horseLOGIC

My studies show that you must have a community of adult children who throw a tantrum when they encounter something they don't like, combined with a group of exhausted parent moderators who let them have their way, against better judgement.

I recommend family therapy.

I'm glad to hear that the system indeed at least works equally badly for "both sides". It wasn't clear to me at all.

I refuse your attempt at categorizing me. This isn't a battle. I don't want any "pro-SJW" content hidden from the front page either, just because a few people don't like it. That's not what user flagging is good for.

My point stands: As moderators, why do you accept these bad-faith flags that have a huge impact on visibility? With this policy, you are supporting the extremists on both ends.

Again, the moderation does not deny being involved.

I will concede though, I technically can't tell. However, if "a few flags" really can push an article from the front page down to page 10 within the course of five minutes I still have the following to say:

1. This system is easily abused

2. Accepting these flags on an article like this is accepting abuse, which is the purview of moderation

In other words, the system is laid out to hide anything that a few users don't like to be seen and the moderation supports that tacitly.

Why?

It wasn't the user flagging that caused this, it happened from one moment to another: http://hnrankings.info/17399895/

The moderators do not deny being responsible for it.

Fair enough, I don't understand the technical details.

The posts were hidden from the frontpage, by moderators, through whatever mechanism. Why? Not as technical question, but why was decision made to hide it? What's the argument behind doing something like that?

If any users can explain why they are flagging this post, I'd be interested in knowing too. To what end, exactly?

You have entirely sidestepped the question: Why did you flag the original post? It "got attention", but so do a lot of front page articles and they don't get flagged.

> What arguments does moderation have to moderate HN?

That wasn't the question, what's the argument for moderation to flag the original article? No arguments have been brought forth, not before and not now. Thank you for your reply, but it just doesn't address the point.

> We get accused of supporting white supremacism and misogyny...

That's the whole problem. I have never ever seen an actual white supremacist or a bona-fide woman-hater on HN (or most anywhere tech related). What I do see all the time is people of the "social justice" persuasion labeling most any criticism in such defamatory terms. Then, if somebody jumps in to defend someone's right to hold a different viewpoint, they too get attacked as "enablers" (or similar). It's dishonest and disgraceful and it needs to stop. The first step is to not ever pander to those people.

> ... just as much as the kind of things you guys are saying here.

What's wrong with what we're "saying here"?

> It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle.

I disagree with that.

> This is in the site guidelines, which we'd appreciate it if you'd read and follow

Let me cite:

"On Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

There is a strong need for this kind of open debate in the tech sector and it would be great if you didn't make an effort to push it under the rug, or even suppress it.

Wait, so it got the "mild penalty" (which resulted in its immediate disappearance from the frontpage) because it was a follow-up?

The post to which it was a follow-up also got flagged. Why? Because "users" flagged that as well? Who cares? Your reasoning is entirely unconvincing.

> How can a site be both a Church of SJWs and an alt-right shithole?

Disregard that, what arguments does the moderation have to hide this post? I see neither a flamewar, nor alt-right or SJW run amok in here, but I see that the moderation is hiding this post. That's the issue at hand.

To be fair, in many rural places you don't want to fall out of the norm on any spectrum and there's no opportunity for practically anything.

That's why you move out.

Yes it has.

There's actually not that many opportunities for internships on C/C++ compilers.

I mean, maybe the GCC people will take you, but... yeah.

I'm disappointed with their race-based criteria, in my perception Arabs/Middle-Easterners ("looks like a Muslim") rank far higher on the oppression scale than Hispanics.

> But how common is it actually to pretend to be a gender you are not for something like this?

Who says it's a problem? It's not up to anyone else to judge my motivation for changing my gender. If I want to change my gender for 10% discount on a pair of sneakers, that should be my right.

Otherwise, where do you draw the line and how do you verify it?

Just put your preferred pronoun on your twitter page, and as long as it's not male and the gender you were assigned at birth, you should be good to go.

As soon as that internship is over, you can just change back. That's what genderfluidity is about, right?

I was making a general point, but even then you shouldn't need to have a "verifiable track record" just to say something mildly controversial without getting fired.

That some person calls for the firing isn't the problem, but it's the faculties following through with it.

It's the infantilized "student customer" along with a long-standing infiltration of sectors of Academia with ideologically motivated staff that is enabling all that.

The majority of staff/students do not a agree with this, but there's a system of fear where you can ruin your career by being labeled racist/sexist (etc.) by one of these ignorant loudmouths.

We can't change this by calling for individuals to not act in a certain way, we need to dismantle this power structure inside (parts of) Academia. It starts with speaking up.

Kids don't always do what they're told, but they're inclined to believe what they're told. Acting out on a false belief nevertheless can be done willingly.

Similarly, the parent telling their child to do such a thing also believes that their child is getting a ticket to paradise, along with themselves and the whole family. Isn't an eternity in paradise worth it? From that perspective, there's nothing sick or evil about it, it's just a very different perception of how the world works. If you were born in a different time and place, you may share those same beliefs.

> Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.

I don't disagree that these things are abhorrent, but that's because we happen to share a different system of beliefs. I don't agree with your simplistic explanation that these people are just "sick fucks".

That's... simply untrue.

First of all, people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, all the time. Secondly, people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a perceived greater good. Martyrs are revered in many cultures around the world, including Christian culture.

The fact that some martyrs use modern explosives is just an "implementation detail".

It can easily be "worth it" if by sacrificing half a million children you get to save half a million and one child. Despite what you might want to believe, Mrs. Albright is neither stupid nor evil.

