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Comment by almostgotcaught | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Anyone can act as though their position is righteous enough, and their opponent's is pernicious enough, that an exception should be made in their case. But it's only because enough people make an effort to avoid that that HN can continue to exist as a place where people want to come and discuss important topics.

If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email. We have several ways of keeping discussion healthy here, but we need everyone to do their part.

> Anyone can act as though their position is righteous enough, and their opponent's is pernicious enough, that an exception should be made in this case.

"Both sides are the same"

> If someone else's comment is wrong, respond with an opposing argument. If their comment is inflammatory or in some other way in breach of the guidelines, flag it, and/or report it to us via email.

My man - there are well known dog whistles and revisionist accounts of the slave trade in this very comment chain ... And yet the only one that gets flagged is mine. And even so based on what grounds - a flippant remark about Wikipedia being free? Forgive me if I don't take your commitment to "healthy" discourse seriously.

We don't care about the "side". I don't even know what "side" or what central point you're arguing. Our role as moderators is not to adjudicate on arguments, it's to prevent the place from burning to the ground.

Your comments have been inflammatory and abusive from the very beginning of your participation in the thread, so of course you're attracting flags. But you're certainly not the only commenter getting flags in the thread.

All the feedback mechanisms we offer are here to help you if your intention is to contribute positively to the site. Votes, flags, vouches, email support. If you don't use them, you're in no position to claim that the system is biased against you.

I wasn't implying it's biased against me - that would be banal - I'm implying you don't actually care about healthy discourse but keeping up appearances because the only thing you're responding to is my purple language and not all the hate speech.

Edit: I'm rate limited

> you're not doing your part to help

... I responded to a comment and pointed out a revisionist take. Did you scold that person too or just me? Do you get it now?

We moderate what we see in the order we see it and it takes time to get to everything. As I said, if you're not doing your part to help, first by observing the guidelines yourself and then by flagging or reporting other comments that breach the guidelines, you're not in a position to complain.

> We don't care about the "side"

I'm sorry, but what? A quick look at this person's profile has tons of flagged comments on every page. None of it is pretty. I see rants about pretty much every non-White Christian group. You can't just ignore that.

But yeah, almostgotcaught is the one who needs a bollocking because he got a bit testy when the Nazi was goosestepping around ... :-/

Now I've been able to look into those comments, I agree it's not what we want on HN, and I've acted on more of their comments. If that kind of thing continued we'd ban them.

The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.

They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.

The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.

And what I am saying is that this is far too focused on the how the displeasure with racist garbage is voiced instead of the racist garbage itself. You can't just ignore what was said and brush it off with "I'm not choosing a side".

The core problem here wasn't @almostgotcaught, it was @typeofhuman. Maybe they could have handled it better, but it really wasn't that bad, and their sharp response really isn't the main problem here.

This is also why flagged comments should just disable replies to the entire thread by the way, instead of just the flagged comment.

The way this started was when almostgotcaught made a comment that said "jesus christ you people are so thick", in a reply to a different commenter. That commenter had written an inflammatory comment attacking America's "barbaric cultural history". I chided them first and flagged their comment so it was killed, and only after that responded to almostgotcaught, because "jesus christ you people are so thick" is well towards the worst end of the spectrum of inflammatory comments we see here. I hadn't seen any of the stuff from typeofhuman at that point, and nothing about dog-whistle comments had come onto the radar. I was just focused on dealing with a user who seemed to be waging war against HN and going off on a tear, which they've done before. They (almostgotcaught) are a user who has a history of posting inflammatory comments, about things that have nothing to do with racism; the first comments they were called out for by dang were about programming languages.

I've been doing this work in various forms for a long time, and we've had cases before where dog-whistle comments have been posted, and, in the best instances the way they've been handled by the community has been anti-inflammatory and mature. That is, others reply with sober explanations about what's going on, and send emails to the moderators so we can know about them and take appropriate action (killing comments and banning users). In such cases, the issue was dealt with very effectively and without it turning into a huge meta-drama that gives it much more visibility than it needs to have.

This is ultimately the point I keep trying to make. HN's guidelines and feedback mechanisms are designed to deal with this stuff, and have a track record of dealing with this stuff very effectively when people use them properly, which most people do, most of the time. That could have happened in this case too. When people take matters into their own hands and wage war, everything breaks down.

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