That might be true, but a more benign explanation is incompetence.
If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.
Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.
If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
I've done that. Not been banned.
> point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite
Well, I mean, aside from being false, that’s also going to often be a specific labelling of something here as “white supremacist” or “hate speech”; flagging exists pretty specifically to deal with content where that description actually applies without sidetracking conversations with incendiary debate about whether it does. So, yeah, comments doing that will be flagged and moderated and, if thet persist, will likely get you banned.
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this.
If it was banned, you couldn’t post from it. So, since you obviously can, I assume you are misrepresenting the facts when you call it a banned account.
I don't think this is true, or I just don't see any evidence it. Take a look a this HN yesterday thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26782031. Neither PG nor his YC companies are immune to criticism.
Citation needed - this claim is very far from my own experience. If you think you'll be banned, then email me with your evidence and I'll look at it.
If you express some completely heinous ideas in polite, mostly grammatical writing then normally you will not be banned. This is based on my experience of over a decade of various accounts and occasional banning on "Hacker" News.
To be fair, much of the overtly racist and bigoted content I've seen lately has gotten voted down and flagged, and I've seen Dan step in and stand against it on a few occasions. I don't know if this is the result of a shift in my perceptions or in the community, but to me it seems like things were far worse a few years ago, and now at least a few of the notorious bad accounts have been banned. It's certainly not a paradise, God knows any time race, religion or gender comes up this place often winds up validating its execrable reputation, but I do think the mods are trying. It's not their fault the tech community is being taken over by incels and neo-reactionary fascists.
The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the most. The assumption of good intention on the part of someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
There are definitely points of view here, no matter how well articulated, that will be buried in low-contrast purgatory very quickly. And I'm not just talking about "white supremacy" type stuff.
This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.
This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.
Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.
Yes, but at least unpleasant discussions usually just stop at that, unlike Reddit or even worse Twitter where you get a shitstorm of insults.
I consider myself more of a leftist than your typical hn user and when I have been abnormally downvoted I never felt it was because of my opinion but rather because I was too hot headed or too ignorant about what I was talking about.
So I am very concerned by those claims but without any data about presumed tolerance to bigotry stuff, they are of no value too anyone. Anybody could feel sore and angry about how some social online gathering is not as X as he wish he was. Heck, that's my life on Reddit. Gimme data, gimme sources, I'll vote you up.
Looking at your comment history, it looks like you enjoy wading into political conversations with strongly-held opinions. Food for thought, I'd have downvoted some of your comments that I agree with because they bring down the quality of the conversation.
Commenters who post grand narratives about why they were banned typically have a long string of past banned accounts. The giveaway is that they never link to them. That would let readers make up their own minds about why they'd gotten banned, and how accurate their story really is.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I would like to point out that this is a silicon valley/SF tech forum; considering the demo, to mod out all of the vile sexist/race-realist objectivist bleating would be crushing. Just argue back. The left-liberal addiction to manager-calling is ruining their ability to defend their positions, heavily moderated "safe spaces" really become places where people can repeat their beliefs by rote, free from challenges. The reason libertarians are wrong is because their philosophy is intellectually bankrupt, not because it's upsetting. Practice in putting them down refines your own beliefs.
This entire comment is one of the most closed-minded, "lower value" comments I've seen on HN recently.
Complaining about how comments aren't open-minded, and also that "hate speech" and "bigoted shit" is the norm is something of a contradiction. If one is open-minded, he should be tolerant even of "hate speech." He should also be open to the ideas that hate speech is both very real or not real at all. Censoriousness is inextricably closed-minded.
I can't speak to PG portfolio criticism, but I think dang does yeoman's work in moderation. Only once have I seen a decision that I thought was harsh, and I think everyone is entitled to a bad day every now and then.
If you walked into my house and started berating and insulting me, I'd probably have a dim view of you, too.
Also, how are you posting from a banned account? That seems to go against the nature of being banned.
Also I don't think "in my house" metaphor has had much success. Which seems fair : Hacker News is not PG's house, although it is his baby, he handed moderation power over to the users, the algorithm and the moderators. Which is why we like it and trust it and use it. You can't just compare anything to one on one relationships, it does not work like that.
SE prominently displays reputation points, which is different.
Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying small means dang can generally be expected to read most of the comments on the site.
And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely worth wading into. If a million people started using HN, then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.
Though I doubt redditors reddit just for the karma.
Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
For one, answers change over time. The best answer five years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The most current and correct answer will never be able to catch up with that.
Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a collaboration brings out the worst in some people.
Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are the ones that look plausible. They're not necessarily definitive, or ideal.
Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they don't.
Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed and duplicates aren't really duplicates.
I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki, or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the problem.
They introduced it to gamify the whole charade without any deeper thought. At the beginning they had a lot of people addicted to answering questions and displaying their points on blogs which to me always looked ridiculous.
They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope, it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I quit before long.
It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.
If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.
What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.
12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.