Comment by aozgaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aozgaa | Hacker News Reader

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Imagine the following three enforcement schemes for taking down a post due to reports:

* if your post gets reported 10 times, it gets taken down

* if your post gets reported (# of followers / 10) times, it gets taken down

* if your post gets reported (# of followers * 100) times, it gets taken down

Which of these are fair in your opinion? For an account with a huge # of followers, the last one effectively means their posts can't be taken down.

It seems a system like XCheck is a step function where at a certain point, you get exempt from certain checks altogether.

The "equality" here could refer to each account's potential to go through the vetting that would give them exempt status.

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Maybe this deserves a separate response, but another way to think of this is to compare it to income taxes. There are different income brackets that affect your marginal tax rate in the US. Is it equal for everyone to pay the same dollar amount in income taxes? The same rate? A progressive rate? Are people treated equally under the law in all these cases? In none of them?

> Which of these are fair in your opinion?

Who said anything about fair? The only one that is "equal treatment" is the one where 10 reports takes them down. It's shitty policy, but that's a different question isn't it? Number of followers playing a role is where treatment stops being equal. I'm not arguing what's the right way to handle this, I'm just contradicting rhetoric aiming to justify their policy by fallacious argument.

Edited to add: I don't think tax code is meant to or treats people equally, even though they're all subject to the same rules. The rules explicitly divide taxpayers into categories with different treatment.

I like that they've started teaching difference between "fair" and "equal" in kindergarten now in Canada. This is not meant as a slight, just a generational gap - I myself was not taught that as a kid and it took me way too long to realize that "fair treatment" and "equal treatment" can be wildly different things.

Xcheck is, by definition, at its very core, not "equal treatment". Equal treatment is easy and uncontroversial to define.

It may or may not be "fair treatment". That is always subjective and depends on goals and objectives and frameworks.

Something like Xcheck may or may not be necessary. It's interesting to read about problem it's trying to solve and discuss whether and how much it succeeds and at what price and what limitations.

What Xcheck does not get to do, however, is present / defend itself as "equal treatment",and in any meaningful discussion we should not mix and match or treat those as synonyms - that's confusing and unproductive at best, deceptive at worst.

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