Comment by throwaway665544
1 year ago
Envision an airline withholding safety records, a car manufacturer keeping crash test results private, a restaurant refusing to provide health inspection logs, or a government refusing to disclose details of its budget allocation — all claiming that transparency would only complicate matters and provide "more data for distrust". In each case, the flawed nature of your core argument becomes obviously evident.
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
That's interesting! But I don't think the "flawed nature of my core argument" is obviously evident—and I don't think the community would consider that obvious either.
It could be fun to look into it together, but the fun stops at "I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change". Why dance if someone wants to kick you in the shins?
I hear you, but relying solely on the community's perception, particularly when it's predominantly of a certain mindset, doesn't guarantee objectivity. After all, recent years have seen an accelerating trend where leftist-controlled media and social-media companies have normalized the suppression of opposing viewpoints under the guise of 'fairness'.
It's one thing for private communities to set their own rules, but it's quite another to publicly tout these restrictions as universally fair when they're essentially projections of biased viewpoints coming from human-beings in positions of power. Actual transparency permits genuine openness and dialogue, rather than masking personal ideologies as righteous principles.
I don't think you can reasonably compare the importance of transparency in your examples to that of editorial decisions in a private moderated community.
In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.
In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate. Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.
It's perfectly reasonable for private communities to have their own sets of rules and regulations. I'm simply pointing out an example of the all-too-common situation pervading certain communities where clear mechanisms of ideological projection and indoctrination (i.e. censorship, non-transparency, etc) are present but unseeable to many members of the community since it supports their existing ideological beliefs. a.k.a. Cognitive dissonance
I think the fundamental difference is that an airline or government is working according to objective rules and regulations, while HN is not. HN is trying to build a community, and I think that communities need subjective rules rather than objective
I have to admit, I laughed when I realized you are using a throwaway account, making this a strange work of performance art.
My original account was shadow-banned by HN years ago (probably by @dang) due to some overly heated political discourse bs.
Hence my interest in debating @dang's straw-man response....and nowadays, using throwaway accounts is often the only way others even see opposing viewpoints on topics like this.