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Comment by zmgsabst

1 year ago

Perhaps your comment would be more constructive if you could say how my comments break the rules. Help me grow and help me follow the rules by being specific.

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You say that you’d equally critique the opposite viewpoint, but that’s been factually untrue before:

You censored people for pointing out in purely neutral terms, using videos of the people themselves giving interviews, that BLM was a Marxist organization — on the basis that it’s an “inherent flame war” to say true things the community is upset by.

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Again, my comment doesn’t seem any different than many others here you didn’t feel the need to critique.

To me, that seems like the antisemitism we witnessed from Harvard et al — who censor speech on campus, then cry “free speech” when making calls for genocide.

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zmgsabst

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dang  1 year ago

> Perhaps your comment would be more constructive if you could say how my comments break the rules. Help me grow and help me follow the rules by being specific.

That would of course be best; the problem is that it takes at least 10x more time and energy to produce such explanations, if not more, than it does to write the ordinary sort of moderation reply. I don't have nearly enough cycles to be able to do that, so most of the time I have to rely on linking to the rules and trusting users to figure out how they broke them.

There's another aspect too: offering a detailed explanation frequently backfires, in the sense that the commenter comes back with a counterargument that's 2x or 5x as long, rejecting the explanation and making complex demands for further clarification. This doesn't always happen, but it's common. It's physically impossible to continue all such conversations to a satisfactory conclusion, but leaving them incomplete often leaves things in a worse state than not having tried.

That said, I'll try and give you a few details:

It ought to be obvious that beginning a comment with "Yawn." breaks HN's rule "Don't be snarky", and given the nature of this topic, also this rule: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - > my comment doesn’t seem any different than many others here you didn’t feel the need to critique

There are far too many posts for us to read them all. I spent the entire day in this thread yesterday, reading comments and posting moderation replies when I saw commenters breaking HN's rules regardless of their views on the underlying topic, and still didn't come close to seeing them all.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. It's a mistake to assume that I saw a comment and just "didn't feel the need to critique". Worse, if you go from that to assuming that the mods must be biased against your viewpoint, that's more or less guaranteed to be a non sequitur. Everyone with strong feelings on a topic, on every side of every position, feels that way (

  • zmgsabst  1 year ago

    I appreciate the time to make a detailed reply.

    > Everyone with strong feelings on a topic, on every side of every position, feels that way

    As a small aside, do you have a page that explains the comment search?