The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]
It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430
But I think you've read into what I'm saying too much in order to defend yourself and the terrible job you do moderating this website; my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences. Speech does have consequences, even if it's polite. But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate than be seen as taking a side, so here we are. That's the charitable interpretation, anyways.
> my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences.
That sounds fine in principle, but in practice it just shifts the language from 'what is the correct ideology' to 'what speech has negative consequences'. Since you can easily predict the latter from the former—that is, if you know what a person says about the first, it's easy to predict what they will say about the second—I don't see much difference there.
> But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate
Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
One can be on board with the critique of naive neutrality which you refer to in your first sentence (and which, btw, is so often repeated that, if we're going to call things trite, we should include that one), without agreeing that a community like this must be run by mods who publicly consign themselves to a single ideological box and moderate based on the definitions it dictates. That may be what committed ideologues would like, but the majority of the community would not. It's also incompatible with the intellectual curiosity that the site is trying to organize around, so we don't have the option anyhow, if we want HN to exist for its intended purpose.
> Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
This sounds to me like a slippery slope argument (or perhaps an argument for a strong form of moral relativism): because someone, somewhere might disagree that something is misinformation, it's actually impossible (or maybe just undesirable) to definitively say something is or isn't that. There are certainly gray areas and practical limits (I'd be totally incapable of judging whether any article on chemistry contains disinformation, for example). That's not a reason not to try.
Optimizing the site for "intellectual curiosity", narrowly defined as a _free marketplace of ideas_, is itself a strong ideological commitment. Intellectual curiosity is absolutely good, but restricting misinformation and hate significantly improves the signal to noise ratio of that discussion. I understand the fear that fringe points of view with merit might be drowned out, since historically some things we now broadly regard as true were fringe positions.
But at the same time the quality of discussion here is through the floor when certain topics come up because large volumes of people who know nothing on the subject are simply regurgitating culture war nonsense and abusing the voting system to prevent actual knowledge on the subject from spreading. This site ends up just being another avenue for bad-faith argumentation and outright lies to drown out the truth. This is especially obvious when discussions on some minorities happen: because the people spreading outright lies or repeating culture war talking points are numerous, loud, and _polite_, actual discussion is utterly impossible. The moderation policy serves to provide a shield to bad-faith actors (for example, through "just asking questions"[1]) while silencing those who are actually intellectually curious through inaction.
For a concrete example, some of the most curious and intelligent people I know happen to be transgender. The subject of transgender people is one of the worst topics on this site right now because that group is the scapegoat du jour for the far right. When those people try to argue against commonplace lies and share actual information, they're shut down through the voting system and are outnumbered. They're subject to being called all sorts of horrible, false things... politely and indirectly. As such, they've left. The quality of discussion everywhere goes down, anyone _actually_ curious about the subject only has the loudest but wrong opinions available, and my friends end up feeling isolated and hated. Who benefits from that? Not those of us interested in good discussion. Only the people spreading misinformation for their own political purposes and people who have more emotionally invested in the idea of a free marketplace of ideas than in the truth.
Anyways, I realize your opinion on the matter is unchangeable. I just wish that the site were more honest about its own strong ideological commitments.
One thing is, I personally wouldn't put the HN concept of "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" anywhere near the phrase "free marketplace of ideas". The word "marketplace" has many associations, some of which are inimical to what we want here. Ditto for "free". Neither word belongs to, let's call it, the domain language of HN moderation (and I could even say bad things about "ideas").
For me, "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" has to do with (1) learning from each other (which implies community, and a marketplace is not a community); and above all, (2) avoiding tedious repetition. The problem with political and ideological battle (on HN) is that it falls on the undesirable side of both lines: its endless hammering of talking points is repetitive; and its pitch of high indignation is destructive to openness and curiosity. If this is a 2x2 matrix, that's the bad/bad quadrant—and note that it's the bad/bad quadrant regardless of which ideology generates the content.
Another thing is, this community has lots of transgender members, they're as welcome as anyone, and some who I know of make some of the best contributions to the site. We don't tolerate slurs or abuse, and warn and/or ban accounts that post those. The community also does a good job of flagging them. Some stick around for a while, but people are welcome to (and do) email hn@ycombinator.com when they see them, and we always follow up. The topic, of course, is fraught on HN, just as in society at large, and people inevitably have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a slur or an abuse as opposed to, say, a wrong opinion. But I don't believe the site is as bad as you say it is on this front. If it is, then there are a lot of posts going unflagged and unmoderated that I'm unaware of.
