What was, or at least felt, obvious was that there was a double standard being applied. Not just in the sense that such a witch hunt would be unlikely to happen to a man being lauded. But also that if there's one point that Hacker News could probably agree on it's that lines-of-code is a bad metric for evaluating programmers, let alone scientists.
There was also the pervasive sense of being on the side of the rest of the team, even though highlighting their contribution was the first thing Katie Bouman did. And at least Andrew Chael, who did write the plurality of the code in the GitHub repo, did come out strongly in favor of her and was horrified of the hate she got. Quote:
"So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop."
(https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854496183091...)
It's curious that, at least in my subjective impression, the tech community has a far larger problem with women than any of the other groups that have traditionally suffered discrimination: racism and especially homophobia really are extremely rare, at least overtly. But the uglyness Katie Bouman, or Ellen Pao, or Marissa Meyers brought out seems to be alive and well.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13094354 is the comment, which I find entirely reasonable but obviously people disagreed, or at least it was considered off-topic)
You may also like Lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/
The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing.
Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potentially dry topic. (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar's Poker, etc.)
Case in point: a few days ago an article about India/Kashmir shortly made the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612461)
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/28232.html
>The effect of both is to enforce the status quo of social beliefs. Stories that appear to challenge the narrative that good programmers are just naturally talented tend to vanish. Stories that discuss the difficulties faced by minorities in our field are summarily disappeared. There are no social problems in the technology industry. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
You cannot discuss things in an actual academic manner on this forum. It is a tech enthusiast forum that happens to have a lot of money surrounding it.
It's even more surprising since HN had the "vouch" feature since before Dec. 2016 [0]. My best guess is that people might have reflexively downvoted/flagged upon seeing the opening sentence of "Black people are measurably less likely to own a car or have a bank account".
--
[0] - Not sure what's the power of a vouch relative to a flag or a downvote, but my impression is that it's stronger.
The latest HN comment dump I could find with a quick search was from May 2018 [1].
There were 237,646 comments in total that month, made by 36,358 unique users. 75% of users posted 5 or fewer comments, with a median of 2. The most prolific user wrote 798 comments, dang managed 6th place with 425 comments.
Even if the numbers doubled since then, there is no need to moderate millions of users, as only (well) tens of thousands of them are actively participating.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6v685o/complete_h...
For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates.
Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities
Personally, I like Dan's "Nietzschean flamewars" phrasing, and I sort of agree that "trying to get him to conform to slave morality" was a personal swipe. But if so, only barely. This could well be an example of overly sensitive moderation.
The real problem with that thread (in my opinion) is that Rayiner's comment was allowed to stay flagged to death. One might not agree with his opinion, but it's a viewpoint worthy of reply (as you did) rather than censorship.
Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind having my account with 9k+ karma and dating back to 2009 banned for whatever. Despite that I am trying my best to look at the situation objectively and I still do not like it.
It is popular to compare reddit with HN and my take would be like this: reddit is like a part of the Universe where stars are still (maybe moving a bit past this though) born, and there is life and dynamics. HN, otoh, seems to be inching closer and closer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
Both those posts mention them already being involved in moderation before officially being declared moderators; you can do that too if you want! Just write email to hn@ycombinator.com if you see anything that you believe requires moderator intervention and they'll consider it.
See for yourself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632086
The thread began, "If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?"
And it's not referring to others on HN; as the replies make clear, it's about people elsewhere.
Adding my voice to the "good riddance" side of the aisle: thanks to what freedom of speech, association, etc. actually mean in the legal / constitutional context, said twats are guaranteed a space for communication - the real world! They can stand on a corner or picket their local City Hall and spout all the hateful nonsense they want.
(They can't, however, verbally assault bus drivers / police officers, or yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or directly incite violence, or disturb the peace at all hours of the night, or needlessly interrupt judicial / civil proceedings, or...point being: even in the US, the exercise of free speech comes with limits and responsibilities.)
