Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account?

The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.

Real person. Live in the south. Kamala being a woman had no impact on her election chances. Most people in my circles were big Haley fans.

Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.

The funny part is that most female world leaders are right wing, since right wing voters are more likely to vote for a woman than left wing voters. There are many more left wing female candidates, but those that win elections are mostly right wing.

In the US, the far-right party elects many fewer women than the center-right party[0]

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-acc...

HN is more tightly controlled than it lets on. User moderation tools are suspended if a user doesn't use them in accordance with a pro-corporate right-wing bias.

Do you have personal experience with this? I was under the impression that abuse of moderation tools was common due to the fact that user moderation tools and open registration do not mix well.

Yes, I asked dang by email, and he told me flags from my account have been disabled because I flagged things he agreed with. I think votes are also disabled.

The buttons are still there, but they don't do anything.

It's funny, because I had been feeling this in my gut - the idea that they do have oversight over flagging and downvoting, and they just pick and choose who they go after based on biases.

To that end, I've actually been avoiding the downvote and flag button entirely. It's handy to close off an avenue of admin retaliation, but on a deeper level I feel like the reflexive race to downvote people you disagree with is the "game" part of gamified engagement.

Besides, if an HN user says something horrendous, I feel like other HN users deserve to know the kind of company they have on this site, instead of tone-policing it under the rug.

It's not like you're worse off it your fl-gging is sh-dow-disabled, than if you never fl-g at all.

There is also word-based fl-gging. I don't know whether HN itself is doing it or some users.

There's no aspect of this that we haven't publicly explained over and over again. Here's one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. Here are countless others: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you read some of those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. What you shouldn't do is take commenters' claims about it un-skeptically, because sometimes (as in this case) they are false.

You don't explain the aspect where a certain political group generates way more flaggable content, and then you flag-ban those who flag it, which promotes that content because it is no longer flagged.

You also don't explain how 2 posts per 3 hours constitutes a "ban".

Re your first statement: certainly I've addressed that issue many times, but I can do it again: I don't believe that claim is true. It merely feels true to people with strong political passions, because everyone always over-weights the contributions of their enemies and under-weights the contributions of their own side. The significant thing—I was going to say "the ironic thing", but it isn't ironic—is that this class of politically passionate users all have the same perception even though they may have entirely opposing beliefs. In this they resemble each other more than they do anyone else.

I don't understand your second statement.

We definitely banned you, for the reasons I gave at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699941. Banned accounts can still post to HN but their posts are killed by default.

You seem to be asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46694184 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46691754. Those comments were killed by user flags. That was before we banned you.

The buck always stops with the platform owners. You don't get to blame users for moderation decisions.

By that argument, it's we who are doing all the upvotes, downvotes, and flags on the site. I don't think most HN readers would look at it that way.

The distinction between moderation done by users (votes, flags, etc.) and moderation done by admins (killing posts, banning accounts, etc.) is long established and well understood by the community. It's not about blaming.

I do not take their claims un-skeptically. I've been lied to one too many times by users who claim, "Oh I totally didn't do anything to get banned, bro."

But I don't trust you either, and my reasons for being reluctant to flag and downvote are genuine. This is because I've also seen moderation teams who swear up and down that they're not biased, but who later get caught out when they put their finger on the scale through action or deliberate inaction.

But there's another dimension to the unfrustworthiness, because I have also seen moderation teams who don't put their finger on the scale per se, but are so invested in their own rules that they let their community rot beneath their feet from people who have figured out how to manipulate them.

If you can find an instance of me saying we're not biased, I'd love to see it, because I'm pretty sure I've never said that.

What I've said, and believe, is that of course we're biased, because it's impossible not to be and because unconscious bias is a thing, but that we at least try to mitigate the effects of it, and have a lot of practice at doing so. Are those efforts negligible? I doubt it. I think HN would be a different place if we weren't trying to do that.