We didn't see it until someone pointed it out to me just now, and I'm just taking a look now.

I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern activism) suggests a few things:

(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic (2) The operators should signal that they care about me/my demographic (3) The operators should preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic (4) The operators should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics (determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)

This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?). Spaces that prioritize making religious white nationalists feel safe are not interesting spaces to participate in in general (check out the front page of Gab (edit: I think I meant Voat) if you need a sense of what I mean).

It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these suggesting I want preferential treatment from moderators. If my original post wasn't clear: I think the moderators are basically doing the best job that they can at weeding out obviously sexist, racist, and otherwise unproductive comments.

So, I'm not really complaining about how the space is moderated, I think it's at a pretty stable equilibrium and I'm pessimistic about it getting much better than this for women, with what it prioritizes (primarily, open discussion about controversial topics, so long as it remains civil, even when one side is expressing repellent views in a civil manner). Obviously, this is not disqualifying for me, because I'm still here, and I have a lot more karma than you.

However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.

Edit (sorry, got interrupted while writing this) - and I particularly appreciate the even keel of your comments in this thread, when it would be so easy to get thrown off balance by the sharp elbows of others. It's clear that you've worked at developing a reflective rather than reflexive style [1]. I wish we could convince/teach more users to do this.

I also agree that there is an issue with this place coming across as unwelcoming in a number of important respects, including (the topic of this thread) to women. My sense is that it has been changing, but slowly. If you have any ideas about how to encourage that, I'd love to hear them.

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

I think a lot of women see terrible stuff come up here either in comments or on the front page and assume (wrongly) that the community as a whole is ok with it, before it ends up flagkilled by everyone else and often you will come into the thread and warn them if it’s particularly bad. I know I’ve had a good few “why the FUCK is this garbage on the front page” reactions over the years, but those submissions inevitably end up flagged too.

I do recall being warned by you for responding in kind to somebody writing inflammatory stuff or acting in bad faith, and this is a reaction I have had to learn to control as a result. That doesn’t feel great, because in the moment it feels like being scolded for hitting back from a position of less power, and this happens a lot to minorities in tech. However, over time I’ve learned that there’s a discursive norm against flamey stuff in general, and that this norm prevents the conversation from being drowned in pile-ons about one person’s bad behavior, which of course ends up Streisanding bad comments too. HN seems like one of the few places where “don’t feed the troll” is actually sensible advice, because there is sufficient enforcement against trolls (community based and explicit moderation) that they aren’t allowed to fester and multiply.

I think a lot of women are jaded and burnt out from having to deal with ugly comments and bad actors in less-well-moderated areas of the web where the community sentiment is actually against us participating. I know it was really difficult for me to learn to set aside my gut reaction and ignore the ugly bits, but I did it because I believed it would be ultimately worth it. It’s a question of trust, right? People have to trust that this space is actually different, that misogynistic pot-stirring and verbal abuse aren’t actually welcome, and that they will be treated as equals. These are depressingly common and even quotidian almost everywhere else, which is I think what builds the reputation.

As a white, religious person, - but not a nationalist: I always felt safe on HN and I hope most HNers are OK with that as long as I play by the rules?

Why shouldn't everyone feel safe as long as they play by the rules?

Edit: I'm not hurt. I'm hoping to get a better worded explanation from you :-)

Edit 2: The reason why I ask is because sentence is quite absurd and cannot be what you mean. Just try to imagine someone saying: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," here on HN.

I'm not. I also read and re-read it too.

One possible explanation could be that I'm not a native speaker.

However if anyone wrote: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," I'd flag it instantly as I originally did with this before I unflagged it and asked instead because while I think some kind of nazi crap could write that I don't think that is what she means.

Edit: also I think it is bad for the conversation to state as fact that I argue in bad faith. If you'd be kind enough to rewrite that I'll also try to remove this edit.

Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned for this stuff.

It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't flagged by the time Dan saw them.

What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join! Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.

I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it because of the reputation, though. It’s been an invaluable space for me in learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be improved, specifically because of what you mention.

I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard to take.

One thing I have noticed in that vein is that it's impossible to tell whether a particular thread of comments is representative of a commonly held viewpoint, or if it's one commenter with an axe to grind. And if it's one commenter, they may have an entirely valid axe to grind! And then, even if it is valid, that axe may be totally off-topic for the post and dominate the conversation, retreading tired old ground and sucking up all the air in the room for interesting, relevant, new conversation. (Collapsable threading helps a lot though.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23372570

This kind of ignorance is going to end up making society a worse place. It's not white nationalism, but it's not a lot better either.

I think if that's what people mean they should just say nazi.

Most of us (and I am definitely in that group) can agree on disliking/hating nazis.

In my opinion there's no reason to mix skin color or religion into this.

Again, thanks. Certain American cultural norms aren't obvious to me.

Things which are written as compounds in other languages often have a space in English, and English does not distinguish between word classes so that Noun-Noun compounds and Adjective-Noun phrases are ambiguous.

But if you hear “white nationalism” five times, when you hear “white nationalist” you don't hear it compositionally as “(white) (nationalist)” but as “(white nation)alist” - someone who advocates for a white nation.

“White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong. For instance, a person could support a multi-party white nationalist pseudo-democracy like the US during slavery. But nazism is going to be a form of dictatorship.

(religious whitenation-alism)[0]

That's kind of unfortunate because I read it as just the opposite of:

non-religious colored globalists

In hindsight it is possible to see, but right there and then it seemed obvious, and I guess we should come up with a better term.

Also, for what it is worth: I might have been able to catch that if "religious" hadn't been thrown in there.

> “White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong.

Good point.

We could need some clear words and definitions for this as I'm fairly convinced I'm not the only one to misunderstand the wording, kind of like a DSL for discussing bad ideas.

A positive side effect of this whole thing is that I am fairly certain I actually got to feel in my body what it feels like to be triggered :-D

If I should ask certain other people here to learn something from this thing it would be to be precise, and to not alienate people for no good reason, because I am fairly certain a number of people here would say I was dog-whisteling or something to that effect while I was legitimately confused.

[0]: Although when white-nation-alism (to be very clear) becomes religious about itself I think it is some form of nazism.

i would like to point out that there are some men that are made uncomfortable by comments that echo masculinity here as well and criticisms from such men never get much traction either. so it'd be nice if there were space (a space or just space) on HN for someone that wishes question the culture and all of the "high-minded" structure. r/twox is a good model - predominantly patronized by women but welcoming of good faith discussion from other genders as well.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/fe6y66/im_...

You'll notice I didn't say any of the things of which you accuse me, nor do I think them (yet).

> If you care enough about karma to brag about it, you probably are a terrible contributor to HN anyway.

I'm confident about what this situation says about me and my contributions here and feel no need to defend myself further.

I [an occasional mod] welcome people who think Rust sucks as long as they give some details why.

I don't welcome people who just post snarky dismissals of projects.

I'd say the majority of people who complain about their opinion being unwelcome here have been stating their opinion as a big loud raspberry, rather than making a substantive argument people can engage with. It's just the raspberry that's unwelcome.

From your top-level comment, it sounds like you started when you were 15? So, um... I and a number of others don't really want to be judged by how we commented when we were 15. (In my case, not on HN - it didn't exist yet. But yeah, I was "less than pleasant" a lot of the time.)

Don't be too hard on yourself for the teen-age years.

Just wanted to echo this and extend it for the older of us: don't be too hard on yourself for the past.

That would be me. I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN. But I don't feel unwelcome by HN, only by mods, who I don't think of highly anyway, as this pushed me to pay attention to what mods actually do over the years. Nowadays they punish my account again, at least they didn't ban it this time, presumably this time it was because of my opinion on something corporate capitalist they didn't like.

> It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

No matter how fringe, if mods allow, people will still be able to defend and express their opinions here, so only mods can make them feel unwelcome here.

That can't be true. We couldn't care less whether people criticize Rust.

> Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things.

Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. If one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire, "the majority of things I did were reasonable" is not much of a defense.

It's hard to speak in the general case though. People routinely overinterpret what they see based on what they assume is happening. If you haven't specifically asked and we haven't specifically answered, the explanation is probably wrong. It's not hard to get an answer if you try.

> Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. Suppose one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire. It's not a defense that the majority of things I did were reasonable.

