Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I feel like places like tigsource have better civility and high signal to noise ratios.

There are a lot of forums that are good cuz they just ban annoying people (and that self selects a lot too). When you try to do mental gymnastics to justify removing people from a community suddenly a certain kind of person can show up and ruin it for everyone. (EDIT: that can be a valid choice for a community! Just has consequences)

But HN feels pretty unique in the quality despite being filled with a looooot of people who are, honestly, pretty agressive! The mod team seems to do a pretty good job.

View on HN

A lot of my early experiences on the web involved being banned from places (forums) until I learned to be civil or at least contribute something interesting.

The bans weren’t designed to be an excommunication but an inconvenience. I’d sign up again with another username which they knew was me, and I could stay until I acted like an idiot again and they banned me, etc.

Yeah, people complain about censorship and bans on social media now, but honestly I don't see it. Seems like you can pretty much spit out nothing but hatred and personal attacks on Twitter or Reddit for years and nothing will happen.

The problem at least for Reddit is consistency and quality of moderation. Moderators will play favorites, and they'll spitefully punish people they don't like. There's no rules on Reddit - paid moderation is the fundamental difference with HN.

Twitter completely banned The Babylon Bee for this [1] article/joke. This is among countless other similar decisions on their part. In this case Elon Musk even contacted them (The Babylon Bee) before starting his current crusade, because the ban there is so overtly political.

As Noam Chomsky said, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

The reason I give that quote is because you're not wrong. In other topics you can express all of the absolutely vile and hateful things one might like, all while acting like an absolutely horrible person. So just stop making fun of the political ideology largely espoused by the political establishment and corporate elite, and you'll have no problems. It will be quite interesting to see how history ultimately records the times of today.

[1] - https://babylonbee.com/news/the-babylon-bees-man-of-the-year...

Yes, this is a good thing. I don’t like real name policies or accounts tied to a phone number or LinkedIn account for this reason. We all benefit when the young or inexperienced get multiple chances to figure things out.

It's not just the young or inexperienced. People saying unpopular things or things that could hurt their career also need anonymity.

Very good point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com