Comment by tomhow
5 days ago
Please don't do this here. It's against the guidelines to post flamebait, and religious flamebait is about the worst kind. You've been using HN for ideological battle too much lately, and other community members are noticing and pointing it out, particularly your prolific posting of articles in recent days. This is not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. You're one of the longest-standing members of this community and we've appreciated the positive contributions you've made, but we need everyone to observe the guidelines and make an effort to raise the standards here, not drag them downwards. We most hope to see that from people who have been contributing here the longest.
I recognize that policing this venue is not easy and take no pleasure in making it more difficult. Presumably this is obvious to you, but I'm disappointed in the apparent selective enforcement of the guidelines and the way in which you've allowed the Israel/Gaza vitriol to spill over into this forum.
There are many larger and more significant injustices happening in the world and if it is important for Israel/Gaza to be discussed here, why are these other ones the victims of concern fatigue? The point is often made by commenters that the forum is too Western-centric for their liking. Your justification for allowing the Israel/Gaza discussion referred to it being of interest to a Western audience. Maybe that's a bug and not a feature and the reason Gaza is front of mind for this community is that there is insufficient exposure to the difficulties of the wider world.
This particular comment was, I thought, unrelated to the issue of politics insinuating itself here and represented a reasonable observation in the context of the original post.
I don't think it has anything to do with Gaza discourse or concern fatigue. Religion is totally tangential to the article, and religious flamebait doubly so. When you wrote your comment surely you realized it was reductive and insulting? A caricature of religious people? If that wasn't the intention then I don't understand what was.
Our role here is not "policing", it's largely janitorial work, and, if it wasn't already clear, the main thing I'm appealing for is for users who joined HN in c. 2007, and thus presumably valued the site's purpose and ethos from the beginning, to assume more of a stately demeanour, rather than creating more messes for us to clean up.
You may prefer to email us to discuss this further rather than continue it in public, but to address the main point of your comment:
One of the things you learn the fastest by doing this job is that we moderators don't have a huge amount of control over what content gets visibility here. Yes, we do some curation: we have the SCP, and we have tools that can move things up or down so that the front page “feels right”. But nothing much happens without the support of the community. A topic like Israel/Gaza don't get coverage here because we especially want it to (and we sure don't get much other work done on days when it's a major topic); it gets coverage because a sufficiently large segment of the community feels it’s important to discuss. Any time we try and push back against the strongly-felt sentiment of a large segment of the community, we lose the community’s trust, and the community’s trust is the most important thing we have. If we lose it, we're out of business very fast.
> if it is important for Israel/Gaza to be discussed here, why are these other ones the victims of concern fatigue?
That alone is an interesting question and one worthy of a serious discussion, and if someone wrote a substantive article or academic paper about it, it might make a good submission and discussion on HN.
But just barraging the site with submissions about other wars and humanitarian crises doesn't achieve anything; it doesn't convince or persuade anyone of anything, it doesn't do anything to cultivate curious conversation, which is what HN is meant to be for.
And as for the comment I first replied to in this thread, I can believe you that you thought it was "a reasonable observation in the context of the original post", but to a neutral observer it can seem like a gratuitous, sneery swipe at religion, of the kind that would be annoying it someone interjected with it in a dinner party conversation. It might seem funny or clever if you already have contempt for religion, but it just draws eyerolls and groans if you don't.
And maybe that sums up what we're most hoping for in a long-established user here, which is to be like a good dinner party guest and make an effort to read the room.
I agree with your aspirations for this community. Which is why it is hard for me to understand how posts like [1] and [2] are allowed to persist. They are not in the spirit of HN which you are expressing here. The title of [1] alone would seem to immediately invite a deletion - it is obviously divisive, does not satisfy anyone's intellectual curiosity and is a clear invitation to a flame war. There is no reason to think that discussion here will be more enlightening than that found in plenty of other more suitable places where that topic is expected to be found.
I am skeptical that there are a lot of participants here, including me, who wouldn't have been unhappy if they could not participate in that discussion. Contrary to your assertion that leaving posts like that is necessary to retain the trust of the community, I think the result is the opposite. Another aspect of trust is evenhanded enforcement. I don't understand how various comments responding to posts which are obvious flamebait are criticized while letting the original non-guideline-compliant, inciting item stand. Similarly, but less so for [2] - Eurovision?
As a counterexample, I would suggest [3] which I suppose fits the guidelines of important news that members might miss otherwise.
[1] Israel committing genocide in Gaza, scholars group says [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534202]
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Personally, I thought that comment was a nicely sarcastic observation on the nature of humanity. Also quite nicely echoing the sentiments in The Culture books by Ian M. Banks.