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.

>>dang+Nf1
It's true that you'd still be criticised by some people even if you did a perfect job. (And I do think that you do a great job!) Still, a specific criticism can be on target even if criticism in general is inevitable.

Joe Biden could point out, correctly, that he'll receive criticism both from the left and the right whatever choices he makes. But so what? It doesn't follow from this that he's actually making the right decisions, or that he's found some kind of perfect middle way, or that he doesn't have any discernible political leanings. Nor does it follow that anyone who thinks that Joe Biden is left (or right) of center has been deceived by some kind of statistical artefact or cognitive illusion – though no doubt some of them may have been.

So I'm not sure that I buy the claim that HN is striking the roughly the right balance because roughly as many people call you a Commie as call you a Nazi. I mean, who cares what people hurling thoughtless insults think? Since when were they the instrument by which we calibrate the range of acceptable discourse?

One possibly constructive suggestion. It might help if there was some kind of explicit indication that an account had been banned. It would be reassuring to see this when stumbling across some horrible post from a negative karma account. I bet a lot of these accounts have been banned, but there's no visible indication of that.

>>foldr+1A2
I agree, and am not making a Goldilocks argument (i.e. we must be just right because we're in the middle) - that's not only a non sequitur, it's a cognitive bias (you can make anything seem reasonable by framing it that way).

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

We do mark some accounts as banned in extreme cases, but it's a manual switch. We added it a year or two ago because some people would forget that they had turned on 'showdead' in their profile and then get upset about all the dreck they were seeing on HN. If anyone notices a particularly egregious account they're welcome to bring it to our attention at hn@ycombinator.com and we can turn that switch on.

>>dang+Iw3
When you say (in one of the linked comments)

> but it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side is good and has good views and sees HN accurately, while the other side is bad and has bad views and sees HN completely the wrong way".

it’s not clear to me why you don’t think this is plausible unless you take the centerist position that all political extremes are equally wrong. It’s not like that would be a crazy point of view for you to hold. However, you seem to either deny holding it or deny that you are appealing to it as part of your argument.