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Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the comm

Hacker News is a well-moderated community, but it's illustrative to see where Hacker News fails at moderation. While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob. I support Hacker News moderating itself however it chooses. However, if we are looking at it as a moderation model for large, open, non-editorial platforms (Youtube, Facebook) -- which I believe should all be covered under public accommodation law -- it clearly fails. And even if when we are looking at ostensibly neutral, publicly-orientated sites like newspaper comment boards, it fails. Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. So while this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News, and perhaps should become the model for small private sites, we should not try to scale it internet-size companies. Platform companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!) need a different set of rules geared towards protecting individual rights and freedoms instead of protecting a community.

epc 7y ago
Which "public accommodation law" do you refer to?
- romaaeterna 7y ago
  In the US, that would be title II of the 1964 civil rights act, taking the broad view of it that has developed in case law over the years. I would also support new FCC net neutrality style regulations or even new acts of Congress that strengthened this.
  - epc 7y ago
    Any changes to include internet services under the Civil Rights act would likely run into a First Amendment challenge fairly quickly, and likely lose. Net neutrality was probably constitutional as long as it applied to physical carriers using public land (for wires) or regulated spectrum. A more likely path would be through Section 508 (the accessibility act). Even that is unlikely with the current partisan makeup of Congress and the US Supreme Court.
    - romaaeterna 7y ago
      I agree that there would be a better chance for this line of reasoning if Manhattan Community Access had gone the other way in the latest SCOTUS term. But it was 5-4, and the decision does leave open some lines of attack. In particular, Congressional action around this might probably be able to pass judicial review if it were to define broad due process rights around speech censorship for explicitly defined "public forums." The only thing that SCOTUS loves more than the 1st amendment is the 14th. No way to know until we fight it out.
magpi3 7y ago
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. What you are asking for would take significantly more resources. I appreciate what you are saying, but all I ask is that a site be consistent. If it is consistently moderated, I as a user can vote with my feet (or my clicks in this case) if I approve or disapprove of the job that is being done.
- romaaeterna 7y ago
  Yes, I would only recommend it for the monopoly platform companies (Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!, etc.)
Fnoord 7y ago
> While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob. Isn't every community -barring a few wild west's- like that? One Usenet, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up in people's kill file. On IRC, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up on people's ignore or would get kicked off the channel or klined off the server. Except for the kick and kline the effect of a kill file or ignore is akin to a global shadow ban. The solution to the problem you mentioned is that unpopular opinions with merit will find their way to become eventually popular enough that they're adopted. Whereas unpopular opinions without merit eventually end up existing on the cesspits of the Internet. Because somewhere on the Internet, any person can spout their unpopular opinion. The question is, who reads it? Is it so much different from a shadow ban?
- romaaeterna 7y ago
  I don't mind this sort of moderation on community sites like Hacker News. Still, as the error keeps coming up, I will repeat myself (I apologize to people trying to read the whole thread, but this is the main point): For the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), we need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    What about market competition? Won't that work out for the reasonable content? Won't a platform like Tor always allow all content (reasonable and unreasonable) to at least stay available as it is censorship-resistant?
- luckylion 7y ago
  Individuals putting someone on their personal ignore list is different from a moderator deciding to put someone on everybody's ignore list though. Your solution is a bit lacking, I believe. "If it's not popular, it has no merit, because if it had merit it would be popular". There's also no telling whether some unpopular opinion you'd consider without merit today will become popular tomorrow (and, if history teaches us anything, we've been generally bad at predicting which will become popular, which will remain popular and which will fall out of favor), so it's somewhat silly to make hard judgements.
rimliu 7y ago
You've just voiced the thing I dislike most about the HN. And I do not fully agree with "Gackle and Bell, by contrast, practice a personal, focussed, and slow approach to moderation". The faceless "we" they love so much does not appear very personal to me. Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind having my account with 9k+ karma and dating back to 2009 banned for whatever. Despite that I am trying my best to look at the situation objectively and I still do not like it. It is popular to compare reddit with HN and my take would be like this: reddit is like a part of the Universe where stars are still (maybe moving a bit past this though) born, and there is life and dynamics. HN, otoh, seems to be inching closer and closer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
- radcon 7y ago
  Agreed, HN's lack of transparency is slowly killing it. You can see the discussions becoming more one-dimensional every day.
  - diminoten 7y ago
    You're being downvoted because you're hitting on a trope/cliche that's called out in the rules, and while I doubt HN is dying from a user engagement perspective, I do believe the comments are less filled with value than they have been in the past, given how negativity dang sees conflict. Healthy conflict is good, but I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it.
    - dang 7y ago
      > I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it. Where did I do that?