Last thing is, what does 'misinformation' mean if not 'falsehood'? But then you're asking mods to decide what's true vs. what's false and impose those decisions—which strikes me as absurd. How on earth would we do that? We don't have a truth meter [1, 2]. We have our views about what's true vs. false like anyone does, but I'm not so hubristic as to imagine that my views are the correct ones and wield power with them. That is the worst quality I can imagine in a moderator, and the thing the community would most reject. (I'm also not so hubristic as to imagine that I don't do that, unintentionally—at most I can say that I've spent 10 years trying to get better at not doing it, and practice has an effect.)
Eager ideologues of every flavour say "you don't have a misinformation meter? no problem - use mine!" But the power to decide and enforce what counts as misinformation is literally the power to decide what's true and thereby control the site. Now I'm repeating what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418981 and we're in a cycle.
Moderation, at least as I understand it on HN, simply can't work on such principles (deciding contentious questions by decree). It needs principles on a different level that can foster the kind of community and discussion that has a chance of remaining curious, and then maybe the community can do the job of figuring out what's true vs. false together.
That doesn't mean I'm reducing this to relativism and I suspect if we were to look at a list of borderline posts together, we'd end up agreeing about many. Maybe most. I don't want culture war talking points, for example, or just-asking-questions baiting, any more than you do. But I want grounds for saying "we don't want that here" other than "you are wrong according to my ideology"—and indeed, I don't want culture war talking points or just-asking-questions baiting in any direction. It's not as if it's ok for curiosity one way and then not ok if you flip an ideological bit.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787789
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(1) there's no such thing as "clear bad-faith" - to decide that would require knowing someone else's inner state. We don't have access to that about each other, and people are far too quick to draw conclusions about it—thousands of times too quick;
(2) usually the person who seems to be in bad faith just has a different working set of information and a very different background than you; they may be wrong of course, but that's not a crime or sin. We're all wrong anyhow.
(3) the only response to "disinformation" that works (or has a hope of working) is to answer false claims with true ones and bad arguments with better arguments.
I can also tell you that HN hasn't much changed since the election. Or if it has, I haven't noticed, or seen data suggesting it. People have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
I think it is generally agreed upon that the volume of shared misinformation and individuals believing misinformation has been dramatically increasing over the last decade as preferences in media has shifted.
It would be interesting if the population of HN wasn't following this trend.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I just mean that whatever macro trends we're subject to, they're longer-term than discrete events like an election.
My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.
I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.
Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.
All a reader has to do is observe your behavior, and it's clear what kind of person you are. You make it obvious by your retelling of your personal judgement of my commentaries here. I didn't realize you were St. Peter, Dan.
So Dan, if you don't want people to think you're an asshole, don't be an asshole. But don't tell me Hacker News janitorial moderation isn't based on tone when the guidelines themselves dictate it.
You're bullshitting every reader here and you're showing every user that you're comfortable opening up your admin tools and regurgitating pinned comments without context to stick it to me, and any other reader who dares question your methodology.
Oh and by the way, thank you for privately downweighting my account and numerous other people's here when I had previously consistently been a top comment in a number of threads. When it was inconvenient for you and a comment had well over a hundred upvotes, it's so nice that you can hide behind moderation tools and just send that comment straight to the bottom of a thread.
Don't lie. I have what, hundreds? Thousands? Of comments here? You thought a single percent? A tenth of a percent? Were distasteful? I've been here for probably 15 years and yeah, you pick on people personally.
It's supportable, but unlike what moderation tools you have, Hacker News' codebase doesn't allow me to pin your comments unless I want them to end up in my general pool. And unlike you, I'm not paid a salary to pour over people's comments online.
Don't do this. You do this bad faith stuff all the time and have for years. Don't lie to me and everyone else by saying sorry and then acting like an asshole the next few sentences. Oh whoops. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. Then reading off everything you can.
Really? You think people are that stupid?
The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.
Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.
This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.