Comment by dang
3 years ago
Wow, what an amazing combination of statements. You're blowing my mind actually.
> Try talking to e.g. a human at Google elsewhere, it's just not possible.
100% yes - being willing to be a human at the end of (almost) every communication is the thing that matters most to us in terms of HN moderation.
> HN is the only place where it is possible to talk to the people who build the tech infrastructure which dominates and changes our daily lives.
Here I start to lose the connection. I don't feel like HN admins are building that. We're just trying to run a web forum. It's true that YC owns HN and YC invests (or tries to!) in the most important world-changing startups, but there are several layers of indirection between us and that.
> Internet politics is made here.
Oh god that sounds absolutely awful. Let's not and say we did?
> Wow, what an amazing combination of statements. You're blowing my mind actually.
I'm not sure if that was meant to sound positive? :|
> > HN is the only place where it is possible to talk to the people who build the tech infrastructure which dominates and changes our daily lives.
> Here I start to lose the connection. I don't feel like HN admins are building that. We're just trying to run a web forum. It's true that YC owns HN and YC invests (or tries to!) in the most important world-changing startups, but there are several layers of indirection between us and that.
> > Internet politics is made here.
> Oh god that sounds absolutely awful. Let's not and say we did?
Oh I was not talking about what HN intends to be, but rather about what it factually is just by the question of who hangs out here.
Factually, it's the place with the highest probability of FAANG people hanging out that I know of.
So as a "civilian", here I have the highest chance to get heard by them.
And here they discuss new technologies and all kinds of aspects of technology which affect people, *and* their opinions on how things should be get influenced here, so this is the "political" aspect.
Sure, they are not legally entitled to decide Internet law, but the way their software works has consequences which can be considered as political and even as "the law" in terms of areas where there is no governmental regulation yet.
Thus HN is the place where a regular person has the highest chance to influence Internet "politics".
And to get to the point: That's why it is so annoying to get locked out of it. It feels kind of similar of losing a small part of Internet "voting" rights.
I did mean to be positive! I know it probably sounded sarcastic.
I'm sorry it's not possible to respond in detail to everything you wrote here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35224229. I'd like to—but I just don't have the capacity.
The short version is that we have to moderate HN according to the intended use of the site. I don't think your political interpretation is accurate (I think you're overestimating the influence and value of this place) but even if I'm wrong and you're right, we can't change how we moderate because of that. If we did, this place would soon cease to exist for its intended purpose (curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest) and then its influence and value would rapidly decline anyhow.