Like publicans of yore banning rowdy drunks from the premises (which itself came with political / legal overtones; see https://www.amazon.ca/America-Walks-into-Bar-Speakeasies/dp/...), many owners of online spaces are deciding - as is well within their rights as owners of a private space - to ban users and groups who disproportionately degrade the experience for all others.
(This is my general surface-level opinion, without getting into discussions like https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/rnhzlo around the amplification of extreme voices by short-sighted metrics optimization, or debates on whether providing space for hateful voices effectively denies free speech to the targets of their hate, or explorations of the tradeoffs different open, democratic societies have made around hate speech.)
For example, here’s the front page from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-07-07
I’m on mobile so I’m only skimming, but if you sorted that day list by upvotes, the 4th most upvoted story would be the one about a new African trade coalition (450+ upvotes). There’s also a 200+ upvoted submission about FBI/ICE having access to state driver license photos. And a bunch of other sub-100 upvoted threads that are political, or aren’t explicitly tech — e.g. forest kindergarten, FCC and robocallers, the Durian King. And this doesn’t account for the tech articles in which politics are prominently discussed, e.g. anything to do with the Boeing 737 MAX.
Seems like a solid mix to me, even as at least a third of the tech-focused submissions don’t interest me (e.g. Lisp and RaptorJIT). There’s enough political content for that day that if I wanted to read only non-tech HN threads, I’d have my fill.
I'd encountered one such newly-launched site, heralded as "a kinder, gentler Reddit" in 2016. Not only did the site itself collapse and fail a year later, but it failed, in the extreme, to live up to its promise, in part through the user community (always a confounding factor) but also through exceedingly poor moderation both by volunteer user mods and the site's paid staff and management.
I'll note: I was largely in agreement with the site's stated principles and politics, and still found myself very much on the dark side of it. Contrast with HN where I consider myself frequently contrarian and yet reasonably well tolerated.
In writing on the experience I called out the contrast with HN specifically. In part:
The really striking thing for me is that a bastion of one representation of what Internet critics, erm, criticise, HN, is proving much more effective at accomplishing and embodying the goals which Imzy, a "kinder, gentler" place, has set out to achieve.
... with a longer discussion of the things that seem to work particularly well. See:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
I disagree with dang and sctb on occaision. I am disappointed that there are topics that HN doesn't seem able to discuss (and have called these out). I've been admonished a few times.
But on balance, the site works, and rewards time spent on it. And credit must go to dang and sctb.
Thanks, guys.
"the likelihood of short sleep increased with greater poverty"
Poor people are much more likely to work irregular shifts and night shifts, which have a serious impact on sleep.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190411122008/https://news.ycomb...
HN is a community. It's totally fine not to use your real name, but users do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I definitely want to give credit to dang and sctb for making it that way. It could have gone differently. In particular, the no-politics argument is basically a fancy way of saying "nothing that challenges the status quo please". [1] I really appreciate them trying to keep the forum in a state where these discussion can at least happen. I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics.
[1] See, e.g., Prof Ichikawa on how skepticism gets misused to defend the status quo: https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1134323822096658433
A minute later I go back to the home page and it was wiped out without a single discussion comment.
I don't see any reason why this type of articles should be taken down, they are scientific in nature and highly relevant.
Things like climate change denial should have no place in a site like Hacker news, it's unbelievable.
As far as Antifa assault involving ethnic intimidation goes: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/alleged-antifa-membe...
It's hard to know the context. The last time I remember I was asked for a citation, I found the Washington Post article I was going to refer to was paywalled. It's now available to me again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-the-united-states...
Most likely the specific observation you're referencing was that in the last 2 years of the chart (2016, 2017), if you go down to the bar charts for left wing and right wing violence, you'll see that there are 11 incidents of right wing violence for that period and 17 incidents for left wing violence.
