Comment by WrtCdEvrydy
4 years ago
Are you serious? If I publish a paper on the social engineering vulnerabilities we have used over the last three months to gain access to your password and attempt to take over Hacker News, you would be fine with it? No outburst, no angrily banning my account...
It seems odd that you are responding with a threat, or at least a threatening hypothetical to a (the?) moderator.
The way I understand it is that unnecessarily angry or confrontational posts tend to lower the overall tone. They are cathartic/fun to write, fast to write, and tend to get wide overall agreement/votes. So if they are allowed then most of the discussion on a topic gets pushed down beneath that sort of post.
Hence why we are asked to refrain, to permit more room for focused and substantive discussion.
No, I'm asking if he thinks as a person who built Hacker News if this is what we want out of the technology ecosystem from the cybersecurity professionals.
Edit: dang is a good person and I don't understand how he's taking sides here with people sending out malware (because that's what this sums up to). I understand I came on a little hot, but that was unexpected.
I'm not taking a side, just making the shallow point that "fuck these people", etc., is not good HN posting.
It's common when we post a moderation reply for people to assume that the mods are disagreeing with them [1], when we're just asking them to follow the site guidelines. Those two things are orthogonal, but they fuse under temperature: that is, when one is feeling hot about something, it's hard to separate them. They come unstuck as things cool down.
(I don't mean to pick on you personally. This kind of reaction happens in everyone, certainly including me.)
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
2 replies →
I'm glad we agree on the merits of dang.
After reviewing the thread I don't see any of what you are asking, here, upstream. I don't seem dang coming out on the same side as people sending out malware, and I don't really see that question present. I wish I had something more concrete to say, but I think your take here (and only here) is wrong and that you might have just entered this one on the wrong foot?