7 ms·

Why is this even on Hacker News? Does the majority of readers here have the expertise to comment on the matter?

thereare5lights 8y ago
I suspect there is a strain of anti-Chinese sentiments here. When you see articles relating to black social issues, they immediately get flagged, but articles like these always get through.
- dang 8y ago
  There's no way for HN to be immune from macro trends. The macro trend right now, unfortunately, is polarization between China and the West. As I'm sure you've noticed, this has been manifesting dramatically in Western media over the past months. Since the audience here is mostly Western (50% US, 30% Europe, 7% Canada plus Australia, IIRC), it's inevitably going to identify more with one side than the other. We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.
  - thereare5lights 8y ago
    You can absolutely eliminate it, you just don't want to because it would cost too much. I suppose macro trends would also explain why black social issues always get flagged on HN as well.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dang 8y ago
      Eliminate a Western audience looking at things from a Western perspective? That is an excessive idea of what moderators can do. We are janitors.
      - thereare5lights 8y ago
        You can do something so that black social issues links do not get removed.
        dang 8y ago
        Plenty of such articles have been discussed here, and we've often turned off flags on the more substantive ones. It really depends on the specific article and how well it fits the mandate of this site. Not all social-issue articles do.
      - shawn 8y ago
        You are no janitor. You banned my new account on Christmas when I was trying to help someone who is committing suicide on your website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758099 Congratulations on being the grinch.
llacb47 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  But then look at the front page, look how it never applies to everything, not even close, and how trivial, cute subjects never get these complaints. People are avoiding their own responsibility and don't like when others exercise it. Since I can only guess anyway, that's my guess. What I know for a fact is that the reasons against such a topic simply being where the interest of people puts it, do not hold water, that is, are always selectively applied. That in itself is intellectually interesting, but we are not allowed to personally question posters on HN too much, even when it's done it's barely rewarded with an honest reply, so we aren't intellectuals enough for that stuff. It's pointless to talk about the aggregate of a group when individuals remain opaque, so the whole subject is simply beyond our reach, as intellectually stimulating and important as it may be. We should know what a double standard is though: If we can pretend wiggly lines satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we can take note of a country that already build massive concentration camps to "re-educate" millions of muslims now does this. We can also take note of the comments welcoming it, and ponder those. But again, that's mostly homework, we don't have the culture capable of doing this as a "community" apparently. That's a "flamewar" or whatever. We don't like growing pains, so we won't grow, that is pretty much settled.
  - dang 8y ago
    The boundaries are not nearly as arbitrary as you imply. They are determined by what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines. If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      > what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuff just gets flagged off the front page by users, and sometimes it has the [flagged] thing, sometimes it doesn't. People can already hide topics from the front page for themselves, and blissfully ignore them. What is the point of flagging things, are there limits or can people just flag until you arbitrarily take that ability away, where is the accountability? How is taking away the ability of others to speak altogether better than the possibility of some cussing or other things that are harmful to good faith communication? It may be harder for people to remain civil around lethally serious subjects, but it's not impossible -- and it's not fair to punish everybody, to let random people punish everybody, because you predict what would happen otherwise. It's like a stone that keeps tigers away, on steroids even: > If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself. Any other way? That "way" is still a black box. So this is a super tight rope, and left and right is utter destruction? What does "destroy itself" mean, that the server would vanish? Or that it would "bleed" from one topic into another, and suddenly people are also more irate about wiggly lines? And of course, if you actually believe that claim, then you can't even make any changes, you can't try it out, because then HN would destroy itself. How perfectly circular. How do you know the opposite isn't true, that if things are arbitrarily suppressed, it leads to a bad atmosphere and grudges, and people get tempted to bring up a topic when it's not actually the topic?

I suspect there is a strain of anti-Chinese sentiments here. When you see articles relating to black social issues, they immediately get flagged, but articles like these always get through.

dang 8y ago
There's no way for HN to be immune from macro trends. The macro trend right now, unfortunately, is polarization between China and the West. As I'm sure you've noticed, this has been manifesting dramatically in Western media over the past months. Since the audience here is mostly Western (50% US, 30% Europe, 7% Canada plus Australia, IIRC), it's inevitably going to identify more with one side than the other. We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.
- thereare5lights 8y ago
  You can absolutely eliminate it, you just don't want to because it would cost too much. I suppose macro trends would also explain why black social issues always get flagged on HN as well.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 8y ago
    Eliminate a Western audience looking at things from a Western perspective? That is an excessive idea of what moderators can do. We are janitors.
    - thereare5lights 8y ago
      You can do something so that black social issues links do not get removed.
      - dang 8y ago
        Plenty of such articles have been discussed here, and we've often turned off flags on the more substantive ones. It really depends on the specific article and how well it fits the mandate of this site. Not all social-issue articles do.
    - shawn 8y ago
      You are no janitor. You banned my new account on Christmas when I was trying to help someone who is committing suicide on your website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758099 Congratulations on being the grinch.

llacb47 8y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

PavlovsCat 8y ago
But then look at the front page, look how it never applies to everything, not even close, and how trivial, cute subjects never get these complaints. People are avoiding their own responsibility and don't like when others exercise it. Since I can only guess anyway, that's my guess. What I know for a fact is that the reasons against such a topic simply being where the interest of people puts it, do not hold water, that is, are always selectively applied. That in itself is intellectually interesting, but we are not allowed to personally question posters on HN too much, even when it's done it's barely rewarded with an honest reply, so we aren't intellectuals enough for that stuff. It's pointless to talk about the aggregate of a group when individuals remain opaque, so the whole subject is simply beyond our reach, as intellectually stimulating and important as it may be. We should know what a double standard is though: If we can pretend wiggly lines satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we can take note of a country that already build massive concentration camps to "re-educate" millions of muslims now does this. We can also take note of the comments welcoming it, and ponder those. But again, that's mostly homework, we don't have the culture capable of doing this as a "community" apparently. That's a "flamewar" or whatever. We don't like growing pains, so we won't grow, that is pretty much settled.
- dang 8y ago
  The boundaries are not nearly as arbitrary as you imply. They are determined by what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines. If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuff just gets flagged off the front page by users, and sometimes it has the [flagged] thing, sometimes it doesn't. People can already hide topics from the front page for themselves, and blissfully ignore them. What is the point of flagging things, are there limits or can people just flag until you arbitrarily take that ability away, where is the accountability? How is taking away the ability of others to speak altogether better than the possibility of some cussing or other things that are harmful to good faith communication? It may be harder for people to remain civil around lethally serious subjects, but it's not impossible -- and it's not fair to punish everybody, to let random people punish everybody, because you predict what would happen otherwise. It's like a stone that keeps tigers away, on steroids even: > If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself. Any other way? That "way" is still a black box. So this is a super tight rope, and left and right is utter destruction? What does "destroy itself" mean, that the server would vanish? Or that it would "bleed" from one topic into another, and suddenly people are also more irate about wiggly lines? And of course, if you actually believe that claim, then you can't even make any changes, you can't try it out, because then HN would destroy itself. How perfectly circular. How do you know the opposite isn't true, that if things are arbitrarily suppressed, it leads to a bad atmosphere and grudges, and people get tempted to bring up a topic when it's not actually the topic?