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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

The online shaming culture at tumblr, twitter and reddit was what convinced me that you need to stay pseudonymous on the internet at all cost.

There are so many people that participate in this and haven't realized yet that they are being an asshole to random strangers.

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Don’t try and pretend HN takes the moral high ground. This is something - regardless of how big of a problem you think it is - that permeates.

Once a month there will be a link to some GitHub or issue where everyone will pile on about some stupid issue.

Then flag it, too. HN shouldn't be the torch & pitchfork store.

Ad hominem is at least nominally against the rules here. Most egregious instances will get flagged and deleted. It’s not perfect but there is some effective immune response moving things back in the right direction.

IMO, the issues are much milder on HN than I have seen elsewhere.

HN is human-moderated, by both members and staff moderators. There is ... limited ... automatic moderation. Which means that some things do slip through the cracks.

(There are multiple mods, though dang is the public face.)

If you see something, say something: by flagging every-day dreck, or by emailing mods in the case of something exceptionally bad.

I do both. Flagging is a daily thing, email for abuse / transgressions maybe a few times a quarter.

Edit: Clarified first 'graph.

Online I always try to talk about people as if the person I'm talking about would read it. It's always easy to be harsh when no one's watching, but the thing is that online you never know if they are. This doesn't mean I don't criticize posts or people, I just do it as if that person would read it.

I started doing this after some of my weblog posts (mostly about programming) ended up on Reddit and HN, and I read some of the comments on that. Some actual quotes (mostly from Reddit's /r/programming): “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “you must have an IQ lower than 65”, “fucking suck at making software (and I guess generally anything)”, “you’re like the anti-vaxxer of front-end development”, “this is hate speech” (context was about a technical topic they disagreed with, no politics at all involved).

And there's more ways to be unfriendly than using "bad words" like "idiot", such as not actually reading the post before commenting (frustratingly common), being excessively pedantic, very aggressive but without actually using insults, etc. I remember one guy who for some reason really had it in for me and did a line-by-line "rebuttal" on several posts, picking on the tiniest thing, resulting in some comments that were longer than the article article than he was responding to, but usually never really addressing the core point. Odd person shrug.

HN has been a bit better overall, though not perfect either.

reddit is pretty bad now, I didn't realize when I was there regularly but after a break it's really shocking.

I went there last night to read any first person accounts of the streamer riot yesterday in New York's Union Square. Instead there was a lot of racism and hate.

It really depends on the sub. "Reddit" isn't really one big forum, but more like a hosting platform for lots of mostly independent forums. Some are moderated quite reasonably, some are moderated very strictly, and some barely at all.

As a rough rule of thumb, the larger the sub, the worse it is. This holds true for communities in general in my experience – humanity doesn't really scale well to large groups.

It's permeating into HN too, since so many people starting abandoning reddit. I've noticed a distinct shift during the last few months, that very distinctly started in mid June. It's gradually becoming a less positive place, and "antiwoke" posts in particular are becoming commonplace where they used to be unheard of.

Yeah agreed. It's pretty depressing, to be honest. So many people who are really nasty and hateful.

In the late 1980s, I got online. I refused to use my real name anywhere. I said, "Someone could run this Usenet group off to tape, restore it some time later, index it, and somehow make that available." I was derided as a paranoid fool. And yet here we are. One of my "handles" is still visible in a help file from 1993.

I was asked to provide a quote for a silly fluff lifestyle piece my friend was writing for the college's newspaper. 20 years later, that piece is number 5 when searching my fairly unique name (I've done as much as possible to scrub myself from the public internet).

I wonder if there's a service that could be created here, using AI to create sterile/whitewashed ghost accounts, and flood them all over social media, etc., for people so that the real, human identity is pushed down on the search results.

For sure against TOS, but I'm not sure that I personally care.

It's a common PR SEO service, no AI.

100% this.

Learned in the 90s early internet about the emotional harm that I’ve seen happen to people.

Slightly different topic. I think state and federal laws need to be passed regarding medical, police, evidence, and other types of private videos and photos from being leaked online. Too much of it magically leaks out and it’s just the people that are trusted with the data that are posting it online.

For sure. There was a show called “LivePD” that took live video as someone was arrested by the police.

I watched for years.

Now it feels so gross…if someone is having the potentially-worst moment of their life, society should offer them the decency of not putting it on live TV.

Didn’t those people all sign releases?

Maybe, and kinda.

From a NYT opinion piece[0] a few years ago:

> But “Cops” cameras, of course, are not news cameras, so unlike a traditional news crew, the shows’ producers have to obtain the written legal consent of every suspect whose face appears on camera. The producers of “Cops” claim they do. We found a different reality. Tracking down the people who have been filmed by “Cops” is not easy. But of the 11 suspects we interviewed, all but one said they either did not give their legal consent to appear on the show, were too inebriated to consent knowingly or were coerced into signing — with the police and producers, troublingly, working together to get those signatures.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/cops-podcast-inve...

This is why I still wear a mask outside. If I'm filmed, at least I'll be harder to recognize.

one of the COVID silver linigs

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