Comment by zedshaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zedshaw | Hacker News Reader

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> Meanness is moral mediocrity.

Shiiit Paul, hacker news has been screwed up since the beginning. Remember this video?

http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

That video would show up on the front page about once a year, and is by one of your most popular members and commenters. The video is full of slander and straight up factual errors and even gets almost all of cryptography and network protocols wrong. It's probably one of the worst videos on security out there, yet, what did HN do?

Eat. It. Up. Nobody flagged that video, told tptacek it was bullshit, or bothered saying one damn thing about it other than cheering it on and laughing. You definitely didn't boot him off the site, and in fact gave him a top spot in your system. This is not how you tell people you don't like 'meanness'.

Over the years here and before I started commenting people called me a cocksucker, cock, asshole, douchebag, and every mean ass thing you can imagine. They do it to other people too, and I sure as hell don't see anyone getting flagged or kicked off. If you pick someone unpopular to insult you're totally allowed to be a dick here.

Paul, HN is in decline because you don't actually enforce your own rules. If you don't want people to be "mean" or talk like idiots then don't let mean and idiotic crap on the front page. Half the time, when one of my many clever ruthless jokes shows up on the front page I giggle. My jokes demonstrate what you've been allowing for years but only seem to care about now that it's insulting your own ethos of the "uber hacker scientist ruling the world":

You guys love cruelty and insult, I'm proof.

In fairness you probably attract more of that sort of thing than 99% of people. I mean, if you're going to act so aggressively alpha, you're going to get attacked often. So your view might be a bit skewed here.

I've been doing Ruby for a long time, and back when the mailing list's signal to noise ratio was better, I used to read it daily, so I've been reading Zed's flames for a while. ("The Chainsaw Logger Infanticide Maneuver" was a pretty great one; I still show it and the resulting thread to people.)

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that Zed's fully aware of this effect, and is doing what he does intentionally. He has informative content, but also knows how to push precisely the right buttons. It's often entertaining, but the abasive style is also a brilliant and effective form of self-promotion. (Think Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh.) He knows precisely what buttons to push to get a reaction, and (as far as I can tell) enjoys himself immensely. It's great to watch if you like to see flames written to people that take themselves too seriously.

So I don't think you're telling him anything new here. If you sit down at a table and don't know who the sucker is...

> Remember this video? http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

I know it's off topic here, but could you either elaborate on this or point us to more detailed rebuttal?

Thomas made remarks about Zed Shaw probably causing companies to fail and not hiring him. At least, if it is the same video I am thinking about.

In other words, HN needs a few simple laws and some light moderation. e.g.

- no personal attacks

- no "x is an asshole because" inflammatory comments

- ostensibly duplicate content should be deduped

- no flame bait?

I agree that people making personal attacks should be punished. Perhaps a reset of karma and a limited time ban? Obviously there isn't going to be a silver bullet, but I agree with Zed here about enforcement.

How about "no curse words"? Swears almost never improve writing.

Easy to monitor as well.

No, please not. Treat us like adults not children. Censoring words doesn't change a thing, people will just offend with other words.

People are very creative in being mean to each other if they really want. Also it's not specific words that hurt but the context in which they are used.

wlad, good point. I guess the "say it to my face" rule already covers what I was after.

I don't think it is as easy as you think it is. Consider for example the Scunthorpe Problem [1].

Also consider that people on this site are hackers and so naturally we can all speek Leet [2] ;-) In these days of unicode it's extremely difficult to prevent people posting words that look like swear words, but which on inspection are just unusual characters.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

arctangent, I was suggesting a lazy filter to set the tone. If you have to open the character map to put the 𝛍 in f__k that gives you time to consider whether it's worth violating the spirit of the forum.

I shortened my comment above but my full suggestion is to apply time-delayed negative karma to posts with Carlin swears rather than ban them. Who is going to spend 45 seconds finding the 𝛍 to avoid −2 karma?

My first point still stands, though. You can't apply a naive filter because people will end up getting penalised for using words like "scrape", "interstitial", "swanky", "spool", etc. ad infinitum.

Word boundary character.

You're very persistent but I'm afraid you're still wrong :-)

Firstly, I gave unicode as a simple example of the lengths that people could go to in order to swear. But it's actually even easier than that in practice. I you want to ban the word X then I can replace it with a slight misspelling which carries the same intent - and when you ban that a naughty user will just pick another one.

(Bad words aren't the problem we should address, it's the intention behind words which is the real problem.)

Secondly, the Scunthorpe problem is more severe than you realise and can't be solved by considering only whole words. For example, some words have more than one meaning: "tit", "gay", "sod", "knob", "cock", "prick", etc. Some or all of those words would be filtered out by a naive filter.

There's also the additional problem that people may not necessarily agree on whether a word is a swear word or not (even if it does not have multiple meanings like the examples I listed below).

For example, in 1977 the Sex Pistols won a court case about the title of their album "Never Mind the Bollocks" in which it was ruled that "bollocks" is not obscene in the UK (but may of course still be considered obscene in other countries!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Obscenity_court_ruling

And finally, some words mean different things in different coutries. For example, the word "fanny" means one thing in the US and quite another in the UK.

Naive filtering of swear words is never going to work.

never going to work

As I outlined above it's just about the incentive and setting the tone. If you have to write "siht" you'll think twice about whether it needs to be said.

I might do well to add that I am not suggesting this for prudish reasons. I took a creative writing class in college and the teacher banned curses and drugs. Intro to Creative Writing students otherwise substitute force for substance.

Monitor? Aren't people complaining about China's monitoring and stuff like that?

Well played, epic Rails guy.

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