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Comment by Barbing | Hacker News Reader

> intimidate/threaten

Links to examples?

I see “please stop fulminating” “we’ve asked you not to do this [guideline violating behavior] and we’ll have to ban you if you keep it up”, which is gentler than [shadow]banning even with the ‘threat’ of punitive action. Assuming you’ve seen mod comments I’ve missed.

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Yes that is what I mean. It's an intimidation couched in gentle language ("don't say things like that or else") and the threat is banning. Examples are in my past comment threads and some to my email years ago. I've gotten it for comments that weren't even controversial, it seemed the mods just disagreed with the opinion and decided to come down hard just because. I've seen it on others' comments too and had to defend them.

Of course there are some crazy extremist comments, but I'm talking about both comments about programming, and content has been echoed by the UN general assembly or human rights organizations. Those comments are now apparently out of line. This forum has crossed into the realm of censorship normally reserved for generic corporations who remove anything that might affect ad sales.

In my experience, if someone is going to be contrarian or pivot the topic to something else or move a conversation from primarily non-political into political, they have the burden of explaining the connection to the main topic and to be exceedingly diplomatic. One-liners that go against the grain or that will generate a lot of adversarial back-and-forth get warned.

Which is a bit crazy, isn't it? Like a micromanager gone mad. They claim it's a community but it feels more like one person's plaything

I really think it's a good thing. I think it balances the ability to allow dissent and debate while helping ensure the comment isn't flamebait. Without slashdot-style metamoderation it's the only way to keep trolls at bay. I've crossed the mods here once or twice in heated arguments, and it's almost always been a reasonable request from them to clean up my argument. Though I was unreasonably banned on my original account about 14 years ago (hence the username created in angry haste).

why would you think they would make that publicly visible?

>The mods are much … quicker to intimidate/threaten

They’re doing this privately? Normally you shouldn’t screenshot emails/DMs/texts sure, but please do in this case. I have showdead on in Settings, so I should see it if you’re worried about censorship. If someone’s posted this before and it was deleted and not just killed, raise your hand and I’ll add my email to my profile.

Offer open to all. Obviously I’m doubting these guys are threatening people…

I've never heard anybody claim that they got a threatening email from dang before though. The moderators could easily block any such story from appearing on HN, but there are plenty of other sites where they could post it, and I suspect that a credible claim would become popular quickly.

So I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that if it did happen, we probably would have all heard about it by now.

they aren't gonna send a threatening email, they just ghostban you.

We were responding to your insinuation that they would do the intimidation nonpublicly. Perhaps it was misinterpreted.

Ding ding, right!

Obviously, the move is to continuously put your finger on the scale rather than doing something blatantly potentially illegal (depending on the threat).

There would have to be some meat on the bone, some unilateral NDA kind of thing…

We all should’ve heard of it by now. From Lobsters, Mastodon, blogs…

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