What about that jameshilliard guy that has tens of flagged dead comments about Israel ?
Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
I think overall most of my comments are positive. Some people seem to flag comments as a way of disagreeing I guess.
> Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
I don't think that's really an accurate characterization, it's certainly not 99%, are comments correcting factual inaccuracies/misinformation in threads related to Israel considered political just because the surrounding topic is politically contentious?
Most of my comments on threads involving Israel are me just correcting some of the more obvious misinformation/conspiracy theories and/or trying to provide more factual background context/nuance to the discussions. I try not to push a specific political agenda/ideology for the most part. It's not like I'm trying to start political/ideological discussions either, there just seems to be more factual misinformation around topics involving Israel and that happens to be something where I know a lot of the history.
I had to go back 79 days and what felt like hundreds of posts to find any exception (something about heat pumps I think!), but then scrolling further back just led through reams more of the same. That means your account is definitely on the wrong side of the "primarily" test (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
To say that you're simply correcting inaccuracies and misinformation doesn't really work because the question of what counts as accurate vs. misinformation is hotly disputed. It is basically the entirety of the battle.
On the other hand, your comments have mostly (though not entirely) been avoiding the more degraded forms of guidelines breakage that people resort to in these threads - things like snark, name-calling, and from there into personal attacks, slurs, and so on. That's good, but it's not enough—if you want to keep posting on HN we need you not to use the site primarily for political battle (broadly construed).
Why ban the other account and not yours? The primary difference is that your account does have a history of using HN as intended. I had to go (too) far back to find it, but it was there. In such a case we prefer to warn first, not ban outright. The other difference is that I saw a lot more cases of the other account breaking the site guidelines egregiously. That combination (no history of using HN as intended + breaking the guidelines egregiously) is what tends to push us across the warn/ban line.
But no—to address the question that people often wonder about—this is not about either person's views about the underlying topic. Moderation would be exactly the same if the positions were flipped, and indeed often has been.
I went and checked myself and it's not exactly quite that bad, I quite regularly comment on posts unrelated to Israel/politics, these are comments of mine newer than 79 days that seem entirely unrelated for example:
7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49846584
19 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687187
28 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49569325
52 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252558
59 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163184
59 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163014
79 days ago(the supposedly non-political one you found about heat pumps is quite ironically titled "The politics of air conditioning in Switzerland"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915330
> To say that you're simply correcting inaccuracies and misinformation doesn't really work because the question of what counts as accurate vs. misinformation is hotly disputed. It is basically the entirety of the battle.
I think it's more complex than that, for example in this thread I was pointing out that one shouldn't use UN aid delivery data to justify that sufficient aid is reaching Gaza, because UN aid data doesn't support that conclusion by itself, I then pointed out what data does support the conclusion that sufficient aid is being delivered. So I think there are cases where it's entirely possible to correct misinformation without even challenging the conclusion.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879645#49906915
> On the other hand, your comments have mostly (though not entirely) been avoiding the more degraded forms of guidelines breakage that people resort to in these threads - things like snark, name-calling, and from there into personal attacks, slurs, and so on.
Yeah, I try and avoid that in general.
> That's good, but it's not enough—if you want to keep posting on HN we need you not to use the site primarily for political battle (broadly construed).
I guess the main issue is that I tend to get more replies to my comments in Israel related threads and I get drawn in responding back if I think there's more to be said on the topic, most of my Israel related comments(in terms of absolute numbers) seem be from these super deep back and forth threads and not top level comments.
If you looked at the comments of the banned account that were older than a year ago, they were not political.
While jameshilliard has hundreds of comments (in your own words) almost entirely on the topic for the past two years, with a huge number of them flagged/dead.
It is clear to see what is going on.
@4gotunameagain Really appreciate vouching for me, thank you.