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A comment on Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches people to argue better. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches pe... by ceejayoz on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:00PM (#47158594)
"This comment appears to dismiss the complexity of discussions about dogwhistles by claiming that 'everything is a dogwhistle.' This type of blanket statement can undermine the seriousness of genuinely harmful coded language, and can trivialize valid concerns about discrimination and manipulation in discourse."
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches pe... by NickHodges0702 on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:07PM (#47158708)
We've dialed "dog whistles" way back -- thanks for the feedback.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches pe... by ceejayoz on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:11PM (#47158760)
Just remember every time you tweak the defaults, the 90% of your site owners using those defaults suddenly have a significant shift in their moderation policy that they are themselves unaware of.

(I moderated a vBulletin forum in the 1990s. This shit gets really, really, really hard, and no one is ever really happy with it.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches pe... by NickHodges0702 on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:18PM (#47158851)
Sorry -- should have been more clear: We are shifting the defaults on the demo site, not on respectify itself.

Thanks for a great point, though. Finding the best defaults will be very important, and we can't tweak it like that very often if at all.

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Re:Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches pe... by NickHodges0702 on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:37PM (#47159062)
>>(I moderated a vBulletin forum in the 1990s. This shit gets really, really, really hard, and no one is ever really happy with it.<<

I feel that. I used to moderate the Object Pascal Compuserve forum. That was hard enough!

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Re:Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches pe... by ceejayoz on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:44PM (#47159127)
This one was for gamers.

I’m pretty sure we created a few budding lawyers out of some high schoolers.

[ Parent | on HN ]