Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dang

Religious flamewar is not ok here, so please don't take HN threads further into it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: We've had to ask you this kind of thing many times before - here's a small sample:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916978 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687837 (Dec 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578435 (June 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578417 (June 2020)

Edit 2: It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological (and religious) battle. We ban accounts that do this. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended. That means for curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest.

View on HN

It’s not a flamewar: I can easily provide sources that support all my claims, and I’m following your advice about “two comments at most, three is too much”. It also doesn’t have much to do with religion as such, as even Catholic Church is officially against the “intelligent design” idea.

Now, what the above is, it is pointing out an organized disinformation campaign, which uses religious beliefs for its purposes. I’m pretty sure that fighting propaganda used to be part of the hacker ethos. And we’re not going to solve this problem by pretending this particular propaganda somehow deserves anyone’s respect or that it is any different from others. Would you be opposed to comments against antivax theories? If not - can you explain where do you see the difference?

Also, I can’t help but notice that while comments that are openly racist are widely tolerated here, pointing it out is an “ideological battle” - as evidenced by your own examples above. Don’t you find it a bit… curious? I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person frustrated with it.

Flamewar has nothing to do with providing sources. Nor does it have to do with being right or not. It's easy to be both right and replete with sources and still be doing name-calling, snark, aggression, or other things that the HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid.

It has to do with inflaming discussion to the point where people angrily hurl talking points and attacks at each other. That's far removed from the curious conversation, respectful across differences, that we want here.

This is not a difficult concept for anyone familiar with internet threads. Moreover, the ways that you've been breaking the site guidelines are not borderline cases. Please just fix this.

Pointing fingers at the bad behavior of others doesn't seem relevant to this point. You've been breaking HN's rules badly for a long time now. If you first fix this, and then have something to say about other people's bad behavior, or about moderation failures, I'd be happy to address it.

By the way, you've also posted lots of good comments that are perfectly within the site guidelines. I appreciate that, and I definitely don't want to ban you. Unfortunately, bad comments do more damage than good comments add value; plus they add to existential risk (since the default fate of most internet forums is self-destruction, sooner or later). So we need to do something about the bad comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>If you first fix this, and then have something to say about other people's bad behavior, or about moderation failures, I'd be happy to address it.

After I fix it, what should I do next time I encounter a racist comment? Should I just pretend it’s not there?

And no, I don’t believe the natural fate of forums is self-destruction. We have plenty of examples showing otherwise, from Usenet to 4chan to the entire scientific publication system. The fate of every _commercial_ forum is self-destruction, because it self-regulates into something that doesn’t quite align with the commercial owner’s best interest, because it’s different from users’ best interest - and it appears that this problem can only be toned down, but not fixed in a sustainable way. An example of this is the vast majority of current startup culture.

The site guidelines answer that question.

You're changing the subject a bit, though, because most of the abusive comments you've posted here have nothing to do with that scenario.

That’s one way to see it. Another is that those “abusive comments” aren’t abusive in any way - in fact abusive comments are widely tolerated here - but they are politically incorrect to you.

Did you warn users who posted “abusive comments” towards covid denialists or flat earthers?

It's not just in the eye of the beholder - the comments that I've scolded you about, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32279605 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32279588 in this thread, were obviously breaking the site guidelines. If you don't stop doing this, we will ban you.

If you're asking whether we moderate, scold, and ban other accounts that break the site guidelines, regardless of which views they're for or against, the answer is certainly.

That does't mean we catch every case, but that's because we don't come close to reading everything that gets posted here. There's far too much.

Re "politically incorrect to you": every politically passionate user who gets moderated here feels like the mods must secretly be conniving with the other side. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... This perception is a function of political passion. People either don't notice the cases going the other way, or discount them.

So like I said, not showing enough respect towards fringe theories is obviously breaking the guidelines. Fine, I’ll comply.

I don’t feel like you’re “with the other side” - of course your interests here are different than mine, but that’s orthogonal. What I do feel is that certain topics - like the fringe theories on religion and politics - are a taboo here. And that’s a problem, because same way you can’t understand computer architecture without at least general grasp on manufacturing, or the fashionable web technologies without understanding the startup business model, the same way you can’t understand the world without understanding the forces governing it - including the pathological cases, which appear to be a taboo here.

Don’t you think enforcing taboos goes against the hacker ethos?

That's not an accurate description of what we're doing. It's all much simpler than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com