Changes to our content policy, our board, and where we’re going from here

Unbelievable indeed. When is HN going to come out with their anti hate policy?

The replies in here are coming from all over the world. People assume that HN comments are representative of SV and come to extremely distorted conclusions, because that's quite false. In fact only about 10% of the HN community is in SV and the majority of those are not posting to HN in the middle of the night.

I want to write more about this misconception, because it's common, poorly understood, and unfortunately damaging.

Readers frequently misinterpret other comments because they have no idea of how frequently national lines are being crossed on HN. They misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different country or region for an extreme comment coming from some other place—usually their own, because that's what we naturally calibrate to in the absence of differentiating data—or else they assume everyone is in SV, which is an illusion as I described above.

This is particularly significant in flamewars about race, like this one. Many HN comments that count as racist, or point that way, in a mainstream American context are being posted by users from countries that don't have the US's fraught history with race. These users are looking at race issues in the US from the distant outside, and often they have poor intuition for the depth and complexity of the issues, the intensity of the feeling around them, and the conventions by which Americans debate them.

Because these comments get widely assumed to all be coming from American commenters (which, to be sure, some are, but many are not—certainly the majority in this thread were not), suddenly the population sample appears highly skewed, and much more extreme, to readers who are familiar with the US.

Some people will say 'racist comments are racist, period', but I bet that they, along with everyone else, make many fine-grained adjustments of interpretation when they have information about someone coming from a different background. For example, they would be more likely to perceive a comment as ignorant, and respond by educating the other person, if they think of them as foreign—and more likely to perceive them as an enemy if they come from nearby, even if the comment is otherwise identical.

It's likely that many of these adjustments aren't even conscious. Humans are deeply conditioned to react to nuances in social cues, and foreignness is one of the biggest categories of social cues. Unless we're arguing about specifically national disputes (which is a different sort of flamewar) we make extra allowances in such cases. Unfortunately, most of this nuance is lost in the stream of HN comments, and it puts extra strain on divisive discussions. The social machine runs without the lubricant it typically relies on, leading to excess friction, heat, and damage. This lack of lubricant gets experienced as a defect in the machine—which it is, in a sense, but it gets misinterpreted.

    > I despise this kind of actions taken 
    > based on the colour of the skin

E.g. I was on the main gifs subreddit the other day when a gif of a wall being erected around the Whitehouse was shown. The amount of vitriol, hatred and borderline violent/violence-encouraging comments I saw that was at the top and mostly directed at conservatives/Donald Trump was just too much. It was truly hateful, but because it was directed at the right groups/people, it went unpunished and mostly upvoted.

Here's hoping that all hate and violent stuff like that gets removed from reddit, instead of just having it aimed at "the right", because that's their goal here really. Maybe we can then have an honest conversation about left/right politics.

    > it is undoubtedly an echo chamber, almost unparalleled 
    > at this point.

Can you elaborate on the connection between this announcement and the platform's value as a platform that fosters discussion you perceive? Do you mean content moderation has turned the site into an echo chamber?

> For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation.

The NYT didn't apologize for publishing an Op-Ed from a Senator. It apologized for doing it's job badly and publishing materially false statements as fact.

It's worth noting that Senator Cotton went on to publicly call for the extra judicial killing of protestors. Which, if we're really so concerned about legitimate opinions, I would suggest murdering protestors would have more of a chilling effect than choosing not to publish their op-eds.