Comment by dang
8 years ago
I agree that this and many other things are more important than most topics on HN. Does that mean we should moderate HN with that in mind? Persuasive as that sounds, we need to remember what HN is and what it isn't.
HN's mandate is the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity is playful, wants to learn, wants variety. It is more fond of trinkets than of causes. Its relationship to More Important Things is itself curious: it inevitably touches on larger topics, yet if we were to swap priorities and put More Important Things first and curiosity second, I think it would kill the site. Certainly it would turn it into a fundamentally different thing, and you can't do that to something alive without killing it.
So the question is not "are there more important things in the world", it's "does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist, even though there are more important things in the world". I think it does, because there is room for many kinds of website. This is just the kind of website that HN is.
If you accept that, you need to understand that such a site, simply by being interesting, comes under constant pressure to be something else. From a moderation viewpoint it's our job to protect it for what it is and resist the pressure to turn it into something else, even when we know the something elses are more important. Often we personally agree with the very things we moderate. That sounds weird if not impossible, but sheer quantity has a way of changing a person and you get pretty good at it after a while.
When you say "some of the ideas he thinks are bad are promoted and grow on HN" I don't know what ideas you're talking about. But if you mean ideological ideas, yes, they certainly crop up here, but I don't believe they're growing here. I think they're floating around everywhere. They also damage intellectual curiosity and so there's an easy argument that they don't belong on HN. Convincing everyone else of that of course is not so easy.
Thankyou for the thoughful reply. (I'd have replied sooner, but of course I'm throttlebanned, because that post was downvoted and now I can't defend it - which is kinda a good example of how things are wrong here)
I'm not arguing about putting "most important things first".
I think that intellectual curiosity is very important. But I think that people are using the HN rules to push agendas, they are good at it, and I don't think that is the same as "intellectual curiosity".
Take that Rwanda thing. It's pretty clear that the parent comment isn't just indulging in "intellectual curiosity". They are playing the whole "escalation of opposition" game: "oh, maybe hate speech doesn't lead to violence" -> "there aren't enough studies showing it does" -> "it's not really a problem" -> "you are a problem for opposing hate speech".
Even in this very thread we see this same behavior:
Justifying downvote: "you told people to look up a topic but did not provide any link as a recommended starting point" (which is fine) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jlg23
But then: "I am actually very familiar with the topic and I am thus aware that one can find many, seemingly contradictory, sources" (Oh, look at that! Someone who rejects clear evidence which doesn't agree with their views) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOfLPY5VAAAw7cC.jpg:large (which was on the Naomi Wu story.)
That last link seems like cherry-picking. Why a screenshot? Why not a link to the comment on HN? Likely it was flagged and/or downvoted, which is how the community signals that a post is unacceptable. In other words your example, correctly examined, probably indicates the opposite of your claim.
It's impossible to prevent everyone from ever posting awful things to HN in the first place. This is a public, anonymous internet forum. Of course people are going to post such things, and of course it takes time for the community immune system, including downvotes and flags and moderation, to react. But it usually does. You can't judge HN fairly without taking that into account.
I know that people capture these screenshots and pass them around on Twitter and whatnot. I also know that when the original posts eventually get flagged or otherwise dealt with, the people passing the screenshots around never mention that, never update, and most of all never apologize for publicly claiming that HN—and even we personally—endorse the most horrible stuff. That's how political battle works: concede nothing, correct nothing, distort every available data point for maximum effect. It doesn't seem very compatible with intellectual honesty to me, but that is for each person's conscience to decide.
I think it's worth noting that I've been using HN for quite a while (nearly 10 years! Wow. didn't realize...). I don't think my judgements are some kind of rapidly-adopted thing.
That last link seems like cherry-picking. Why a screenshot? Why not a link to the comment on HN? Likely it was flagged and/or downvoted, which is how the community signals that a post is unacceptable. In other words your example, correctly examined, probably indicates the opposite of your claim.
Actually at the time the push-back was downvoted. And yes, I agree that it was likely flagged, hidden and then deleted.
But that isn't the point.
The point is that people did think it was acceptable to write that here, and others agreed with it.
The traditional forum response has been to hide that type of behavior from the rest of the site population. But on HN, people turn on "show dead", and then respond to it just as though it was there. We've seen similar kinds of behavior on Reddit, where poisonous behavior was pushed into subreddits in the belief that would protect the rest of the site. I don't think there is any argument that theory failed.
This is a public, anonymous internet forum. Of course people are going to post such things, and of course it takes time for the community immune system, including downvotes and flags and moderation, to react. But it usually does. You can't judge HN fairly without taking that into account.
I no longer believe that to be true, and that Rwanda example shows what I'm talking about.
Yes, the top level comments are vaguely ok most of the time, a couple of days after they are off the front page. By that point no one is reading them and the damage is done. The slow process of downvoting, flagging and moderation just doesn't work anymore.
I don't know what the solution is, but I'm sure that right now HN is doing more harm than good.
> Justifying downvote: "you told people to look up a topic but did not provide any link as a recommended starting point" (which is fine) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jlg23
> But then: "I am actually very familiar with the topic and I am thus aware that one can find many, seemingly contradictory, sources" (Oh, look at that! Someone who rejects clear evidence which doesn't agree with their views) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947869
Woha. I agree with your conclusion wrt Rwanda (or at least what I think your conclusions are - you never elaborated).
My point is: If you want to communicate, make it easy to be understood. Please provide a link "the wikipedia article[0] is a good introduction".
Telling people to ~"just do the research" only warrants one answer "I did, you are wrong. Your turn."
Nobody has to invest more time into a response to a comment than the original commenter if the original does not contain a single reference/verifiable fact.