I don't accept that content deletion is a way to go. When an offensive content is deleted we lose the ability to jude it for urselves. The content must remain but be strictly attached to a persona so the persona can be "judged" rightfully. In real life, when we deal with these people we want to know what they did. It gives fidelity, unlike "the person said something that violates rule 4 section 3". We should stop pretending that we are not humans and embrace the human ways of dealing with human problems. There's nothing human in undoing speech.

And no, attaching follow up to organic content is not moderation.

How do you feel about HN's approach - flagged or heavily downvoted comments are invisible if you are not logged in or if you have not changed "showdead" from the default unchecked state (at which point they're rendered in a hard-to-read colour)?

I don't like it when it's due to low score, it is an oppression of unpopular opinions.

I like it when it's about flagged posts. I have the option enabled to show these posts and I would vouch if there's something worthy in it. So spam and other BS is "removed" but I still can take a look at it and see it for myself.

Overall, I think HN is one of the best moderated online places.

So this is unusual to me, because flagging feels more open to abuse than the comment score. Indeed this very thing happened to me recently:

- user A says vaguely racist thing

- user B calls person out for racist thing

- user A cannot downvote a reply, so they flag it instead - making it disappear

So both can silence someone, but in one case many people need to disagree with someone and in the other you just need one person (or one person with an alt account if you want to go and revert a "vouch"). So if anything flagging is more prone to abuse than downvoting. I try to read greytext comments when I can and vouch whenever it looks unjust (and do something similar for downvoted posts) but from the looks of things not many people do.

edit: might as well include my example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164001

So I'd understand if I was downvoted and called out for my confrontational response to racism. Because at that point I'd reply that actually treating this kind of casual xenophobic comment as unserious and mocking the person is the most effective counter to this kind of behavious. Getting bogged down in debating the merits or worth of any individual person or where they might "belong" is exactly what this kind of person wants to do.

That's where you judge the moderation. The moderation quality defines the community quality.

The good thing about HN is that the moderators are reachable and they do respond intelligently. Unlike AI moderation, you can send an e-mail about it and dang will respond to you and explain why something happen and you can discuss it.

I had my account restricted multiple times and restored once we got on the same page(I don't agree with everything but once I see their point, I can work with it). I had wrongfully flagged comments unflagged by sending them an e-mail too.

It's not perfect but it's pretty good and miles ahead than anything else online.

So in my case the comment didn't desperately need unflagging - someone could wave the comment guidelines in my face and I'd probably concede that such an open confrontation broke at least one. But yeah I guess you can overturn a flagging more easily than being downvoted.

The real key is that there's a moderator, and the community is small enough that he can check things manually.

Once it gets too big for that, you're doomed to destruction eventually.

My preferred solution would be to break up the communities once they're too big, instead of trying to make a massive world-wide community like Twitter does. Reddit somewhat has this, but there is still a site-wide issue.

>Once it gets too big for that, you're doomed to destruction eventually.

>My preferred solution would be to break up the communities once they're too big, instead of trying to make a massive world-wide community like Twitter does.

I agree with this. In real life situations you can see it too, the larger the crowd the stupider their total behaviour becomes. Large crowds are good for certain things though, but mostly primal stuff like singing and chanting.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I myself prefer giving the users the moderation tools that affect only their view of the content. Users trying to save other users from posts they personally disagree with, in my opinion, can lead to echo chambers just by itself. Let me configure my account so that I can block or mute specific users or highlight keywords I can add to a list or allow users to tag posts. That way others can express their opinions in more ways than just commenting and I can use that data to determine if I want to read the existing comments or not.

I do think HN is one of the better moderation systems since this is one of the saner places on the internet and you can still configure things so you can at least see all the content, though you can't interact with it all. I would just prefer it if I was in charge of saving myself from bad opinions or whatever motivates people to down vote posts into oblivion.

Nobody wants to reinvent moderation and have a list of keywords and such that they have to maintain.

In real life, unless you’re recorded, there isn’t a record of what you say. Moreover, people who do hear first hand what you say will recall different aspects and also forget detail over time.

This allows people to evolve and to not be beholden to something they said/thought a decade ago and no longer think.

I don’t see any value in spending my time judging content saying that trans people are degenerates or that black people are an inferior race. I’ve already judged those ideas in my life and don’t need to see them anymore.

Well you can judge people that say those things as people who don't deserve your respect and attention. Then don't hang around places that interact with those people, that's how we do it in real life.

In an online world with no moderation it is impossible to not hang around places with these people. They can just show up unannounced to spew hate speech wherever they want.

> Then don't hang around places that interact with those people

We've just come full circle to why twitter choses to moderate. They don't want to keep up content that drives people away.