More generally, in terms of incidents like vandalism, threats, and assault, there are lists going into several 100's of incidents for the past several years for the far left. If you want to find them and analyze them, that sounds worthwhile. There were tons and tons of such incidents on YouTube, seemingly endless. However YouTube seems to engage in suppression of videos that go against certain political agendas.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
Any topic this widespread is going to produce many copycat and follow-up articles that add no significant new information, as well as many sensationalized articles that don't provide a basis for substantive discussion. Users tend to flag those. If they didn't, climate change wouldn't simply be the most-discussed topic—it would be practically the only topic on HN.
There are also cases of bad flagging, where a particularly substantive article didn't get the discussion it deserved, but these are not nearly as common as people jumping to the conclusion that a topic is being suppressed when they run across a flagged submission. Checking HN search is an easy way to vet that logic (though not as easy as not vetting it). Frequently it turns out that the story has already had significant attention. If, after checking that, you see a particularly substantive article getting flagged, you are welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We sometimes turn off flagging in such cases.
Everybody feels that the topic they consider most important is under-discussed on HN. Actually, every important topic is under-discussed on HN, because frontpage space is the scarcest resource we have: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... There's no way around this on a site that exists for curiosity, because curiosity withers under repetition.
Websites like Reddit Profile (https://redditprofile.com/about) and HN Profile (https://hnprofile.com) systematically scans all HN comments and identifies all users' expertise, personal interests, activities and emotions, and allow employers to uncover their E-mails and hire them. And it's just a one-man's startup as a social experiment, larger agencies and corporations have at least many order-of-magnitude higher budgets. And I definitely think not everyone wants that.
The problem, I think, is this type of behavior encourages inappropriate uses and abuses of anonymity.
I learnt of the news about 8chan from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055 — which was on the HN’s first page before it was replaced by the slightly longer thread you linked to. The top comment in that thread is decidedly against the chans.
There’s also been a lot of mentioning of Popper and his paradox of intolerance in these threads. A post [1] in the thread you referred to (it also was among the top ones when that thread appeared on the front page), for example, began by saying that "Popper taught us that we can't be tolerant towards intolerants" ("taught us" implying that this statement has grown to become general wisdom).
If HN’s prevailing sentiment has since turned in favor of 8chan, I am very happy to hear that.
You may feel it's not enough, but nothing is ever enough: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
This is contrasted to denialism which denies claims out of hand. This is not based on scientific data, but gut feeling or motivated reasoning.
Dr. Ichikawa is thus describing denialism in his tweets.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_movement
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism
edit: Here is an article on the distinction from one of the strongest figures in the skeptical movement, Steven Novella. It even focuses on the topic of climate change.
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/skeptic-vs-den...
Or are many discussions on MF generally constructive and productive?
My experience, dipping into it (I'm not a member/regular) is the latter. Backed by some quantitative/qualitative research:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
It's also possible that I saw it and was too exhausted to look back through all the flagged comments in the thread, identify which ones were explaining how AMP works, and see if they had been flagged correctly. That takes a ton of energy, which is not always available when the rest of the site is clamoring for attention and in varying degrees of onfireness. One thing you can do to increase the odds of getting a specific response is to include specific links to the post(s) you're worried about—that makes it an order of magnitude easier. I certainly appreciate your intention to defend fellow users who are being mistreated.
But I think if I had seen your comment I would have replied at least to say that I believe you that your intention wasn't to downvote-bait.
Sure, here you go. I would never "make things up" and lie on HN, that's despicable and I do not appreciate being accused of such trash by the HN mods.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20192283
That is a well researched story on the NYTimes on an underreported topic that is mostly technological in nature. You claim it got a "software penalty" as opposed to being flagged.
I cannot imagine any interpretation other than what I described, that there is an automatic penalty applied to posts that you personally don't like or have personal expectations from outside of the community's voice.
How am I to interpret your comments without assuming that you have software that flags content and penalizes it by topic when you state that the software penalty happened "because this topic is unfortunately more likely to lead nationalistic flamewar"
I do not understand.
Edit: I cannot see these posts without being logged in as me. Have you hidden this particular discussion from public view? Am I shadowbanned? For what purpose?
