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Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")
There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.
HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.
However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
[Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.
The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay."
Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the post evil but only little boring.
Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged] indicator are because the user that posted the comment has been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to automatic filters that threw up false positives for new accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith.
Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and assorted people redefining words and then asserting that only their new definition is the correct one.
I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if it were not dead.
After reddit's nonsense last summer I appreciate HN more than ever. If it means the moderation is a bit "too strict" then so be it. That was also the case on some of reddit's (and other sites') best communities. /r/AskHistorians immediately comes to mind.
HN is a small community , and frankly more moderate than everywhere else (except twitter these days).
Sadly, censorship in 2024 is coming by the people, for the people.
The contemporary American software engineer resembles the professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the suburbs in the 80's and 90's.
No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5).
Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
???
Is anyone who isn't a card carrying DSA member "far right"?
Joe Biden is by all accounts, center-left. However, the parent comment also describes the "HN crowd" as far-right. What probably is actually happening is that America is extremely polarized, where any side you don't agree with has the "far-[left/right]" label slapped on.
As in no outright slurs, right? I've seen plenty of race realist comments, as well as "James Damore is right about women in tech".
Here it is, so others don't have to dig around for it. It appears to have been a top level comment.
"This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political expediency. He did what the government asked while denying doing it, now apologizes for it to curry favor with the rightwing world he alienated. It's like the NY Times pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative during the Iraq war and later running long articles about what bad journalism that was."
Conversely - why didn't you vouch for each of the dead comments, if they are so great?
Biden sounds a lot like Stephen Harper (pre-barbaric-practices-hotline) and just to the right of Brian Mulroney. Joe Clark would be well to his left.
Here is dang’s explanation: >>37421874
It sounds a fair banning for me.
Correction: delete the "would like to"
Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're saying.
Whatever they post now shows up as dead
In many cases it's not the particular comment, it's the particular poster who is shadow-banned, and all of their comments are dead on arrival (to everyone but themselves, the definition of shadow banned). But people with showdead=true and enough karma can vouch for them to resurrect them if they're worthwhile.
Same goes for commentary on Chinese people or Palestinians, though nowhere near as extreme in animosity as that towards the Russian.
No refunds.
It was awesome. Then it jumped the shark when people realized they could flag posts they don't like with no repercussions.
One of the best uses of HN for me is watching my brain jump to conclusions only to have them slapped down by a well thought out counter argument.
This forum isn't perfect but I haven't found a better public discussion board on the internet. Hat tip to the moderators and others making this happen. Your work is appreciated.
This is a variation of the little boy who cried wolf. If "racism!" is cried for every single little thing that needs discussion, then one day it actually is racism and nobody will be listening.
The former use technology to do things economically to workers we haven't seen since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Like preventing a driver from getting new deliveries if those 10 minutes put him over 1 hour of work. It's robber barron extreme right wing economic policy.
Instead, it's always about how the immigrants should be locked up or deported. And that's always about immigrants from Mexico, never from Canada or other places.
One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information from the other side and amplify misinformation from their own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.
In short: Nothing of value was lost. Especially since you can toggle it on.
I've moderated a number of forums in my time. And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
(Also, I have zero interest in participating in unmoderated forums. Unmoderated forums are either overrun by spam, or by users who somehow manage to spend 50 hours a week flaming people. Look at any small-town online newspaper where the same 5 people bicker endlessly after every single news story. And if I don't like how a forum is moderated, I find another one.)
And that's a "far right" position? So far as I can tell, even in europe, in most jurisdictions gig workers are treated as contractors rather than employees.
Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections.
There was a time in America where the notion of an income tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your home were considered far-left authoritarian and unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property, the government surveilling our communications and finances, government oversight and permission required for all activities.
Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and people's notions of what those terms mean is variable. But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.
In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal progressives "won" and became the center and the establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist today.
Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I can think of where America has stayed the same or moved right since WWII.
I think you're looking at the DEI phenomena incorrectly. It's a way for the economically comfortable class to signal virtue without having to experience any of its detractors. Check the Wikis of many DEI proponents and writers. They live in both highly segregated economic and racial neighborhoods.
They live a 1950's far right wing lifestyle at home but wax poetic about DEI for the virtue.
I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group of people that like their “alternate facts” and share their HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone that calls their lies out.
It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of those to get comment restricted.
Ronald Reagan gave 3 million illegal immigrants permanent resident status.
and historically LGBT rights were far left positions. That doesn't mean they're far left positions today. Moreover if being pro-capital (as opposed to being labor) is "far right", then is being pro-labor "far left"? Is there even a "centrist" or non "far-left/right" position?
Also HN doesn't censor as much, libertarian-right posters that would've gotten downvoted to hell on reddit actually have an outlet here. Religious right has no outlet on either site
Yes, HN is better than a toxic cesspit full of ignorant teenagers. That's a low hurdle.
It's not my work, since I'm not the one defending putting some comments to death while leaving lots of other, equally stupid comments up.
Complaining about Indians, complaining about women. But they don't even know that's what they're doing so you can't say "hey stop being sexist". They're surrounded by men all the time, of course it will never click in their heads.
> but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property
Many of these originating from the right. Because the right is not, and has never been, a party of small government. They want big government, just their big government. That has meant historically enforcing slavery, then segregation, suppressing women's rights, suppressing abortion, dictating what you can do in the bedroom, and on and on and on. These are all conservative policy - and all HUGE government.
> it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously
Yes, this is called the progression of time. This is why people who are unable to change their mind over time end up falling behind and sounding crazy.
Have you ever asked an old dude about how they feel about black people? Whoa! Clearly they grew up in a different time. Some let that shit go like they should, some don't. Those that don't are destined to be left to the past.
Just a few decades ago a slight right winger might be anti-integration. Slight. A far right-winger would be lynching people in their neighborhood. So you're correct - we've moved past that.
And, in 40 years, if I personally don't change my beliefs, I will also sound crazy. To conservatives that's scary or something. To me, that's how the world works. I say either adapt or be relegated to the insane.
So far seems working as intended.
What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic. I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis type document, would be a great topic.
There is _always_ a technical solution here. If you can't figure it out, keep thinking. There's never a reason to ban/moderate your core users for 10% rule violations. Instead, that shows a weakness of the software. More transparency helps.
It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment. During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly.
What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate. I actually expected the opposite.
Things change as we scale, for better or worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=<CommentUserID>&by=<ReplyUserID>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang>
That (presently) turns up two admonishments dating back 11 months and two years: <>>37423572 > and <>>33132910 >.
The first of those (11 months ago) is where the account was banned.
If you have specific questions on accounts, users, sites, comments, posts, etc., which you feel are improperly flagged, killed, or banned, you can always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I do this frequently, usually with suggestions (e.g., title or URL changes), sometimes with questions (earlier today a site which showed up dead, turns out it's a hard paywall, which I eventually tracked down dang's comment on, though not in an easily-searchable way).
<>>41375637 >
The wealthy and powerful don't benefit from citizenship. When you have wealth you can just pay for what you need or want. It's the common person who needs the benefits and protections that come from citizenship.
You're on the right path, pointing out how counter-culture liberals won but they are in fact right-wing. They LARP as liberals/leftists.
1. Biden was promoting - and willing to sign into law - a border bill written by a Republican; it very nearly passed as it initially had bipartisan support before being scuppered by a presidential candidate.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that by no means implies that the post is ok or somehow blessed by the mods. The likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it*. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
You can help by flagging such a post or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. It was only because someone brought those unacceptable comments to my attention that I was able to respond. We can't moderate what we don't see!
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...