Comment by savryn
4 years ago
I'm new here, and I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged. Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment and the few obvious supporting comments from actual women and Europeans in question were flagged, despite that safety from assault is the basic existential underpinning of being naked and women's key fear.
If hackernews won't allow cultural topics at all, great. But when it does, it's morally repulsive to flag and target and mute the voices from the key subjects.
Direct "lived experience" by actual women on any topic takes second fiddle to the neoliberal narratives of nerdy men running these echo chambers?
Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as the r/twoxchromosomes clown world, where women's voices on their political and social interests get moderated by those without two x chromosomes?
Guess we're back to the false feminism of "only nice girls allowed" where nice girls only do and think what men let them.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here
HN as a website allows many unpopular opinions to be expressed, but a minority of users will flag just about any unpopular opinion. If two (three?) people flag the same comment, it disappears for most users and is marked [flagged] [dead]. Some small population of HN users browse with "showdead: yes" (apparently you've already done this?). If you have enough "karma" (500?) you can "vouch" to revive a topic that has been flagged. Some users regularly do this, and over time, most (but not all) polite and constructive comments end up revived.
As a new user, there's not a lot you can do about this, other than posting your own polite and constructive comments, even if they go against the dominent narrative. If you come across a particularly good comment you think was unfairly flagged that isn't revived soon after, you can quote it and repost to call attention to it. Or you can email Dan (hn@ycombinator.com) and point it out to him. He can be slow to respond, and won't always do what you want, but he'll usually give you an honest answer if he doesn't.
> I see a totally fair comment below this has been flagged
Which comment is that? I tried but couldn't find it.
> Same as the thread on 'decline of nude sunbathing' where my comment
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We're trying to have a particular type of internet forum here—one oriented around intellectual curiosity, not snarky flamewar or ideological battle. Since the latter end-states are what the internet seems to default to, it takes energy and work to try to avoid them. We do what we can as mods, but above all we need commenters to participate in the intended spirit.
Direct lived experience is certainly compatible with curiosity, and therefore highly welcome here. It needs to come without snarky attacks, ideological talking points and the like, because those things destroy curiosity and set a thread into flamewar mode. They're also the opposite of direct lived experience.
> Someone please give me the wink wink defactos here, is the hackernews enforced narrative the same as
I can give you the defactos wink-free! The answer is definitely not, and there is no enforced narrative. What we want is a space where people have respectful, curious conversation across differences, and above all learn from each other. Trying to enforce any one narrative would destroy that possibility, so we need multiple narratives, multiple voices, multiple views. The trick is to have them without bursting into flames. On divisive topics, that is not so easy.
I vouched for quite a number of comments yesterday that I felt were constructive and respectful, but were nonetheless flagged. I didn't keep track of the comments and don't know if they got flagged again; I don't know if you can see what I "vouched" for in some sort of admin UI? From what I recall this wasn't isolated to one particular viewpoint or "side" by the way, there are, ehm, strong emotions all around.
Yes, we can track vouches in admin software. I took a quick look. Most of the comments you vouched for seem not to have ended up in a flagged state; a few did. I'd probably have left a few more of them [flagged], but I didn't see anything too egregious, other than one comment were a user pointedly included someone's personal details.
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You can probably email dang (probably @ycombin…) if you want. Mentioning his user name here might be enough too.