5 ms·

i could just as easily say, "almost no one wants a hacker discussion forum". "hackers" are a small subset of society. it's fine for hn to exist and cater to th

by modzu 8y ago

i could just as easily say, "almost no one wants a hacker discussion forum". "hackers" are a small subset of society. it's fine for hn to exist and cater to this group, right? yet here, humor, satire, and a variety of "OK" things to discuss and share are considered off-topic and not permitted. just like when hn started and people thought it would just turn into reddit, i do think its possible for a forum where free speech is celebrated to not turn into a nazi club. i'm glad we have law abiding individuals in society. but make no mistake, laws and morals are not equal, and indeed if we cannot have a space to discuss things that are illegal but possibly moral, we're talking dystopia

DoreenMichele 8y ago
it's fine for hn to exist and cater to this group, right? yet here, humor, satire, and a variety of "OK" things to discuss and share are considered off-topic and not permitted I think it depends a lot on how you discuss things.
- modzu 8y ago
  agreed; i think its also probably exacerbated in certain cases due to the small (single?) qty of moderators on hn (ie strong potential bias); similar issues happen on wikipedia, where subject matter experts occassionally butt heads with editors
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Humor is also not forbidden here. It's just hard to pull off, but I've had the occasional humorous remark upvoted by a good bit. (I've also gotten plenty of humorous remarks downvoted. It's hard to play to this crowd in that way.) I'm a demographic outlier. I often stick out like a sore thumb. I've had to work at figuring HN out. It didn't come naturally. I try to not take things too personally and to remember it's a forum with a whole lot of traffic, so you are occasionally going to get downvotes or not great replies just due to "laws of large numbers" kind of thing.
    - newsbinator 8y ago
      Humor is tough partly because it's a tough crowd, I guess, and partly because there aren't as many native English speakers as there are on, say, Reddit.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        An awful lot of humor is either really ugly stuff or vacuous. Either of those violates the guidelines here. Trying to be funny without being either ugly or vacuous sets the bar pretty high on what you can successfully joke about.
    - matt_the_bass 8y ago
      On a related note, i find most of the humor that does not get down voted really funny. I enjoy that. But I also u joy that every child comment is not trying to be a joke like on reddit.
krapp 8y ago
>if we cannot have a space to discuss things that are illegal but possibly moral, we're talking dystopia There are plenty of spaces to discuss such things, but not every space is obliged to play by those rules. And if you can't find one, nothing is stopping you from making one. At the end of the day, every site is a petty dictatorship. That's true for HN, Reddit, Voat, 4chan, 8chan, the deep web, the dark web, wherever - whomever owns the site makes the rules and has arbitrary control over the content (unless the law says otherwise, or regardless of the law in some cases.) But not even the big social media silos control the entire thing. Google might derank my site, but they can't take it off the web (assuming they don't host it, somehow.) My hosting provider might take my site off the web, but I can find another. I don't think we're anywhere near dystopia yet.
- anewguy9000 8y ago
  of course sites have their own policies. not sure i agree that "there are plenty of spaces to discuss such things". don't see many examples in this thread; only "gab" is mentioned as being tolerant of controversial/illegal subjects, and man, is it getting blasted for it. wikipedia describes it as a "haven for neo-nazis". yikes! isn't there room for something simpler? for example here on HN, was a discussion about staying motivated to work on challenging stuff. a comment about cocaine was deleted. well, the truth is, plenty of lawyers straight-up depend on that stuff, the way programmers depend on JAVA. why is this comment deleted? because it's bad? illegal? might tempt some kids to try it and ruin their life? whatever the reason for the censorship, the truth is being hidden aka “showdead". so there are a couple of inter-related things going on here that i'd love to see addressed by a community, if not this community: 1. transparency. lobsters does this well. if there is going to be moderation and censorship, be transparent about it, and about why its happening. every change a mod makes on lobsters includes a "commit message" explaining the action. conversely users on hn get banned and may not even know.. 2. free speech is about more than providing a space for neo-nazis and trolls and otherwise people who belong in jail or segregated from society. i think the analog is the academic vs the corporate world. we have scientists using up public money to think about stuff that may never have any actual value to society. but we enshrine their ability to do that work because its necessary in order to make discoveries. similarly, actual thought, genuine knowledge, which should be the end-goal of any discussion that is not merely rhetoric, ought to be concerned with arriving at some kind of truth or truthful conclusion. we can't do that if we are too broad with our censorship, as evidenced with the cocaine comment. pretending cocaine doesn't exist doesn't make you right when everything you've read says that tea is the most powerful stimulant. 3. to krapps point about petty dictators -- yes, indeed, and that's important so that communities can have identities and topics and focus and not just decay into noise. but it seems that providers -- you mention google, hosting companies, ISPs, etc -- all play it safe, and are absolutely not interested in participating in the free speech debate at all. thus they are very much gatekeepers. no, you cannot get popular online while being blacklisted on google, or kicked around from one host to another (at least it must be an order of magnitude more difficult, esp for niche communities). even self-hosting is not really a viable option. academic institutions are an option here, but i do worry about it changing in the future.