I see that in certain other topics as well, such as discussions of the 737 as mentioned in the article.
Along with intellectual curiosity, I think it's important to cultivate intellectual humility, and they go together. A lot of what we think we know just by reading the news isn't all that well-founded, so asserting a strongly-held opinion isn't justified. I'm reminded of a cartoon about collecting questions, rather than answers:
http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
So, if you're wondering about downvotes, overconfidence might be a reason, or at least for one downvote.
A romp through approaches to generative adversarial networks described as if they are realms in a Tolkein world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251308
(This week's) complete guide to building a terminal text editor from scratch in C which gently holds your hand at each step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14046446
Stumbling down the root domain of the above link leads you to the collected archive of _why_the_lucky_stiff, a hacker artist who created technical documentation as if it were a work of literature, animating and writing songs about ruby in a unique aesop meets kaftka meets neutral milk hotel style, and who then suddenly disappeared and deleted his whole internet persona, transmitting a 96-page oblique missive years later as individual PCL files. https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
Someone documents how using the 30+ year old, tiny awk language let him do what all the latest fad big data tools couldn't https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20293579
Several posts this past week from natashenka's Project Zero blog led me to her passion project of being the world's leading expert in hacking tamagutchis, which read as part instructional and part love letter to digital pets http://natashenka.ca/
Even though I'm ostensibly in the same industry as retail brokerages, I've never understood their business models as well as I did when I read this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551
Not to keep going, but just to have a less lame example than a couple introductory textbooks -- I didn't mean to imply HN as a surrogate class syllabus
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19984428
> Ok, but "got any sources for that?" is a rather unsubstantive contribution, and then going on tilt about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines outright. Would you mind raising the signal/noise ratio of what you post here?
It seems the attempt to correct a low "signal / noise ratio", in this instance, seems to be back firing.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494093 from way back when.
My assessment of that thread is the same as it always is when a thread gets a huge number of comments: sentiment fits a roughly normal distribution, with the mean position being something approximating "this is a really difficult question and either course of action has significant risks and pitfalls", and every step away from the mean point of view placing increasing importance on one particular aspect and decreasing importance on the other aspects.
If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be a huge number of comments, as we would quickly find consensus and move on to the next topic.
If you look at the top three root comments on this thread:
- The first one [1] points out that different standards are applied between 8chan vs Facebook/Twitter/etc, and disagrees with Cloudlfare's decision on free speech grounds. But then many people disagree and debate this position.
- The second one [2] asks a neutral question about Cloudflare's exposure to legal liability for content on its platform if it is making decisions about what content is allowable or not. Then people discuss that question.
- The third one [3] acknowledges the complexity of the topic, devoting each of the first two paragraphs to what the writer considers to be almost-equally meritorious but opposing points of view, then concludes that on balance the Cloudflare decision is right. But then many people disagree and debate that position.
To properly answer your challenge, one would have to examine all 1400+ comments and classify them by their level of support for/against the Cloudflare decision, which is somewhere between impractical and impossible.
But from my scanning through the comments, I don't see any "prevailing" or "overwhelming" position emerge, and I see many of the commenters wrestling with the inherently vexed nature of the issue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610548
However, I disagree with these nuance-avoiding characterization of participation and discussion.
Eg, the article makes participants in Boeing crash discussion, seem inhumane and devoid of 'outrage' that the authors of the article were expecting.
On the other hand, the article is not analytical enough (or purposefully avoiding) mentioning the potential causes, that make moderation of a technical forum difficult.
As I had noted somewhere else in my posts, this forum allows a disproportionaly high number of one-sided article submissions.
It is those type of submissions, by often high-karma users
(eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jbegley )
that continue to create selective-outrage, counter-selective-outrage arguments, and overall high stress, low technical information content discussions.
And cause continuous moderation stress.
I read LW pretty regularly (FWIW, I don't live in a group house, am monogamously married, and expect superintelligent AI to arrive slowly and be less exciting than many LW types hope or fear) and don't remember seeing anything there that matches what you describe -- though of course maybe it was deleted or something.
