What’s with the warning on the top?
> Asahi Linux developers are frequent targets of abuse on Hacker News. Despite our pleas, the moderators have not taken effective action to improve the situation.
> Overtly hateful content is often flagged on HN and not immediately visible. Unfortunately, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. That preserves the 'clean' image of the website, but the reduced moderation activity enables abuse to continue. Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities.
> Please demand change within your community.
Considering the amount of visitors on HN, it's possible you've never seen or met anyone matching the described behaviour (in the linked pages). But the people on the receiving end might not want to warn for the thousands of people it doesn't apply to, but rather the ones where it does.
Say it's only 10% of 1000 visitors matching the HN referrer, that's still 100 people against a handful of volunteers. If only 10 of those think it's funny to SWAT them, or send them things they didn't order, all day, every day, that's enough to warrant such a warning.
That should answer your question: "What’s with the warning on the top?"
Perhaps you expected a list of all sorts of interactions between this website and that website, but I doubt the project volunteers kept a ledger to share that with you and that in itself would incite reverse brigading which solves nothing.
As for how you haven't heard of them before, that is a bit surprising. They have been mentioned here plenty of times.
HN being user-driven means they are an amplification and legitimisation vector for anyone who figures out how to abuse it. It's not an easy problem to solve, and I don't think any organisation (commercial, or otherwise) has really found a way to deal with this.
As a human side-effect, most people will either have to have experienced it themselves, or have this as part of their job to understand the issue at all, and will either deny it or assume it's exaggerated. Even those that are on the instigating side will not have a concept of the impact until it inevitably happens to them (as is common in that ecosystem).
Maybe that's already something that people do, and the banner does nothing. Or maybe it's not something people do, and maybe some people start doing it, and then the banner does something.
HN should stop making those threads available, not because right wing, or left wing, or whatever political argument you'd like to make, but because it's a way to get search juice for lots of things for free that is also detrimental, ultimately, to HN.
You can post any garbage you like outside the view of the community, and still get it associated with the community here.
This specific case involves a specific group of people. I'd be equally annoyed if people on the other side of the spectrum used what amounts to a bug in HN to influence search ranking for a smear campaign.
HN makes flagged posts and subthreads invisible to its average users (you need to link to the subthread), but keeps them fully searchable. And does not moderate them. As a result, it's an easy way to deposit unreviewed content on a high-reputation website, leeching of that reputation.
It's got nothing to do with politics, and everything with the fact that when you allow a community to be publicly associated with content without letting the community see or moderate the content, you're damaging the community's reputation.
HN should fix the bug. That's all. Everybody involved in this particular drama is entirely entitled to say whatever the heck they want, just not under the cover of being pretend-part of this community.
It sounds quite cyclical. They dislike Marcan because they're alt-right users leeching off this community's reputation, which is obvious because they dislike Marcan.
The people on the link you sent, they, uh, have a long comment history. No one is being "pretend-part" of the community here. Or am I missing some context?
https://x.com/LunaFoxgirlVT/status/1887896920732876819
> It's the worst kept secret in history that I had to keep alive, I have no interest in keeping it alive anymore.
> I mean, Lina started as an april fools joke on Marcan's youtube channel
https://x.com/LunaFoxgirlVT/status/1887897472527458689
> So yes, Marcan is Asahi Lina, Asahi Lina is Marcan. It's not a secret, it never really was.
> Only really became one when Marcan found out he liked vtubing.
And if you don't like Twitter, Luna is also saying it on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/lunafoxgirlvt.foxgirls.gay/post/3lh...
> My abuser (asahi lina/marcan) is a Linux kernel contributor.
So if HN were to think: "gee, we don't want to delete this content, but we also see how it breaks the rules", they could opt to put some noindex flags for the robots to consume which is a very cheap way to try to do something that reflects their own rules.
It is of course possible that this is no reputation effect at all, and there is also no interest on a human level in all of this. In such a case, nothing happens.
If anything, this specific behaviour and these actors have been outlined by articles dedicated to just that, right here on this sited. Granted, other sites are often lumped in here as well, such as reddit and even stackoverflow. This is not new behaviour, it happens in all communities. The big differences between them all is to what degree they get abused and in what manner.
As for examples: I doubt people who are targeted will want to share their experience with anyone directly. Someone asking for it to stop should be enough.
What you could do is plug "Asahi Linux targeted" in to any search engine and read as much as you like. It's not like this is very new either, this mess has been going on for years now.
As usual, it's also your average internet mud-flinging contest, but at the core the issue of harassment stands, and shining a light on it regardless of the actors is always a good idea.
They are explicitly* asking us to take action--the onus is on them to explain to us why we should take action. They have not, so no action will happen. It's as simple as that. We aren't the ones asking for something to be done here.
Kiwi Farms is a terrible website that does terrible things. What does that have to do with us? Barring any explanation from them, my conclusion is that it doesn't have anything to do with us.
* "Please demand change within your community."
Also, I would never have read it if it wasn't for this thread. :-)