Comment by actionfromafar
10 months ago
"Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities."
Funny how this aged, now. Trying to shame people on Mastodon? Totally valid. Trying to chew someone out on a private forum? Now it's an organized attempt to destroy lives.
I notice this strange double standard also.
"Everyone else is a bully, but not me - I'm just trying to raise awareness."
Always funny to me to read something like that. HN has high moderation, one of the highest I've seen on modern fora, only a few steps below r/AskHistorians for example. I don't see this "abuse, bigotry, and nastiness" here and even if there are comments like that, they are quickly downvoted and dead.
But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.
They require an account with showdead enabled so they are not being indexed by default.
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HN is pretty low moderation across the axis of personal attacks. If you politely say a ad hominem or racist or *-phobic thing here, it's unlikely you'll be moderated for it, for instance.
I can dig up many such examples, but I suspect the response would be, "of course that's not moderated" because this community has a different set of values than some others.
Moderation is always an editorial action, and as such we tend to view it as strong when it aligns with our own values and weak when it doesn't.
That doesn't match my experience of what we do, so I'd like to see those "many such examples".
IMO, if you're going to make charges like this, which would be serious if they were true, you should include links so readers can make up their own minds.
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I don't think HN has high moderation at all. High moderation would imply stricter and quicker punishment for making rancid remarks.
There were a number of remarks on the prior thread by people making conspiracy claims, harassment, insults etc. Some of them get flag-killed, some just down voted but ultimately the users on the site still remain.
Of course I'm not one to be above such a thing in terms of insulting people occasionally but HN is really quite permissive in terms of what you can post and get away with. It takes consistent and repeated bad behavior to get a warning, and even more to get banned. And if you're an expert in being politely venomous you can get away with even more. That's why the outside perception of HN tends to be a lot worse than the inward one.