Comment by dang
5 months ago
HN's principle is to have intellectually curious conversation about topics that gratify intellectual curiosity. It seems pretty obvious that this isn't that.
5 months ago
HN's principle is to have intellectually curious conversation about topics that gratify intellectual curiosity. It seems pretty obvious that this isn't that.
History is watching, and you are complicit. How long are you going to justify censoring anyone against the Grand Free Speech Absolutist? What is going to be _your_ red line?
We're all complicit.
I'm going to do my job the same way as always. History will come to its own conclusions.
This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call.
> This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are.
You're wrong.
It's not going away: https://www.axios.com/2025/01/23/elon-musk-nazi-joke-adl
It's who and what he is: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/elon-musk...
It's who he wants to be.
I would agree in a lot of cases. But we aren't all complicit at the same level.
I know it's how Trump and Elon work: they make outrage after outrage, crime after crime, so that one shadows the other, we can't keep track, we get exhausted, etc.
But there has to be a tipping point, or we just boil like frogs in the fascism saucepan.
If this is not the tipping point, what will it be? A proud, intense, in-your-face nazi salute, the day of the inauguration. If your tipping point is when they finally come after you, you'll be all alone. It's textbook 1930s Germany.
You seem to be saying there will be no tipping point for you. People wonder how the darkest moments of history happened, and how people let it happen.
This is how.
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Was pg's post about "woke ideology" an intellectually curious conversation starter?
It's not. Yet the post you are talking is still up.
All I ask is consistency.
let see whether the consistency will happen or what is the response about the matter.
Sure. Certainly far more than this story.
That's not to say that the HN discussion went well, but we can't control that. We can only play the odds, and it's important to.
I'm not buying that; it's pre-emptive laziness, you don't want to attempt to even bother to see a spirit of discussion fostered on this thread because of your hunch that there will be some bad actors in the comment section that will cause moderators and high-karma users to, well, moderate.
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That seems like a stretch. Discussions on wokeness are among the most common on the internet, it's also a well-known flame-war topic and explicitly political in nature. I think most people could have predicted the outcome of that thread based on the title alone. I suppose anything written by pg is automatically germane to HN, but that creates an awkward situation if other tech adjacent politically relevant discussion is subject to normal moderation policies.
Anyway, I know moderation is difficult, but I want to gently suggest that this feels like a double standard.
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