Comment by johnbarron
5 days ago
Maybe its opportune to talk about editorial consistency, because your statement here is a fascinating case study in selective moral clarity.
When posts surface about Gaza, documented by the UN, by Médecins Sans Frontières, by the Lancet, by journalists who were subsequently killed while reporting or now in Lebanon, they vanish from the front page with remarkable efficiency...
The reasons, which I have collected like trading cards at this point, include: "too political," "not related to tech," "flamebait," "this isn't the forum for this," "not intellectually curious," and my personal favorite, "this will only generate heat, not light."
Entire hospital systems destroyed, aid workers killed in marked vehicles, tens of thousands of documented child casualties, and the curated editorial position is: not HN material.
A Molotov cocktail lands on a billionaire CEO's porch. No injuries. Likely a disturbed individual, and according to some well researched reporting in the New Yorker, Altman's personal life has generated no shortage of intense grievances that have nothing to do with AI or tech.
But here we are: front page, moderator editorial, existential crisis about the community's soul...!?
So help me understand the framework. Is violence HN worthy when it is directed upward on the org chart? Is a zero casualty arson attempt on a mansion more deserving of community reflection than systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, because one involves someone in YC Rolodex?
You write that you've "never seen a thread this bad." I'd invite you to read the comments that appear in the eleven minutes before Gaza threads get flagged. They're remarkably similar in tone, just aimed at people who don't have Sam publicist.
You say you want to "find something else to do with your life." Maybe that instinct is worth listening to. Since the AI boom, HN moderation has drifted from "intellectually curious forum" toward something closer to "curated narrative for the industry it covers."
When a platform consistently decides that violence against tech executives is a moral emergency but violence enabled by tech companies' contracts is "off-topic," the person setting that editorial line is not a neutral steward, they're an editor with a viewpoint.
And that's fine, but let's not dress it up as community values. So...In the spirit of consistency:
I'd like to this post be flagged. It involves no technology. It's a criminal matter best left to law enforcement. The comment section is, by the moderator's own assessment, irredeemably toxic. It is generating heat, not light. It is too political. It is not intellectually curious. It will attract flamebait.
In other words...it meets every single criterion routinely applied to kill discussions about violence that does not happen on somebody porch in Pacific Heights.
> Is violence HN worthy when it is directed upward on the org chart?
Generally, world news and politics are not supposed to be submitted unless there's a tech industry connection. The exception seems to be world-changing news, and there's a light touch on YC-affiliated news for conflict of interest reasons.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's not really accurate in terms of how we moderate stories with political charge on HN. I've written about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone want to understand how we actually approach this, all the information is accessible through those links.
You seem to be making quite a few false assumptions about HN moderation—for example, that we left the current thread on the frontpage. In fact we downweighted it the same way we downweight other flamewars.
HN has had many major frontpage threads about Israel/Gaza. We haven't been suppressing the topic. I gather that you feel it should have more representation than it does, but that is a different issue; everyone feels that way about the topic they feel strongest about. Incidentally, the people on the opposite side from you believe that we're nefariously suppressing things in exactly the opposite direction, and direct their ire at us in much the same way that you have. (To put it crudely, we get hammered for antisemitism from one angle and genocide from another.)
You seem to be assuming that I'm not aware of what awful things people post in those threads. On the contrary, I'm sickeningly familiar with them and have banned many accounts for breaking the site guidelines there. If you know of a case that we missed—entirely possible, since we don't see everything—I'd like to see links. But you shouldn't assume that the moderators must be on the opposite side of an issue from you, or have no human feelings about it, when you happen to see something bad on HN. The likeliest explanation is simply that we haven't seen it yet.
There are many ways for a thread to be bad. You're right that people hurling tribal abuse at each other is one of those. However, even in the worst of those threads I don't usually see people justifying or celebrating specific violence against specific persons, and if I did see that, I would intervene. I think what shocked me in the current case was how the thread quickly turned into a mob dynamic with commenters vying to outdo each other, no doubt feeling that it is just fine to do that—indeed, righteous—because the object of the rage was $rich-ceo.
What I was saying is that a mob dynamic like that is not ok on HN even if the target is $rich-ceo. It's not "you can't do this on HN because the target is rich and powerful". It's "you can't do this on HN to anyone, even if they happen to be rich and powerful".
I gather that you won't believe me, since you've built an entire case on assuming the opposite. All I can tell you that it is a deep misunderstanding. I've intervened in many such threads many times, regardless of who it was that the commenters were celebrating harm to, or attempted harm.
As for the notion of treating one incident of failed violence as more important than mass slaughter of children, I agree with you that that would be grotesque.