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Comment by krakensden | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wish that he'd be unbanned. No one owes him their attention, but it seems awful to hide him in the closet.

That's the interesting thing happening, right?

We've got the opportunity to listen to this guy, whether we agree with him or not, or can parse out signal from noise or not, and we've instead said "Ah, fuck it!" and shadowbanned him instead of simply scrolling down.

You can still listen if you care to. You just have to enable "show dead". You just can't engage him in back and forth discussion. If you can track down some means to contact him individually, he might be interesting to talk with one on one. And it would be less likely to go to hell in a hand basket. A public discussion in a large forum is a very poor environment for trying to effectively accommodate such a situation. I wish I had some other answer. But I don't.

You can contact him via his address on his site if you wish to talk about his OS http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Doc/TrivialSolutions.html#l1

What kind of situation is "such a situation" and why is a public forum bad?

Not just a public forum, a very large public forum. If it were a small forum with more private posts, it might be possible to accommodate him in a way which would be productive for him and for the forum. But on HN, no matter how many "regulars" figured out how to talk with him humanely and respectfully and genuinely engage him as a person, too many people would pile on to kick the living shit out of him. There is essentially no hope it wouldn't be more damaging to both him and the forum than the current situation, where he is shadow banned, no doubt realizes it, and gets talked about like he isn't in the room, as if he can't possibly figure out we are talking about him just because he is shadow banned.

There are enough difficulties making this forum work with relatively "normal" people and relatively ordinary social frictions. Trying to add into the mix the need to compassionately tolerate someone whose posts are so inflammatory would become a nightmare for everyone involved. I wish I could say otherwise because I am not personally comfortable with banning someone merely because they have a mental illness. However, pg and others already lament how the forum has lost quality, already are beating their head against a wall trying to address the issues which caused that, etc. They aren't qualified to help someone like losethos fit in and get along. It is a tricky thing to do under the best circumstances and a very large, very public forum only magnifies the challenges involved. The way mental illness expresses itself is partly influenced by social factors. The social factors here would almost certainly make him behave worse, not better. Most people have no idea how to constructively interact with someone who is genuinely mentally ill and it is all too common for group response to the situation to seriously compound the problem.

If it were a smaller forum and if I were one of the moderators, including him might be constructive. But here, I don't think so.

I don't feel I am being very clear. I have a medical condition and am not at my best today. So, sorry if that doesn't clarify anything for you.

FWIW I think you nailed the issue 100%.

I have "insider info": I went through very public withdrawal online from prescription medication. So I have been the person who couldn't manage to stop being inflammatory, no matter how hard I tried. It didn't matter how much I apologized and explained, it still created problems. In fact, my sincere apologies ultimately turned me into the group scapegoat. I could say something completely uninflammatory, someone else could overreact in an asinine way and the group response was "there she goes again". I ultimately quit taking their shit, for which I was thrown off one list.

I see no reason to suggest that subjecting losethos to a similar debacle would benefit anyone. I wish it weren't so, but the reality is that most "normal" people just aren't as nice as they would like to believe they are and they don't hesitate to do truly gruesome things as long as they can find a way to pretend it isn't really their fault (distinguishing between "IRL" and virtual interaction is a convenient way many people justify being assholes online).

An entire forum ganging up on one vulnerable individual and blaming the victim for it is an all too common testament to this ugly underbelly of humanity. The people in charge here are wise to not allow a situation which would actively foster such ugliness. In the abscence of a better answer, the current solution errs on the side of at least not sending the message that lynchmobs are welcome here. The ugliness would not stop with losethos. It would spread and soon no one would be safe here.

I'm sorry to hear that. :(

> (distinguishing between "IRL" and virtual interaction is a convenient way many people justify being assholes online).

Yes x 1000000.

Don't be. I lived. (I have a diagnosis with "certain death" attached. Long story and not terribly relevant to this discussion.)

Have a good evening.

Unfortunately it's not his posts that would be noise[1], it would be the very many replies to his posts that would be noise.

[1] Some of the comments are noise. The pretty harsh language would be challenging for some people to not respond to.

it's not that simple. some of his posts are off topic, or outright offensive (rude, racist, etc). it is complex because this is an unfortunate side effect of the illness.

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