X has started reversing the throttling on some of the sites, including NYTimes'

It's funny, the HN crowd has gotten all up in arms about this, which even if true is merely childish and annoying. However, when the previous management blocked the New York Post for daring to break the story on Hunter Biden's laptop, that was apparently okay.

Instead of downvoting me this time, I would appreciate some discussion of how the alleged throttling is somehow so much worse than the actual censorship of an important news story about blatant corruption and multiple criminal acts by a politician's son that abused his father's position of privilege for personal gain.

I think once a pattern of behavior is established, this should reasonably inform your interpretation of their behavior. This is the "Boy who cried wolf" lesson. So, if someone lies a bunch, and they say something, it makes sense to ignore it. If you don't keep score, you'll be pilloried.

If someone makes unethical moves (like taking peoples twitter handles or boosting alt-right memes), it makes sense to assume that unethical behavior is more likely in the future. The reason people get angry with you is that you don't maintain the same "reputation score" in your head within the brackets they find acceptable. That is, I allow for variation in perception to some degree, but if at a certain point someone says something really admiring of someone who's proven to be wholly untrustworthy or destructive over and over again, as a matter of public record, I start to judge that person as unreliable and lacking in judgement. This often comes out as anger, I think because it's a simple way to use our social emotional brain to "keep score".

(This is particularly applicable for individuals and individual actions; it's more difficult to apply this rule for groups. For example, do you have great faith in "academia"? This may or may not be acceptable to me, depending on your definition and your knowledge.)

Even discounting this incident, finding people and organizations that Elon has banned from Twitter isn't even that hard. I find it very difficult to believe that people who claim that Elon is some sort of free speech absolutist actually believe what they say.

Just think of what Steve Job would have called his next computer company…

The calculus changes for someone like Musk, who is not a troll to a large fraction of the population. In that case, it's beneficial to post something like the GGP because it signals to other people two things: first, you're not alone in disliking this person. Second, it's okay to express that opinion. That second one is important since there is a fine line between ignoring something you don't like and self-censorship out of fear of reprisal.

So, while I agree that you should ignore nobody trolls, I DO NOT think you should ignore famous, politically/economically relevant trolls. It's an act that comes with some risk, and is therefore courageous and admirable.

I agree with the notion of what you're saying, and I usually make a pretty strong point of avoiding this topic, but a counterpoint can really only be so obvious before I can no longer avoid stating it: Trump was the president. It's not really unreasonable to not "ignore" a person when they are the individual elected by the people of your nation as their representative.

That doesn't work, because they just escalate or get other people to act out on their behalf. And really, why should we construct society around the behaviors the worst people? There is some evidence for the proposition that rude responses to provocations is in fact the most effective moderations strategy.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697

Alas, they will always get rewarded for the attention-seeking behaviour. Always. Because it’s a sad fact that there are always people who are attracted to destructive attention-seekers, just as there are people attracted to mass murderers, satanic telepreachers, and promoters of poisonous ideologies. They simply don’t see these characters like you and I do. There’s money to be made by connecting these populations, from pamphlets and Speakers Corner to websites and Social Media. It’s always been a problem. But now, with a global population of billions, these trollish people are basically guaranteed to draw enough attention to have dangerous influence.

Or send them to jail. :-) It would be harder with Elon, but between securities fraud and willful safety negligence, it’s probably doable. :-)

This kind of 101-level advice is fine for dealing with random edgelord trolls with 10 followers. However, it's nigh-on impossible to simply ignore the likes of Musk and Trump when newspaper columns are full of their activity and they have such a fucking large impact on us.

Your post reads like the intro to an unhinged anti-Musk manifesto. Are you sure you're not taking life too seriously?

When you accuse someone of "vast damage", destroying society, lies, and wishing them to fail among other things, it's you who is spreading hate. You are the problem.

> "People want to live in a sane world where sane outcomes hold up."

No idea what that means, but after reading your post I'm not confident you're a reliable source on what people want, or what a sane world looks like!

Moderation is necessarily inconsistent because we don't see everything that gets posted—there's far too much to read it all. We don't even see 10%; we're lucky if we see 1%. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

That said, if you're participating here, we need you (like other users) to follow the rules regardless of what other commenters are doing. It always feels like the other person (a) started it, and (b) did worse. Since everyone feels that way, using that as a guide for one's own behavior just leads to a downward spiral.

can't even what? When you fix an issue there should still be evidence for its existence, no? Commenters of this entire thread expect everyone to read it at the exact time the issue happened?

Like what is the point of "citing" a bunch of "sources" if the "sources" are only able to provide the necessary information at one particular point in time?

You can use whataboutism to justify anything, but even your example is bad. Twitter admitted they got that wrong and Dorsey apologized: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-says...

I don’t see any apologies for any of the bad actions Twitter has taken since the purchase, and the hypocrisy of doing this while claiming to be a center of free speech is astounding.

Of course Twitter had bias before because every group of people has a bias. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong or malicious, just because you don’t like them. The real tragedy is letting your own bias blind you to what’s in front of your face.