Hacker News Reader

Comment by srid | Hacker News Reader

> srid's attempted brigading

Nowhere in the ban log you mentioned "attempted brigading"; rather what you mentioned, as reasons for the ban, was "lots of off-topic stories" & "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project".

https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906

Neither of which is true, of course, nor can they be proven.

To let the readers judge for themselves, here are my lobste.rs submissions & comments:

https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories

https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads

And here's the submission that got me banned (after a NixOS moderator, Hexa, commented on it so as to derail the submission):

https://archive.is/Z2BU3

https://archive.is/75A7j

View on HN

Readers can’t judge for themselves because 23 of your comments and 21 of your stories were removed, mostly for abuse. (For context, less than 0.5% of commenters or submitters ever have a single removal.) You received several warnings about picking fights and you’re understandably focused on your fight with Nix but it only happened to be the last one you tried to start on Lobsters. There’s a pattern in your actions that’s why you keep getting rejected by technical communities, and it’s going to keep happening as long as you imagine a conspiracy or political motivation instead of looking at the pattern and taking responsibility for your behavior.

> Readers can’t judge for themselves [..]

Ah, but they can.

> [your fight with Nix] only happened to be the last one you tried to start on Lobsters.

For example, readers can easily verify that this statement is lie by going to that last submission and see that there was no fight (except Hexa himself fighting into the void):

https://archive.is/Z2BU3

https://archive.is/75A7j

So, once again, where is the evidence for your accusations?

(Incidentally, where you say "23 of your comments and 21 of your stories" -- a figure I can't confirm -- I'm sure none of those happened in the last few months or are related to Nix in anyway, as my involvement have exclusively been technical, ergo they are nothing to do with "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project", and if they were about "lots of off-topic stories" then I would have been banned long time ago.)

This is part of that pattern. Best wishes for your future endeavors.

>mostly for abuse

The comments are deleted so nobody can verify that it was "abuse". You're basically saying "source: trust me bro".

Back in the day, forums used to put a big fat USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST sticker on bad posts, but keep it around for posterity so people could see for themselves what the fuss was about. I don't like the secrecy of how moderation is done nowadays.

A explanation is visible to users on each comment and story, mod actions show up in a public log, and the site's source is available for any remaining questions on how things happened. There are users who store everything as it comes in via RSS or mailing list mode and call out mod mistakes as they see them. More broadly, modern moderation systems have evolved in response to the failures of the systems you describe. It's not about secrecy or power, it's about how leaving up abuse had a lot of bad effects that contributed significantly to the decline of platforms like Usenet.

>A explanation is visible to users on each comment and story, mod actions show up in a public log, and the site's source is available for any remaining questions on how things happened. There are users who store everything as it comes in via RSS or mailing list mode and call out mod mistakes as they see them.

None of that means anything if I can't see for myself what the purported infraction was. The most important piece of the puzzle is missing! "It's in the RSS feed" -- oh that's so helpful, I'll be sure to look for that in the locked filing cabinet in the disused lavatory, the one with the sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".

It's a hallmark of a free and democratic society that criminal and civil proceedings are generally public, when someone is punished, we can easily look up what they were punished for. Obviously software forum arguments aren't as important or dramatic as legal disputes, but we imitate in the small what we admire in the large. It is disturbing to me that one side of this culture war calls itself "democratic", but acts like a Star Chamber.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com