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.
The comments on this have already amply fulfilled my prediction. People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person. HN is about learning, and nobody learns anything new in a thread like that
You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.
It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.
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.
I think that's fair and of course I know that many people would make the individual moderation calls differently than we do, and be just as 'right' as we are. At the specific-data-point level, we're talking about judgment calls and guesswork, and there is inevitably some arbitrariness there. Consistency at that level is not possible.
On the other hand, a thoughtful pg essay and a sensational 3-second video clip of the most trollicious person on the internet are pretty different on (let's call it) the genre spectrum, and that's an important consideration for HN moderation too.
As inconsistent and arbitrary as individual moderation calls may feel or be, though, the principles of HN moderation have been surprisingly consistent over the years, and that's the more important level. We don't always apply them correctly or consistently, but I think the principles themselves are good ones for this site and are easily defensible. Most of what I do in moderation comments like this is try to explain those principles, though usually the commenters are concerned about one particular story, at least in the moment.
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.
The comments on this have already amply fulfilled my prediction. People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person. HN is about learning, and nobody learns anything new in a thread like that
You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.
It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.
In past threads I've described this as the difference between reflexive and reflective discussion. If anyone wants to understand the basic approach, maybe some of that would help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
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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.
I think that's fair and of course I know that many people would make the individual moderation calls differently than we do, and be just as 'right' as we are. At the specific-data-point level, we're talking about judgment calls and guesswork, and there is inevitably some arbitrariness there. Consistency at that level is not possible.
On the other hand, a thoughtful pg essay and a sensational 3-second video clip of the most trollicious person on the internet are pretty different on (let's call it) the genre spectrum, and that's an important consideration for HN moderation too.
As inconsistent and arbitrary as individual moderation calls may feel or be, though, the principles of HN moderation have been surprisingly consistent over the years, and that's the more important level. We don't always apply them correctly or consistently, but I think the principles themselves are good ones for this site and are easily defensible. Most of what I do in moderation comments like this is try to explain those principles, though usually the commenters are concerned about one particular story, at least in the moment.
“People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person.”
I and many others see something very blatant in the video, and you dismissing that is lazy and frankly, it makes you look biased.
Ive generally been impressed with HN moderation, but this is a very glaring exception.