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OH COME ON Dang, Alex called up Wes's employer and threatened him with criminal charges and then had the balls to lie about it in his facebook post that he didn

OH COME ON Dang, Alex called up Wes's employer and threatened him with criminal charges and then had the balls to lie about it in his facebook post that he didn't "Threaten". Are you seriously defending this??

dang 11y ago
Asking HN users to be civil defends nothing except civility. There's a relevant general point here though. Reactions like this, and many others in this thread, are reflexive. That's really not what this site is for. Good comments for HN aren't reflexive, they're reflective. Practicing that distinction is the most important thing for being a contributor here, and it's orthogonal to one's actual views.
- zorpner 11y ago
  Asking HN users to be civil defends nothing except civility. This would only be true if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil. As it stands, it does generally come off as defending specific users. ...it's orthogonal to one's actual views. Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator -- this is "fair and balanced"-style thinking. There are many perspectives whose projection onto comment reflectivity are anything but zero.
  - dang 11y ago
    > if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil That's asking us to operate like machines—supermachines, in fact, with incivility detection and moderation powers. That's unrealistic. HN users' capacity to be uncivil exceeds our capacity to ask them not to, so the latter maxes out. > it does generally come off as defending specific users We try hard not to play favorites. I'm biased, of course, but there's more than one kind of bias here. People are more likely to notice us criticizing a comment they identify with than the cases that go the other way. We're biased to notice what we dislike and assign more weight to it. > Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator In that case I'm a bad moderator already, because everything I've learned about HN is packed into what I said there.

dang 11y ago

Asking HN users to be civil defends nothing except civility. There's a relevant general point here though. Reactions like this, and many others in this thread, are reflexive. That's really not what this site is for. Good comments for HN aren't reflexive, they're reflective. Practicing that distinction is the most important thing for being a contributor here, and it's orthogonal to one's actual views.

zorpner 11y ago
Asking HN users to be civil defends nothing except civility. This would only be true if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil. As it stands, it does generally come off as defending specific users. ...it's orthogonal to one's actual views. Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator -- this is "fair and balanced"-style thinking. There are many perspectives whose projection onto comment reflectivity are anything but zero.
- dang 11y ago
  > if that request were applied equally whenever HN users were uncivil That's asking us to operate like machines—supermachines, in fact, with incivility detection and moderation powers. That's unrealistic. HN users' capacity to be uncivil exceeds our capacity to ask them not to, so the latter maxes out. > it does generally come off as defending specific users We try hard not to play favorites. I'm biased, of course, but there's more than one kind of bias here. People are more likely to notice us criticizing a comment they identify with than the cases that go the other way. We're biased to notice what we dislike and assign more weight to it. > Believing this is going to made you a worse moderator In that case I'm a bad moderator already, because everything I've learned about HN is packed into what I said there.