https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40501414
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136616
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40017777
This kind of thing is not ok here—it's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
I am not perfect and I should have been a bit more polite in some of the posts you link.
People post absolutely reprehensible opinions on this site, and a rational, reasonable response to those opinions is not politeness. The startup community is supportive of and participates in a lot of extremely harmful practices, and believes a lot of harmful ideologies. If espousing ideologies that are literally killing people is allowed by the guidelines, but pointing out how horrific those ideologies are isn't allowed by the guidelines, then the guidelines are effectively supporting those ideologies.
Take for example this post which you linked (I'm linking the post it was responding to):
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135978
The above post I 100% stand by. I think I said that about as politely as I think is possible; any more polite would be miscommunication.
If you consider that post a problem, I understand, but I'm not going to comply with that. If that's the case, please just delete my account and all my posts, and I won't attempt to create another account. I'd rather not be associated with a site that's protects reprehensible ideologies in the name of politeness.
(1) plenty of HN users post comments from plenty of ideological positions without breaking the site guidelines and (therefore) without getting moderated; and
(2) users breaking the site guidelines from all different ideological positions do get moderated.
That doesn't fit with "you're taking a side". In my experience the causality goes the other way: when people get moderated they have a strong tendency to jump to "the mods are against my side" rather than look at how their posts are breaking the rules and/or go against the intended spirit of the site. In other words it's not "I got moderated because you're taking a side", it's "you must be taking a side, because I got moderated". So it's probably worth adding:
(3) The users who jump to "you're taking a side" are distributed across all the ideologies.
There are also users of every ideological view making the case "my ideology is special; it requires me to break the rules, otherwise it cannot properly be communicated". This is disproven by all their co-ideologists who have no trouble communicating similar views without that.
I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136616 was not as bad as your other three comments I listed, but it still used the "people like you" trope, which is a flamewar + personal attack combo that leads to forum hell.
I don't believe you need personal attack, clichés of internet aggression, etc., to make your case for what you believe in. On the contrary, these things cheapen your position. Morever, they are fungible across all the ideologies—that is,
(4) commenters who resort to breaking the site guidelines resemble each another far more than they resemble anyone else. Ideology is not the high-order bit here.
By the way, I don't identify with your word "politeness". Enforcing politeness in not at all what we're after, and in that sense I agree with you, though I think you're misassessing what we do as mods. Politeness is profoundly uninspiring as a value, and I'd find it profoundly demotivating if that were the principle. But it's not.
The HN guidelines used to say "Be civil", but we changed that years ago to "Be kind", because civility (which I take to be close to politeness) doesn't go deep enough to capture what we want here. Kindness is a far better word. We want people to be in good relational connection with each other, even when they disagree about a topic. That's an ideal, of course, but it's the right ideal for HN, because it's needed in order to optimize for curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
You'll note that increasingly my posts here are on homelessness. There are nearly 600,000 homeless in the US alone, many of whom will die from homelessness-related problems. Many posts on this site both spread misinformation about that problem, and argue against any and all real solutions to that problem. That isn't kind, but it isn't moderated. And treating those comments as if they are not reprehensible, might be kind to the poster, but it's unkind to the 600,000 homeless in the country where a lot of HN users live.
Kindness isn't a simple thing: sometimes kindness to one person needs to be balanced with kindness to other people.
I get that you're using the word differently and that's fine, as long as we understand what each other means by it. It seems like you're defining your political position (on homelessness in this case) as 'kind' while the opposing position is 'unkind'. Presumably someone of the opposite view might take issue with that, but I don't.
Since it's in your interest to argue for your views in a way that is personally kind to the people you're arguing with, I don't see any tradeoff between our two usages.
I am in fact completely justified in being hostile to ideas like "It would be interesting to imprison the homeless" because ideas like that are reprehensible.
It's clear you don't want my behavior here, but I equally do not want people here who discuss homeless people with zero compassion. There should be no safe place for that sort of discussion.
Think about this: if the topic were genocide, would you demand that I stop being hostile to other users if those users were advocating genocide?
Now consider that the homeless population of the U.S. as of 2020 was 580,000[1]. That's more than the population displaced by, for example, the Mt. Lebanon famine which is widely regarded as a genocide[2], and the homeless are subjected to many of the same conditions, and given this has been going on for decades and decades, homelessness has almost certainly killed more people. Where is your proportional response to this? Yes, I'm absolutely hostile to this being treated lightly: why aren't you?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon