your moderation? Have you become the very thing you sought to destroy?

I can point you to plenty of comments complaining that the site and mods have an overwhelming political bias in direction $whatever-you-want. Not sure if that's what you're asking for.

Yeah that's exactly what I'm asking for, please point me to any comments that you have responded to (like you responded to me), where the comment was defending American capitalism or deriding Democratic Socialist concepts such as UBI, universal healthcare, etc.

Sorry for the delay. I don't keep track of the moderation comments that way but I guarantee you that there have been hundreds of such cases. Since we moderate posts that break the site guidelines, and both sides break the site guidelines a lot, we end up moderating both sides. The irony is how much they have in common. Mask one or two bits and they come out pretty interchangeable.

What I do collect are denunciations of how ideologically biased the mods and/or community are. I'm fascinated by the conviction with which people spout them, and (like I just said) how interchangeable they are with their opposites.

Here's a goodie—"Hope you’re a San Francisco liberal or your opinions are banned": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20438487

"The mods here are radical liberals": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682

"Dang is an SJW cunt": https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BetterThanSlave

A bit less eloquent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471335

"Nah, HN isn't biased to the left at all, dang": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21325122

"Socalist-leaning mods": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533

..."publishing left-wing propaganda": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19912334

...for our "far-left social justice agenda": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20742578

There are a lot of these. A few more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21803541

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256458

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588105

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21907232

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15752730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189135

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15585780

All: if you're finding yourself agreeing with these comments, please don't miss the point: there's another passionate litany of complaints in the opposite direction. Elsewhere I have posted opposite lists of links.

What's actually going on here is cognitive bias: people place tremendous weight on the cases they run across and dislike, and skip over the cases that go the other way (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Since HN gets millions of comments a year, and thousands of posts by mods, both sides have lots of material to select from.

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