Comment by bobleeswagger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobleeswagger | Hacker News Reader

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Allow me to start by quoting your profile:

"Conflict is essential to human life"

Do you ever ask yourself if the folks who report my comments just have a hard time with freedom of expression?

Do you ever reach out to the ones that report everything that isn't a mainstream opinion? I know they exist. It's the bread and butter of the culture here.

Look, I get it. YCombinator isn't a constitutionalist organization, or whatever. You are based in America, though. I hope you reflect on that. Often.

Let's get to the meat:

If you want to censor people (or your boss wants you to), you should just do it. Bullying folks into censoring themselves is no bueno, and I am more than happy to call this out as exactly that. It's hilariously ironic because I'm the kind of person who could absolutely help this community, but you are certain I need to be pushed out whenever we meet. How fun to push up that hill. Still, I try.

If sharing my thoughts, freely, on topic is "breaking the rules," feel free to call out the specific rule I am breaking. This "PlEaSe ReAd OuR GuIdElInEs" crap is pretty despicable and my time is worth a lot more than that. Your time is worth a lot more than that.

If you can't be specific: Please, don't bother. I haven't broken any site guidelines with this comment, or the last one.

It's a two way street. I'd be grateful if you started taking my perspective into account, but I guess that is a lot to ask, even though you have had so many opportunities.

I already referenced which rules you're breaking, though perhaps I didn't do so clearly enough. Here's the list in a more explicit form: you're breaking the rule against flamebait ("Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."), the rule against fulmination ("Please don't fulminate."), the rule against snark ("Don't be snarky."), and probably others (such as the rules against name-calling and ideological battle) as well.

If you want to make a case for yourself as a principled poster of dissident views, you need a better foundation to stand on than the GP comment and the other ones I linked to, which are just typical flamebait of the sort we're trying to avoid here. If you keep posting like that, we're going to have to ban you, not because we/I have anything against you or your views in the slightest, just because we're trying to have an internet forum that doesn't burn itself to a crisp. Scorched earth is uninteresting.

For the record, you don't reference any rules when you do your little schtick. It has clearly happened more than once for me, but I've seen it done to plenty of others. Don't present yourself as doing something that you clearly must be asked for. How ridangculous. My point is that I'm not re-reading guidelines if you cannot give me the courtesy of explaining exactly what parts of my comment broke what rules. Vagueness doesn't help your job in any way. At least you have me here to set a good example.

> I already referenced which rules you're breaking, though perhaps I didn't do so clearly enough. You're breaking the rule against flamebait ("Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."), the rule against fulmination ("Please don't fulminate."), the rule against snark ("Don't be snarky."), and probably others (such as the rule against name-calling) as well.

I believe those are all strict matters of subjectivity, I was not flame-baiting, fulminating, or being snarky. I also didn't directly call anyone names. I said the statement. Do you know something I don't about my thoughts on the matter...? Where's the name calling?

> If you want to make a case for yourself as a principled poster of dissident views, you need a better foundation to stand on than the GP comment and the other ones I linked to, which are just typical flamebait of the sort we're trying to avoid here.

If you want to be taken seriously as a moderator of this site, I'd start by realizing what a bad job you do when it comes to matters like this. Another opportunity to improve the site drastically, vanquished by you. I know my value, I'm happy to wait for someone like you to realize how much you're missing it.

Next time I'll just make a comment that backs up the ever-present echo chamber, instead of sharing how I really feel about the issue. We all know it's what you're asking for.

It's part of the social contract here that commenters are expected to be familiar with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make a good faith effort to stick to those rules. It's neither long nor hard to read. I don't think it's discourteous or too much to ask people to read it if they're going to post here, and it's so rare that anyone objects to the request that I have to assume the community agrees with me about that.

It's hard for me to understand why you're responding so combatively because, from my perspective, this is entirely routine, bog standard moderation. It's nothing personal! You're as welcome here as anyone else, as long as you stick to the rules. There's no reason at all why you can't make your substantive points within the guidelines, and no one's asking you to change your views.

Yes, there's some interpretation involved–that's inevitable with moderation—but I'm not interpreting the rules in any extreme way, nor any differently than I would with any other user, nor with any perverse agenda in mind. As I said, we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't destroy itself. Flamebait leads to flamewar; flamewar, if unchecked, leads to conflagration, which leads to scorched earth and internet heat death. We've been consciously trying to stave off that outcome for over 15 years now (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html).

Thanks for ignoring most of my critique about the site and how you moderate it!

I've tried to respond to everything you said that I actually understood. Some of your critique (e.g. the "what a bad job you do" paragraph) is too unspecific to be answerable. If you want to clarify one or two specific points that you feel I didn't reply to, I'd be happy to take another crack at it.

"Conflict is essential to human life"

You added that after I'd already posted my reply to that comment. I understand about editing comments - I do it all the time as well - but I don't think 'ignoring' is the right word for someone missing an after-the-fact addition.

Conflict is essential to human life, yes, but that doesn't mean everything that people do in conflicts is ok. Quite the contrary. Milner's point is that we need to figure out how to stay with and endure conflictual differences without resorting to the things that make conflict worse. In internet forum terms, that means not resorting to snark, flamebait, swipes, and the other things that the HN guidelines ask commenters not to do. Allowing the tension of differences without lashing out is, I think, the heart of tolerance, and is what gives a chance of finding solutions other than endless battle. Milner's point about that seems to me profound, original, and directly relevant to HN—that's why I put it in my About box.

I don't think that the people who flagged your GP comment did so because they have a problem with freedom of expression. I know the users who flagged it. I think they were simply, and rightly, reacting to the flamebait in the comment. It shouldn't be hard to understand why posts like "Y'all have no idea how fucked the US is and you're all cheering like it's not happening" get flagged here.

Btw, I did respond to this part of your argument already, when I said "If you want to make a case for yourself as a principled poster of dissident views, you need a better foundation to stand on than the GP comment and the other ones I linked to, which are just typical flamebait of the sort we're trying to avoid."

Have I answered your critique now? I'm not asking if you agree with my answer—I'm sure that is too much to hope for—but I'm curious to know if you at least feel like you got a response.

> I don't think that the people who flagged your GP comment did so because they have a problem with freedom of expression. I know the users who flagged it. I think they were simply, and rightly, reacting to the flamebait in the comment.

Gee, it's almost like instead of responding to me and challenging their own beliefs (or, ignoring it), they are flaming me through the reporting and moderation bots here at HN. Almost.

Is that really so hard for you to see...? How are those guidelines working out for you on that front?

I know you know the users who report comments. You give a lot of favoritism to subjective interpretation leading to a report from the established echo chamber, but you give little focus to the comments themselves when a commenter is happy to elaborate. It really couldn't be more backwards.

> It shouldn't be hard to understand why posts like "Y'all have no idea how fucked the US is and you're all cheering like it's not happening" get flagged here.

It shouldn't be hard to understand that there is no better way for me to call out an echo chamber that I see succinctly, relating to a topic I understand quite well from a few angles.

But hey, if it gets reported it must be breaking the rules, right?

You're a disgrace, my guy. Guess you can try again the next time you find one of my comments too spicy. I'm not a terrorist, stop treating me like one. I'm adding much needed perspective to a site filled with bots. Your subjective interpretation is always wholly inaccurate.

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