But there is this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s93F5JmhCxKDxWukD/rememberin... concerning someone who committed suicide and (though this isn't mentioned there) left a suicide note describing her experiences of sexual abuse in the rationalist / Effective Altruist community. Nothing to do with Eliezer Yudkowsky in there, though, so far as I can see.
There is a comment in that thread that could very uncharitably be said to match your description. It's a response to someone saying "she complained about such-and-such failings in the rationalist community; let's change for her" (the failings in question aren't, or at least don't appear to be from the description in the thread, about sexual abuse), and the reply is concerned that spreading the message "if you complain about things and kill yourself then that's an effective way to get the things addressed" is dangerous because it might encourage people to kill themselves. Which might be wrong, but is pretty different from complaining that committing suicide "is an unfair way to start an argument".
Anyway, this is all a bit of a digression. As to whether Less Wrong is a counterexample to the claim that every online community with active moderation gets described as "toxic": no, it certainly isn't, and plenty of people have called it toxic. For what it's worth, I think it's a distinctly less toxic place than it was (say) three or four years ago. (The website was rebuilt from scratch and a new team of moderators installed, and both of those made it much more feasible to deal with the small but vigorous group of neoreactionary loons who had been making things unpleasant there for everyone else.) And for sure it's much less kooky than the real-world Bay Area rationalist community is alleged to be.
This is probably a hammer and nail thing, but having just heard a podcast about disinformation campaigns (https://samharris.org/podcasts/145-information-war/), your comment shares some traits. The podcast discusses that one of the main things "they" (those behind disinformation campaigns) do is putting groups up against each other in various ways, highlighting the differences rather than the similarities. Regardless of whether you're actively trying to do that (I would assume not, you're probably unaware of the effect this type of comment has), this is exactly the type of comment that creates an us vs them environment and highlights the very, very worst stories of what you perceive to be the other side. It's one of the least constructive things you can do online.
On the other hand, major announcements like the latest UN report frontally calling for a diet change are still allowed on HN, so there is some filtering going on - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
Many of the same comments that we read each time is that its not clear that the weather is changing due to human action, or that its not clear if stop eating animal products would help that much, etc. which shows that a lot of people are still misinformed about the topic and in a state of denial.
> Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
you state that asking for sources is, and I quote: "a rather unsubstantive contribution".
You are now telling me I should be citing a source.
If I were being snarky I would ask if you would mind raising your signal/noise ratio as you did with the other poster.
I mean, which is it? Is asking to source the claim unsubstantive or not? Is it only unsubstantive if there's a claim against you personally?
As for allowing others to make up their mind, that would be what the poster in the other thread was presumably trying to do, and you shut him down. And that's really the point.
What topics are those? When I hear claims like this, it usually turns out to be a topic that gets plenty of discussion on HN—just not as much as someone feels it should. It never feels like one's favorite topic gets discussed enough (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for why), but that's not "it can't be discussed".
> But on Hacker News it has always been justified by it not being moderation.
We answer questions about moderation all day. When asked what happened to a submission, we say what happened. If users flagged it we say users flagged it. If we moderated it we say we moderated it. How do you get from that to something sinister?
> "It was flagged by users" is the common explanation.
Yes, because it is the common reason.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20656342
[1]https://www.thedailybeast.com/8chan-users-migrating-to-zeron...
>Regarding the rest of your post, I get the feeling that you're being intentionally obtuse in order to avoid the point.
And I get the feeling you were being intentionally hyperbolic in order to make a weak and poorly supported point seem stronger than it was, by appealing to fear and cynicism rather than data.
You're probably right that further discussion wouldn't be productive, though.
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
----------
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
-------
(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
I can see why you are angry that we shadowbanned you, because that account went on to make other comments that were fine for HN. Indeed, quite a few were vouched for by other users. That's evidence of not trolling, and that sort of account is not the kind we shadowban—it's the kind where we post moderation replies, and tell people if we ban them. But those later comments didn't exist yet when I shadowbanned you.