by modzu 8y ago

DoreenMichele 8y ago

it's fine for hn to exist and cater to this group, right? yet here, humor, satire, and a variety of "OK" things to discuss and share are considered off-topic and not permitted I think it depends a lot on how you discuss things.

modzu 8y ago
agreed; i think its also probably exacerbated in certain cases due to the small (single?) qty of moderators on hn (ie strong potential bias); similar issues happen on wikipedia, where subject matter experts occassionally butt heads with editors
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Humor is also not forbidden here. It's just hard to pull off, but I've had the occasional humorous remark upvoted by a good bit. (I've also gotten plenty of humorous remarks downvoted. It's hard to play to this crowd in that way.) I'm a demographic outlier. I often stick out like a sore thumb. I've had to work at figuring HN out. It didn't come naturally. I try to not take things too personally and to remember it's a forum with a whole lot of traffic, so you are occasionally going to get downvotes or not great replies just due to "laws of large numbers" kind of thing.
  - newsbinator 8y ago
    Humor is tough partly because it's a tough crowd, I guess, and partly because there aren't as many native English speakers as there are on, say, Reddit.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      An awful lot of humor is either really ugly stuff or vacuous. Either of those violates the guidelines here. Trying to be funny without being either ugly or vacuous sets the bar pretty high on what you can successfully joke about.
  - matt_the_bass 8y ago
    On a related note, i find most of the humor that does not get down voted really funny. I enjoy that. But I also u joy that every child comment is not trying to be a joke like on reddit.

krapp 8y ago

>if we cannot have a space to discuss things that are illegal but possibly moral, we're talking dystopia There are plenty of spaces to discuss such things, but not every space is obliged to play by those rules. And if you can't find one, nothing is stopping you from making one. At the end of the day, every site is a petty dictatorship. That's true for HN, Reddit, Voat, 4chan, 8chan, the deep web, the dark web, wherever - whomever owns the site makes the rules and has arbitrary control over the content (unless the law says otherwise, or regardless of the law in some cases.) But not even the big social media silos control the entire thing. Google might derank my site, but they can't take it off the web (assuming they don't host it, somehow.) My hosting provider might take my site off the web, but I can find another. I don't think we're anywhere near dystopia yet.

anewguy9000 8y ago
of course sites have their own policies. not sure i agree that "there are plenty of spaces to discuss such things". don't see many examples in this thread; only "gab" is mentioned as being tolerant of controversial/illegal subjects, and man, is it getting blasted for it. wikipedia describes it as a "haven for neo-nazis". yikes! isn't there room for something simpler? for example here on HN, was a discussion about staying motivated to work on challenging stuff. a comment about cocaine was deleted. well, the truth is, plenty of lawyers straight-up depend on that stuff, the way programmers depend on JAVA. why is this comment deleted? because it's bad? illegal? might tempt some kids to try it and ruin their life? whatever the reason for the censorship, the truth is being hidden aka “showdead". so there are a couple of inter-related things going on here that i'd love to see addressed by a community, if not this community: 1. transparency. lobsters does this well. if there is going to be moderation and censorship, be transparent about it, and about why its happening. every change a mod makes on lobsters includes a "commit message" explaining the action. conversely users on hn get banned and may not even know.. 2. free speech is about more than providing a space for neo-nazis and trolls and otherwise people who belong in jail or segregated from society. i think the analog is the academic vs the corporate world. we have scientists using up public money to think about stuff that may never have any actual value to society. but we enshrine their ability to do that work because its necessary in order to make discoveries. similarly, actual thought, genuine knowledge, which should be the end-goal of any discussion that is not merely rhetoric, ought to be concerned with arriving at some kind of truth or truthful conclusion. we can't do that if we are too broad with our censorship, as evidenced with the cocaine comment. pretending cocaine doesn't exist doesn't make you right when everything you've read says that tea is the most powerful stimulant. 3. to krapps point about petty dictators -- yes, indeed, and that's important so that communities can have identities and topics and focus and not just decay into noise. but it seems that providers -- you mention google, hosting companies, ISPs, etc -- all play it safe, and are absolutely not interested in participating in the free speech debate at all. thus they are very much gatekeepers. no, you cannot get popular online while being blacklisted on google, or kicked around from one host to another (at least it must be an order of magnitude more difficult, esp for niche communities). even self-hosting is not really a viable option. academic institutions are an option here, but i do worry about it changing in the future.