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>>lordna+(OP)
Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob.

I support Hacker News moderating itself however it chooses. However, if we are looking at it as a moderation model for large, open, non-editorial platforms (Youtube, Facebook) -- which I believe should all be covered under public accommodation law -- it clearly fails. And even if when we are looking at ostensibly neutral, publicly-orientated sites like newspaper comment boards, it fails.

Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights.

So while this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News, and perhaps should become the model for small private sites, we should not try to scale it internet-size companies. Platform companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!) need a different set of rules geared towards protecting individual rights and freedoms instead of protecting a community.

>>romaae+Ge
> While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob.

Isn't every community -barring a few wild west's- like that? One Usenet, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up in people's kill file. On IRC, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up on people's ignore or would get kicked off the channel or klined off the server. Except for the kick and kline the effect of a kill file or ignore is akin to a global shadow ban.

The solution to the problem you mentioned is that unpopular opinions with merit will find their way to become eventually popular enough that they're adopted. Whereas unpopular opinions without merit eventually end up existing on the cesspits of the Internet. Because somewhere on the Internet, any person can spout their unpopular opinion. The question is, who reads it? Is it so much different from a shadow ban?

>>Fnoord+0h
Individuals putting someone on their personal ignore list is different from a moderator deciding to put someone on everybody's ignore list though.

Your solution is a bit lacking, I believe. "If it's not popular, it has no merit, because if it had merit it would be popular". There's also no telling whether some unpopular opinion you'd consider without merit today will become popular tomorrow (and, if history teaches us anything, we've been generally bad at predicting which will become popular, which will remain popular and which will fall out of favor), so it's somewhat silly to make hard judgements.

>>luckyl+Rt
Of course there are going to be posts which don't get upvoted enough. Everyone who frequently posts here has witnessed that some good posts don't get many upvotes, whilst other ones which you find less good do get them. The amount of upvotes does not tell us how good your post is; all it does is determine for the reader the order of the posts as it isn't chronological. Why? Because nobody has come up with a better solution.

My reasoning (solution) is a rule of thumb, not a law. Every group of people has a blind spot. There is no perfect solution; however I believe the solution as presented is the one with the least casualties. If you know a better one, I'm all ears.

>>Fnoord+2x
I don't like about the popularity vote-moderation that it tends to become a dictatorship of the majority: if you're outside of the accepted canon, you'll get thrown out. It's effective for creating an a fairly consistent echo chamber, but I don't believe it comes with few casualties. You won't see the casualties, because they are censored.

I'm fine with using a system like that for starters but ultimately let benevolent dictators overrule majority decisions. My biggest problem with your previous post was the implication that whatever isn't popular doesn't have merit. The relation between the two is weak, that's what I wanted to express.

>>luckyl+nZ
> I don't like about the popularity vote-moderation that it tends to become a dictatorship of the majority: if you're outside of the accepted canon, you'll get thrown out. It's effective for creating an a fairly consistent echo chamber, but I don't believe it comes with few casualties. You won't see the casualties, because they are censored.

First of all, I'm someone who at times reads a lot of the discussions, and I see each and every casualty by default because I browse with showdead on. I also see it as part of being a good netizen to help with moderation (and doing vouch or flag is part of that), especially for non-commercial endeavors (which, this place, arguably is or is not depending on your viewpoint; for me it is more akin to .org as its not the purely commercial wing of YC). Heck, I even sometimes check out shadowbanned user's posts. I'm weird like that.

Censorship, in my eyes, can only be enacted by a government. There must be some less powerful word which fits the bill.

Every community [website] has its echo chamber because every group of people contains such.

Now that I put what you wrote into a -IMO- more accurate context which I felt was necessary, I'm left to ask you: What is your proposed alternative?

> I'm fine with using a system like that for starters but ultimately let benevolent dictators overrule majority decisions.

We got 2 who can.

I've been on websites where less intelligent people become benevolent dictator. People who don't see their blind spot. More moderators isn't necessarily better. Also, ask yourself: was a website with a lot of moderators such as K5 or Slashdot or Digg or Reddit necessarily better? Are websites with no moderation whatsoever better?

I actually have quite a bunch of "radical" viewpoints myself; and I do not feel like I cannot express myself here. Yes, at times I get upvoted or downvoted where I feel surprised. Both ways. In case of the latter I always try to reflect what I could've done better. In fact, in every conflict I have I try to reflect what my part in the conflict is.