2 ms·
The world is political and ideological battle. Ideas will win and ideas will lose. People will win elections and people will lose elections. Technology shapes s
by jowiar 10y ago
The world is political and ideological battle. Ideas will win and ideas will lose. People will win elections and people will lose elections. Technology shapes society, and who technology deems the winners and losers is political, both in the concern of tech-as-a-business and tech-as-a-product, as much as you try to pretend you're above it.
When you say you try to be "even-handed", what you are enforcing is "all points of view carry equal weight, regardless of concerns of ethics or truth". That YC can say "Fake news is a serious problem we would like to solve" while at the same time saying "We value civility over truth" is a political statement, and a damaging one.
- dang 10y agoYes, I know the argument and partly agree with it, and it doesn't come close to justifying the basic abuses we're talking about here. Otherwise we would not bother asking users to be civil at all, and HN would be taken over completely by flamewars. > "We value civility over truth" Nobody said that. On HN, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not—especially not to make them look bad. Since you care about truth, that shouldn't be hard.
- jowiar 10y agoYour decision yesterday to kill my comment, and not kill the parent comment, was this in action. Apologies for the quotation marks. I was intentionally (and, if you look at my posting history, non-characteristally) violating the guidelines so that you would pay attention to things. If there was was a feature in here to say "raise this comment to your attention" that didn't involve running off a string of four-letter-words, I would gladly have used it instead of doing what I did.