Here's the information you need if you want to understand why we do things this way. HN gets tons of new accounts that break the site guidelines and in fact are created for that purpose, which is what I mean by trolling. We can't reply to them all, ask them to follow the guidelines and patiently explain where they're going wrong. If we tried, we'd do nothing else all day—or rather would go mad before getting there. Many of these users know perfectly well what the site guidelines are and have no desire to use HN as intended. If we poured moderation resources there, not only would it not work, it would make things worse, and meanwhile those resources would be unavailable for the rest of the site. For accounts like that, we use shadowbanning, and for the most part that approach works well. But it doesn't work in every case.
When a user emails us about such an account, we have to guess whether they're asking questions in good faith and really want to use the site as intended, or whether there's little hope of convincing them to do so. We don't always guess right. It looks like I guessed wrong in your case. The thing is, though, that when I sent you that detailed explanation of what was wrong with your comments and why we'd banned you, you didn't respond with any indication that you'd received the information and wanted to do something with it. Instead you responded aggressively. I get that you were angry that you had been shadowbanned and didn't know it. But that type of response is correlated with users who go on to be abusers of the site and are not people we can convince to do otherwise, no matter how many replies we give them.
All of this is pattern matching and guesswork. Your original comments and your emails matched patterns that are associated with abuse of the site. With hindsight I see that the pattern matching got it wrong, because your new account has gone on to be (mostly) an ok contributor to HN. (I say 'mostly' because, looking through its history, I still see unsubstantive comments and occasionally worse, but not bannably worse.) But I don't see what I could have done differently in any way that would scale. Our resources are meagre; we're constantly in triage. Patient explanation takes a lot of time and energy—it has taken me an hour to write this so far, and there are many more users demanding explanations than I have hours. Had your emails indicated openness to information or willingness to change, I probably would have replied further. But there are many users who fire multiple angry emails on each reply they get, and we've learned that they are not a good investment, when hundreds of other things and people are clamoring for attention and explanation.
Actually, I do think there is one thing we can do differently that is helpful in such situations: get better at handling anger. There are many users whose every interaction with us is angry and only angry. Often it feels like the intensity of their anger exceeds any of the provocations they're complaining about on HN, even if they're correct on those details. It's as if they're really angry about something else—something more important—but they turn that energy instead onto the extraneous outlet of HN and its moderators, maybe just because it's less important and so in a way safer. I find it difficult to be on the receiving end of this anger. At any moment, there are multiple people doing it. They don't know about each other, so they experience our interactions as individual and demand individual attention, while we experience it as a constant bombardment. It's possible to grow in capacity to handle this—it just requires a lot of personal work. You emailed us a year ago, and I've probably gotten better at this in the last year, so maybe the pattern-matching works a bit better now.
From a general standpoint, we develop automated solutions by following new product development[1]. More specifically, we develop features for users to provide different kinds of feedback, and write functions that combine that feedback with machine learning to perform actions when necessary.
Even more specifically, the entirety of forum interaction is an input/output of information in people's brains, computed along with emotion, heuristics, and whatever knowledge the brain has, and generates output. By collecting meta-information about the input and output (such as crowdsourced content flags like category of information, perceived intent of a comment, training data models on old content, etc) we can make functions that use the metadata to perform actions, such as auto-detaching threads, muting users, delaying reply buttons, providing feedback to commenters, and highlighting or shadowing content. A lot of these are already done (some automated, some not), but I think the big feature is when these are done; find the emotional pain points, provide functions that mitigate them based on metadata.
That's an interesting take since I refuted your points. You simply added a bunch of potential political concepts to something that wasn't political and then claimed it was.
> You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
> "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do
If it applies to everything that humans do then there is no "involves politics" or "expresses politics". A human taking a shit isn't expressing politics no matter how hard the struggle is -- so I've just refuted that obviously over-broad point.