zlacker

>>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
> 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.

I'm not sure I'd agree with this. An appeal is as easy as sending them an email. In my experience they're more than willing to hear you out.

>>elliek+gt
In my experience they aren't.

>>lazyas+yZ
What was your experience? I haven't been able to find where we interacted with you.

>>dang+Wl2
Of course not. I'm not insane and so I didn't continue using a shadow banned account.

>>lazyas+Sb3
You said we weren't willing to hear you out, but that seems unlikely to me. People sometimes come to HN with stories of how badly we've mistreated them, but rarely provide links or enough information to let readers make up their own minds. Mostly these stories leave out important details about how the account had behaved and how we interacted with them. But we do make mistakes—moderation is guesswork, and we guess wrong sometimes. If there's a chance of that, I'd like to know what we did so we can correct it.

We only use shadowbanning when accounts are new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. It's possible we got it wrong in your case, but again, we can't correct mistakes if people won't tell us about them.

>>dang+UI3
> We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN.

That's a complete contradiction of the explanation you gave at the time. And yes, I asked what had happened when I noticed the account was shadowbanned, and your response was

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Hacker News <hn@ycombinator.com> Aug 31, 2018, 10:43 PM to me

Politlcal/ideological flaming; unsubstantive comments; addressing others aggressively. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17358383. That's unacceptable and bannable in its own right—and you did a lot of other things along those lines.

You can turn this around by doing the opposite: (1) become less inflammatory, not more, when posting about a divisive subject; (2) make sure your comments are thoughtful; (3) be extra respectful.

Daniel

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(I especially liked that the example comment was from three months earlier. Why didn't I immediately think that far back??@!)

Of course, despite my multiple followup questions, you never bothered to reply again. I'm sure that now you will find the motivation to give an extensive public explanation complete with links of exactly how you really meant that I was "new and spamming or trolling" or "serially creating accounts to abuse HN". It would never work to, say, reply to comments that were 'unacceptable and bannable in it's own right' to say that. Or to follow your previous public explanations of moderation policy, such as

>When we’re banning an established account, though, we post a comment saying so. https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html

>>lazyas+GU5
If you'd just banned me at the time I probably wouldn't be so angry still. The experience of discovering that you had been invisibly fucking with me, probably for months, was absolutely infuriating, and seeing you flat out deny that you pull that shit as a way to manage actual users is unacceptable.