I'm not talking about "set someone's house on fire" though. I'm talking about a comment that triggers a handful of people to mash the downvote or flag link. Specifically, this account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rbecker which, obviously someone else noticed as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585354

That user's subsequent comments have not been great, but, at the time that I encountered them, they had something like 10 karma. Note how I wasn't the only one who couldn't figure out why they were shadowbanned?

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

The account you mentioned isn't banned, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in this context. It has, however, shown signs of being an ideological battle account—quite distinctive signs in fact—and I've already warned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665090.

New accounts that have come here to use HN in the intended spirit don't typically post exclusively about racial statistics, immigration, China, why lynchings were not as commonplace as people suppose, and similar things for their first 52 comments. Could it be that that is just a random streak and a wave of intellectual curiosity is about to come? Sure. But at some point, if it walks like a duck, we ban it.

That said, yes, this user has some questionable comments, most of which seem to have come after the point where I initially noticed. I don't see any reason why posting about racial statistics, China, immigration, and lynchings is a big red flag, especially the way 2020's been going so far. It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however.

> I don't see any reason why posting about [...etc...] is a big red flag [...] It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however

It isn't a red flag in principle but it's a big red flag in practice because these accounts pattern-match extremely reliably with certain classes of users who routinely end up getting banned. Once you've been doing this for 10 years you notice these things early. I don't mean to sound like this is some sort of special power. It's just gruntwork. Believe me, it's boring.

Occasionally someone comes along who (a) is truly a new user who hasn't been banned before; (b) walks like a troll and quacks like a troll on troll topics; but (c) turns out to be an intellectually curious person whose mind, let's say, functions a bit differently from most people's. They might even be that thing we all dream we are and basically none of us is: an independent thinker. Obviously we want such a user. But the sad truth is that the dreariness of pattern-matching turns out accurate the overwhelming majority of the time, and for every such outlier, there are hundreds of trolls - or dozens of trolls making hundreds of accounts. So we play splat-the-mosquito, the mosquitoes respawn, and the karmic wheel turns.

I was personally shadowbanned when I made a new account, but I believe the reason was because I posted a link (to Imgur) in my first post. I emailed the mods and they fixed it for me, but only because I noticed my post wasn't visible after logging out.

To be clear I still don't know the exact reason, but it was apparently made in error.

There is, in fact, research showing that this is how it works on Reddit: users who get told why they're being banned or their post removed go on to be better contributors than those who don't. I can dig up the paper if you're interested, but I don't have it on hand.

Personally, I think that moderation transparency is a noble goal: I'd be in favor of all forums keeping explicit, public moderation logs with all moderator actions. But then again I have never had to moderate a particularly large forum, so perhaps my opinion would change when forced to deal with the same spammers, day after day.

I agree with you on moderator transparency. There should be a certain amount of it visible to all, and that amount should definitely be more than what's available here on HN and Reddit.

Reddit is far worse, because you can be banned for arbitrary things without recourse, even though it's theoretically against the site moderation guidelines. You can be banned from one subreddit simply for participating in another.

I don't think HN has the same degree of problem, but I think the solution is the same. Sometimes, sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994

It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:

it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.

This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.

This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at [email protected].

And here is a bit of a paradox. Not only are "conservative" (right wing) views marginalized here, but so are many leftist ideas that aren't one of HN's pet topics (UBI, land value tax, etc.)

You simply cannot criticize capitalism or the "free market" here without expecting downvotes. You can't talk about things that, for instance, the Soviet Union did right (e.g. going from an agrarian country of peasants to an industrial power in under 50 years) among all the wrongs it committed (gulags, the Holodomor, etc). The same, I suspect, for China, Cuba, Venezuela, or any other country that isn't the US and to which the US has not "brought democracy." Speaking of "bringing democracy," I strongly suspect that serious discussion of Western imperialism is off the table, as well. And, let's not even think about the US's broken immigration system.

On the world political scale, none of these things are remotely controversial. You can consistently say all of them, while holding a center-left ideology in basically all of Europe.

I don't particularly think having a "safe space" is all that productive, but I would appreciate if some of these topics got a little bit of lively and reasoned debate. Instead, people just mash that downvote button, which frustrates me to no end.

I've accepted that by pointing these things out, I end up losing a few fake internet points, and I'm okay with that. I'm so far about the downvote/flag threshold that it doesn't matter. But, I don't like it.