I have come across flagged stories that looked like they would form the basis of an interesting conversation, noticed a string of problematic comments on the story, and agreed with the story being flagged.

Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.

Sometimes that's the case but frequently stories start getting flagged as soon as they reach the front page before anyone has even commented on them.

The notion that HN is well-moderated is bizarre. HN is exceptionally hostile to those who hold beliefs contrary to HN-acceptable norms.

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.

> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies

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.

All their comments start dead. People call it shadow banning or hell banning. And some other accounts have [banned] after the name but keep commenting.

They just posted a new comment that isn't dead. I really doubt HN does that kind of stuff.

Comments by banned accounts are killed by software, but other users can vouch for them to unkill them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). That's what happened in both of those cases.

I'm not sure about the companies but pg's stuff regularly gets criticized on here (even harshly sometimes, I think). Just a few days ago, there was one such story (highly upvoted) on the front page in response to one of pg's essays.

> 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.....

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.

> Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.

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.

He usually bans people for using mean words.

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.

>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.....

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.

> These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.

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.

> Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.

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.

>low-effort troll comments

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.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

A troll isn't someone who simply holds controversial views, but who argues in bad faith, and there are many examples of that on Hacker News.

There are many commenters who post abusively, but in my experience it is not the case that they're posting in bad faith. I think that is actually rather rare. Users are far too quick to assume this about each other.

> 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.

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 think that decline of willingness happened in society at large. It's simply now reaching hackernews. There is very little that can be done to fix this at the level of HN. It will probably require a shift in broader society.

As someone that just stopped lurking, it's clear downvoting is used primarily as a "disagree" button. Case in point, this comment I'm replying to. I believe they're making a meaningful contribution to this discussion. Yet the downvotes have already commenced.

No the problem is that he makes accusations that are not backed up by any data and this is contrary to the guidelines.

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.

I can definitely confess to being hot headed at times. I agree with you about the lack of data and will do my best to consider this going forward.

The person you're replying to is shadowbanned, and their post actually got vouched for, but still (I think) starts off at a deficit.

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.

Hey I truly appreciate the honesty! I can't easily assess the exact reason why I got downvotes without comments like this. Thanks for filling me in!

Take a look at GP's previous comments and their contexts.

Just remember that that will only give the part of the story which is linked to that one username.

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...

Oh for sure. In this case, just looking at their comments it's pretty clear why they've been banned.

You're going to get downvoted and flagged to hell, but I mostly agree with your comment - there was a precipitous quality drop that came with the heavy moderation that people now think of as the identifying characteristic of HN. That being said, I think that after a few egregious missteps (such as the test ban on "politics"), the heavy moderation has been open and kind. I also suspect that there has been some mod meddling to keep my lefty-ass comments visible more than once.

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.

Only about 10% of the HN community was anywhere near SV or SF, last time I checked.

> 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.

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.

Hate speech is a priori not very reasonable so getting rid of it is not a matter a censorship but of getting rid of what stand in the way of thoughtful discussions.

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.

Given your claims of "white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed [...] extremely bigoted shit" being both completely inconsistent with my experience, and the specific things that you are claiming are present, it seems far more likely that you've been banned for the kinds of social authoritarianism (trying to control the speech and thoughts of others) that is particularly popular among a certain political faction lately than those things actually being prevalent and accepted.