Comment by jb1991

The question is at what point the community response stops being beneficial and starts being harmful to the community itself.

I'd say this thread being high on HN's frontpage for many hours* has been beneficial. In addition to calling attention to Hack Club's predicament (and who doesn't love Hack Club?!), it gave a chance for many HN members to post their own relevant experiences, which it turned out there were a lot of—surprisingly many.

But in the later stage of this process, when the thread has basically done its job, drawn attention and generated a response, I think it's harmful to escalate even further and get into a tar-and-feather treatment of poor sods who wander in to offer a "sorry" or "we'll fix it". The dynamic at that point goes from "let's rally together and help these awesome kids, plus hey, something similar happened to us" to something darker and meaner. The former is good for this community, the latter is bad for it.

My point is that we should assess this based on how it affects us. That's handy, because that's information we can access, whereas we can't actually peer into $BigCo to find out whether what happened was a regrettable mistake or a nefarious grab they got caught at.

As long as I'm going on about this I want to repeat what I said in the cousin comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293388): the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage: unprocessed because it is pre-existing in a person (<-- and we all have this) for whatever original reasons that haven't been metabolized yet; opportunistic because it waits for justifiable occasions to lash out, and then lashes out with vengeance. This is not a great way to handle one's rage—it's a recipe for repetition instead of growth. How do I know that? I know it by self-observation, and I believe that anyone who wants to can know it by self-observation.

It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob. This happens easily because it happens without awareness and no one intends it. This is when we become our ugliest, so we should pay attention to signs of it in ourselves and in our groups, and learn to respond differently. Not easy, of course, but a good use to put an internet forum to!

* something, btw, that the community corrected us about - we initially downweighted the thread, which was our mistake. Fortunately we like getting corrected by the community, so it was an easy fix.

I don't know, of course. What I do know is the effect of repeatedly assuming the worst about other people and pounding them with unprocessed rage, which is what internet indignation is all about. The effect is that it poisons community. Since we want a good community, we should avoid doing that here.

The mods' job is to prevent the community system from falling into its failure modes, and/or to jig it out of them when it does (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In that sense, posting like I did there is very much our place. (Not personally, of course, but in the role.) Whether I pulled it off well or not is a separate question.

> there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by

I'd need specific links to respond meaningfully. Generally, though, 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. There's far too much content here for us to see it all, let alone read it all. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

> The parent post is fine, stay in your lane.

Sense of entitlement off the charts. Take a second to reorient yourself, you aren’t even in the wrong lane, you’re on the other side of the barrier going in the wrong direction.