This article is completely correct of course. But there is zero hope that it'll be taken seriously at all.
Just the other day, here on HN someone seriously proposed the idea that hate speech doesn't lead to violence against minorities[1]. I pointed at the Rwanda genocide, and got voted down (a lot), because the OP claimed that 10% of deaths didn't prove my point. Then I pointed out that was at least 60,000 deaths, and that was downvoted too.
Enough people clearly want to ignore things which disagree with their world view that there is zero chance that this destabilising behaviour will stop.
This doesn't mean, of course, that you're wrong about genocide, ethics, Rwanda, etc. It means that if you want to post about these things you're responsible for separating out the dross that people will otherwise react to. The contrast between the magnitude of those topics and the pettiness of I-was-right-on-the-internet only calls attention to the latter.
But I think YCombinator needs to take this problem seriously. The Sam Altmann piece made it completely clear he has no idea how some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN.
The fact we can't talk about how ridiculous downvoted on that post are means it just keeps happening. I think there is complete blindness about how completely outrageous that is, and how it reinforces the negative stereotypes of silicon valley.
I probably could argue the point better, but honestly I don't think arguing about it is the point.
Really, all the moderation team here could read this article.
HN's mandate is the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is playful, wants to learn, wants variety. It is more fond of trinkets than of causes. Its relationship to More Important Things is itself curious: it inevitably touches on larger topics, yet if we were to swap priorities and put More Important Things first and curiosity second, it would kill the site. It would turn it into a fundamentally different thing, and you can't do that to something alive without killing it.
So the question is not "are there more important things in the world", it's "does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist, even though there are more important things in the world". I think it does, because there is room for many kinds of website. This is just the kind of website that HN is.
If you accept that, you need to understand that such a site, simply by being interesting, comes under constant pressure to be something else. From a moderation viewpoint it's our job to protect it for what it is and resist the pressure to turn it into something else, even when we know the something elses are more important. Often we personally agree with the very things we moderate. That sounds weird if not impossible, but sheer quantity has a way of changing a person and you get pretty good at it after a while.
When you say "some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN" I don't know what ideas you're talking about. But if you mean ideological ideas, yes, they certainly crop up here, but I don't believe they're growing here. I think they're floating around everywhere. They also damage intellectual curiosity and so there's an easy argument that they don't belong on HN. Convincing everyone else of that of course is not so easy.
I'm not arguing about putting "most important things first".
I think that intellectual curiosity is very important. But I think that people are using the HN rules to push agendas, they are good at it, and I don't think that is the same as "intellectual curiosity".
Take that Rwanda thing. It's pretty clear that the parent comment isn't just indulging in "intellectual curiosity". They are playing the whole "escalation of opposition" game: "oh, maybe hate speech doesn't lead to violence" -> "there aren't enough studies showing it does" -> "it's not really a problem" -> "you are a problem for opposing hate speech".
Even in this very thread we see this same behavior:
Justifying downvote: "you told people to look up a topic but did not provide any link as a recommended starting point" (which is fine) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jlg23
But then: "I am actually very familiar with the topic and I am thus aware that one can find many, seemingly contradictory, sources" (Oh, look at that! Someone who rejects clear evidence which doesn't agree with their views) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947869
When you say "some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN" I don't know what ideas you're talking about. But if you mean ideological ideas, yes, they certainly crop up here, but I don't believe they're growing here.
I think the Damore essay is a good example of something which would be an upvoted comment here.
Or quotes like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOfLPY5VAAAw7cC.jpg:large (which was on the Naomi Wu story.)
It's impossible to prevent everyone from ever posting awful things to HN in the first place. This is a public, anonymous internet forum. Of course people are going to post such things, and of course it takes time for the community immune system, including downvotes and flags and moderation, to react. But it usually does. You can't judge HN fairly without taking that into account.
I know that people capture these screenshots and pass them around on Twitter and whatnot. I also know that when the original posts eventually get flagged or otherwise dealt with, the people passing the screenshots around never mention that, never update, and most of all never apologize for publicly claiming that HN—and even we personally—endorse the most horrible stuff. That's how political battle works: concede nothing, correct nothing, distort every available data point for maximum effect. It doesn't seem very compatible with intellectual honesty to me, but that is for each person's conscience to decide.
