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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

No one ordered me to take any "editorial stance" about anything. In fact no one at YC has ever ordered me to do anything. That's one reason I'm grateful for the job.

The only people "ordering" me are HN users with strong feelings. Some even say things that feel like threats.

p.s. I'm not sure why, but your comment got me thinking about the lines "everything is political" and "neutrality is not possible"—lines I mostly agree with and (believe it or not) keep in mind while moderating HN—yet which somehow push people to a place where the only thing they feel they can do is destroy each other.

It must be possible to recognize how (nearly) everything has a political valence and (nearly) nothing is neutral, while still finding some option other than banding with one tribe to destroy another. Yet that is the pressure we all seem to end up feeling. To that my answer is no—I don't believe it is the only choice, political though everything may be.

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Do you read books dan? This exact justification comes up over and over again in the descriptions and in some cases regretful memoirs of other oppresive movement collaborators from the past century. Your comment could have been written by a newspaper editor in 1978 south africa, or 1935 south carolina.

You haven't found a hidden middle ground that no one else was competent enough to navigate to or courageous enough to stand on. You are simply doing useful things for a tech fascist movement, and it's to their benefit that you keep doing them.

I do read books, yes! Of course I only look at the pictures.

> This exact justification comes up over and over again [...] in some cases regretful memoirs

I doubt that they exactly regretted not "banding with one tribe to destroy another", and I do mean exactly, since I was careful to be precise and that is your claim.

If you can find examples, I'd be interested. I might even look at a book or two!

Allowing people to have their view of the front page unaffected by flags would be trivial. But some who don't want too discuss this don't want other people to discuss it, either, they precisely don't want people to have discussions unimpeded by sophistry, in their absence.

Calling that out isn't "tribalism", and you boiling it down to that, and other generalities, as if it's people being "mad" that other people have a different flavor of ice cream, while there's by now been (at least) FIVE people doing Hitler salutes during speeches means you're not up to speed or not treating this as seriously as you probably think you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJdH63d6zM

https://cdapress.com/news/2025/feb/22/town-hall-security-det...

> The identities of the men who dragged a woman out of a legislative town hall in the Coeur d’Alene High School auditorium on Saturday remain a mystery, with event organizers claiming no knowledge of who arranged the security detail or which company was used.

^ that's how you get that. Everybody is just "doing their part", looking the other way.

That's also how you get people posting endless walls of text about the topic they insist should not be discussed on HN, or doing mental gymnastics every single time the Nazi salute is mentioned, ignoring once again what dozens of people have told them in reply to it the first of the dozens of times they did that.

> Allowing people to have their view of the front page unaffected by flags would be trivial

If we did that then HN would be a completely different place—it would become a current affairs site. That's not the mandate of this place.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist on the internet? Your argument implies that it does not. I think it does. HN isn't trying to be all things—it's trying to be one thing. You can't play a game if you keep importing rules from other games. You certainly can't play, I don't know, checkers, if you let people treat the checkerboard like a rugby pitch.

HN has been through many rings of political fire over the years. At such moments, a vocal subset of users always demands that we suspend HN's rules and submit it to the flames. Current events are much too important not to! they argue. Well, current events are always more important than everything else on HN's frontpage. That has never not been the case.

We haven't done that, for the simple reason that it would destroy HN for its intended purpose.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I think time has shown that we made the right call on those occasions and that the community is grateful we did. Once one has been through a few of these swings, the pattern becomes so recognizable that it's hard to interpret it as anything but a normal side effect of macro fluctuations.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I may be wrong, of course, but if civilization really is coming to an end, HN won't matter anyway, so the risk calculation isn't particularly complicated.

If you really believe that this time is different and civilization is being destroyed, shouldn't you be doing something more impactful than spending so much time on an internet entertainment site, breaking its rules and arguing with the janitor? It seems to me that the amount of energy some people invest in this trivial activity is incongruent with the urgency of their rhetoric.

As a thought excersize I've been going through your comments @dang to see what the state of moderation currently looks like.

From what I can tell it is a very difficult job right now and I do not envy that.

I read through this last reply and it did make me smirk because I think your reply was quite pointed and apt.

I do wonder though if you internally down weight the effect HN has on the overall tech sphere.

It seems like it is sort of the "online salon" of the tech and I think people have come to see HN as a source of ... guidance(?) in a world of such poor online discourse.

I think the last few years have definitely shown the power that online sites have to not only effect discourse but to sway elections and much more.

I'm not saying that is currently happening with HN but I do think it's worth reflecting where HN sits in the world and whether it has the proper tools to not succumb to the world of online bots / trolls.

Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't but it appears to a large number of people (who may hold more influcial positions in tech than might realize) that it does matter.

Anyways just some thoughts.

Thank you for the thoughts! I appreciate what you're saying. You may be right. It would be hard to measure, of course.

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