It's also really an unfair question because you don't get to see the result of your policy before enacting it.

Moreover, those deaths probably never happened, at least not in those numbers, and they were used as an argument for war:

https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433

Like the supposed 1 million deaths from the Second Iraq War, those numbers are based on surveys which are highly flawed.

Further, the poor perception of the Second Iraq War supported the lack of action in Syria under the Obama administration. Nobody knows how many lives could've saved (and how many sacrificed) if there had been an early intervention in Syria.

I'm not sure I get your point. When I research human sacrifice, I must tacitly condemn it, because that's the civilized thing to do?

Human sacrifice is really just obsolete technology. It just doesn't really work, as the Aztecs had to figure out. It's not like they did it for fun, that would be far more objectionable.

We "civilized" people use different technology, but we still sacrifice people to it - just think of how many people die in traffic.

You presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't.

We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now.

Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to sacrifice the unwilling, it kinda ruins the show.

Do you, really? When do you ever search for just "string"? You're going to add some context, like "split string C++".

Now maybe you'll say Google should know you're programming in C++ all the time, so having learned that, Google should be able to infer that when you type in "split string", the results should all be for C++.

Except then somehow Javascript comes into your requirements and now you need to retrain your Google to give weight to that.

I'd much rather be able to use the Google, not my Google, so that I get more predictable results. It's already annoying that I can't tell people to google something and be sure whatever I'm talking about is in the top ten results of their Google.

> That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.

Nothing about that sentence was stupid and it's frightening that you don't seem to understand the ideal of being "unbiased" (as in "unbiased reporting"). We're going to be heading in the direction where's there's "liberal" and "conservative" search engines, causing even more polarization of our collective world views.

The headline is of course wrong, they didn't remove it fully, they removed it from one paragraph.

More interestingly, they removed another sentence from that paragraph:

"[...] providing our users unbiased access to information."

In other words, Google wants to crack down on wrongthink without violating their own code of conduct.

I fully it expect it to allow it, but you can't just pick one line out of the whole text and be done. For instance, what's the definition of processing? How does it cross-reference with the whole body of other EU regulations? Etc.

> Did you actually look into the GDPR before jumping to these conclusions about the effects on your business?

The fact that I have to look into the GDPR already proves my conclusion to be true. I fully expect there to be few if any issues, but I still need to verify against the regulation, which is thousands of lines of text.

I can't just refer to "salvar on hackernews" saying it's "legitimate" if it's for legal compliance.

It's not inconvenient, it's costing me money. I don't want your data, I need to collect it and store it to comply with other laws, now I need to verify that the particular way I collect and store that data isn't violating some other new law.

You are not my customer, but even if you were, keep in mind that for every piece of regulation (and there's tons of it!) I need to fulfill, I have to pay, which means you need to pay. I need to set prices to keep my bottom line. If I can't keep my bottom line, I'll eventually stop providing the service, because I'm not providing it for fun. That's for paid services.

Now, some companies don't even charge you, they provide (aggregate) data about you to advertisers, who are then willing to pay more for their ads. It only makes sense, how much would you pay for an ad for a piece of specialized software that gets shown to the wrong audience 99.99% of the time? What's going to happen if that kind of data usage becomes infeasible? Those companies need to start charging, or go out of business. There will be less free services. I suppose that helps companies who do charge, but it hurts people who can't pay and don't care about data collection.

I'm not providing such a service, but if I was, you would be paying me with your "privacy". If "respecting your privacy" means you don't want to pay, you can get lost, because you're only costing money. The definition of "customer" is that you compensate the other side.

I don't actually use Facebook, but I'm under the impression that you can post to just the people who are your friends or just a set of friends. There's certainly the possibility to at least not broadcast to the whole internet.

I'm unhappy with this because now I have to do a lot of extra work verifying that I'm not breaking some law, then implement changes in both code and license agreements, then get all the users to agree.

I've had zero profit from user data so far - to the contrary. If everyone could be billed just with some cryptocurrency, totally anonymous, that would be great.

I chuckled at that sentence as well. It's not that the tech sector is rational, it's that a lot of the people working in it are desperate to maintain a self-image of being a rational, scientific-minded person. Then, if some evidence collides with that self-image, we just blame it on management. Problem solved!

I can see why people are desperate to "prove" that the supposed election meddling or the Cambridge Analytica scandal is causing Facebook to fail, but the data just doesn't show that at all.

People make a big deal about privacy, but the actual users of social media usually post stuff because they want everyone to know about it. The people who really care about privacy are not on social media. There's already a general understanding that when using the internet, you're getting tracked by various actors and people (even begrudgingly) accept that.

That same graph shows that Facebook usage has been dropping virtually every month before the election and after, totaling almost 50% loss. There's no exceptional change visible due to any particular event. There are some strong upticks in there as well, but the longterm trend is down.

I believe the most reasonable explanation is simply that people are moving on, just like they moved on from MySpace and other previously popular platforms. Young people are leading the charge here, it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher can see you on Facebook. It's uncool.

It is a questioning of the merit of debate versus just plain virtue signaling. The last sentence summarizes it pretty well:

"The idea of “debate” imposes an adversarial framework on online interactions, as well as privileging logic as a tool of discovery."

>> It appears the author is saying that since people don't change their mind as often as the author would like, then it means that reason doesn't matter.

It's more that if you want to effect positive change (like "ending slavery"), reason doesn't get you far. To the contrary, a very reasonable argument could be made to non-slaves on why freeing the slaves would be a mortal risk to them. Changing "morals" on the other hand, is effective, because morals transcend reason. This is the playbook of the left.