zlacker

>>nicola+(OP)
One thing that puzzles me is why HN does not have a policy of banning users who post explicitly racist comments. I sometimes (unwisely) get sucked into arguing with these people. However, this is essentially impossible to do within the site guidelines, as you either have to have a respectful discussion with a racist (which only legitimizes them) or call them out for being a racist (which isn't allowed). I'm aware that racist comments often get flagged, but then again, they also often don't. And users who post such comments are able to continue contributing to the site.

I won't post links to examples here because, again, that is probably not within the site guidelines. But I'm happy to supply on request.

>>foldr+YY
We do ban such accounts, and I've personally banned god knows how many of them. You're always welcome to email links to hn@ycombinator.com if you want us to take a look. Keep in mind that we don't see everything that gets posted here—not even close. For outrageously bigoted comments, the odds are high that we just haven't seen it yet. Any sufficiently large open forum is going to get those, and given that we don't know how to write software to detect them, there's an inevitable time lag before they get dealt with.

Outside that extreme sort of comment, though, the problem is not as simple as it sounds, or feels, because there's no consensus on how to define or interpret these terms. That means any particular moderation call is going to end up feeling wrong to a sizeable subset of users—good-faith users, not bigots or trolls. Put a few of those data points together and pretty much every reader is going to find a pattern to dislike. It's literally impossible to avoid this, even if we could see everything.

One consequence is that we/I regularly get lambasted with every horrible label that exists in polite society (a clarifying example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941387), because most people misinterpret a sequence of bad-data-point experiences to mean "the mods must agree with and support this kind of thing".

I wish I could get across to people how these perceptions are unavoidable given the stochastics of the site (HN is a statistical cloud) and how our brains deal with randomness (by strongly overinterpreting it). I've been writing about this for years - a lot of which shows up in these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but it doesn't really land. Even if one knows these things intellectually, it doesn't change how they feel, and the feeling determines everything.