Comment by therobots927

5 days ago

[flagged]

We stopped using the word 'civil' years ago.

Commenters here need to follow the rules, and the rules don't go away when the topic is a tough one. On the contrary, they apply more, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html makes clear.

  • Happy to follow the rules when free discussion is allowed. Watching this topic get censored aggressively on here during some of the darkest months for Palestinians eroded my respect for your “rules”.

    • We've specifically protected, carefully moderated, and kept open many threads about this topic, at considerable cost, because each time one of these appears on HN, the mods can kiss the rest of their day goodbye, not to mention look forward to streams of abuse [1]. Forgive me therefore if I dispute your claim of "censored aggressively". To me that feels like not taking yes for an answer.

      That's understandable, because the people who feel passionately about any topic (call it X) always feel like X is vastly underrepresented, and even "censored aggressively", on HN. We can say things like "frontpage space is the scarcest resource" and "we can't have too much repetition" till the cows come home, but it won't take this feeling away. Even when X is literally the most discussed topic on HN, we get people claiming that X is being censored aggressively—it's not even uncommon [2]. This is a function of how people feel and nothing else.

      [1] I'm not comparing this to the suffering of the people in the actual situation. That is obvious of course, but since someone will accuse me of doing that if I don't say this, I'm saying this.

      [2] If you want an example, this one is engraved in my memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. How someone could turn the most-discussed topic on the entire site into "not any mention" and "censored aggressively" still zaps me with pain and anger every time it comes back to me, which fortunately is not all that often.

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