      - diminoten 7y ago
        The majority of the time you've killed my comments.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
" it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob." I have experience with that given I got my early karma countering many popular people here with downvote mobs. I had no idea I was doing that, either. Never seen their names before. Just saw some mis-information that I'd correct. Dan hints in the article exactly what worked for me: just delivering the information in a logical way with sources that invited people, often engineers, to work out what was true for themselves. The folks with mobs used rhetoric and argument from authority. I used evidence. Eventually, most of the grey comments went dark again with some folks in the mob going grey. They mobbed less often, too. I was also told about a pattern where some hot-heads read threads earlier with some calmer folks (maybe older or more experienced) coming in later. Happened with most of mine, too. So, you can't stop the fact that they'll show up. You can diminish their power by simply remaining civil and informative with evidence backing up your claims. Also, I try to use links that maintain the same qualities. If it's a political topic, it won't help to link to a site that's 100% biased in a specific direction. Biased or rhetorical sources likewise get dismissed. Fortunately, most of my arguments were technical. Many good sources for that. I'll also add that it helps to remember the mobs on these sites represent cliques on these sites, not people in general. Most people I've met aren't much like folks on HN, esp the aggressive ones. It helps to remind myself that what's going on in these online forums might just be representative of their culture, attachments, traditions, etc. I don't internalize it. Still introspect about it since there are many times where I can learn something or improve myself. Doing this is a tough skill to develop. I think it's a necessity on the Internet given how much negativity is there, even waves of it at once. It will still tax you but a lot less than before. "Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights." We had more of that on Lobsters. That was part of the founder's experiment with the site. It was initially really different. Mostly due to our vetting process we did for invites with strict controls on quality and private messages to people. Eventually, did a mass invite bringing in all kinds of people. Many of them aren't doing vetting so much as just telling people about a site they like. The result is the site is now more like Hacker News than it was. There's differences for sure. I just think a lot of the problems are inherent to bringing in a lot of people from many different places and perspectives onto a tech site with open-ended discussions. They covered a lot of this in the original article, though. I won't repeat it. I just think more rules, even more accountability, won't change it. If you want the latter, turn on showdead to find most of what they moderate away is garbage. There's some filter bubble on specific political topics that aren't popular here. They're tiny percent of the comments, though. Based on volume, I'd say moderation here is pretty light-handed in general. I mean, if you look at New repeatedly over a day, you'd question how the heck some control-freak moderators could even keep up with it at all. I stopped looking at New more than once a day since I didn't have the time for it.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I completely agree, although I like moderation here since it is actually very accepting and I might just have another definition for it than the author of the article. Another example where moderation works well is stackexchange. I think a Q&A sites needs strict moderation to be able to stay on topic. I think what Google is doing right now is reprehensible for example. Ghosting content because it is controversial and therefore coincidentally bad for advertising leaves a very bad taste.
radcon 7y ago
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. Exactly. HN takes the tyrannical approach to moderation: We're right and you're wrong. If you disagree, too bad. The mob is happy to clean up any wrongthink the moderators happen to miss. > this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News I think that's a pretty generous statement. The quality of discussions around here has declined substantially over the past few years. In many ways it's even worse than Reddit.
elliekelly 7y ago
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. I'm not sure I'd agree with this. An appeal is as easy as sending them an email. In my experience they're more than willing to hear you out.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  In my experience they aren't.
  - dang 7y ago
    What was your experience? I haven't been able to find where we interacted with you.
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      Of course not. I'm not insane and so I didn't continue using a shadow banned account.
      - dang 7y ago
        You said we weren't willing to hear you out, but that seems unlikely to me. People sometimes come to HN with stories of how badly we've mistreated them, but rarely provide links or enough information to let readers make up their own minds. Mostly these stories leave out important details about how the account had behaved and how we interacted with them. But we do make mistakes—moderation is guesswork, and we guess wrong sometimes. If there's a chance of that, I'd like to know what we did so we can correct it. We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. It's possible we got it wrong in your case, but again, we can't correct mistakes if people won't tell us about them.
        lazyasciiart 7y ago
arminiusreturns 7y ago
Very much this. I have been rightfully corrected by dang before, and it made me reflect and adjust my general approach to commenting online. I have also been very wrongfully dealt with a few times too though, and it made me very hesitant to comment further. I am thankful for a moderated space (there are other areas for unmoderated space, but those are under attack these days) and they do a good job most of the time, which is good enough for me. The backbone companies thing is the more important point you make imho, and is why discussion about what the modern public square really is and how the level of corporate dominance of media and the abuse of third-party doctrine allows the silencing of dissent. So a private company can censor whoever they want right?.. but how far does that go? First it starts with cloudflare, and then eventually it goes down to the ISP level... and that seems like a very dangerous slippery slope to me.
saagarjha 7y ago
> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. As far as I'm aware, dang and sctb are fairly reasonable if you email them, and you can see what they're doing by just clicking on their account history.
SquareWheel 7y ago
>Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. Yep. After eight years on the site I finally had a comment removed, and my response to dang to discuss it was completely ignored. Made me feel dumb for even trying.
- radcon 7y ago
  "Those who do not move do not notice their chains." In other words: People who think HN moderation is all fine and dandy only believe so because they've never had the audacity to post an unpopular fact or opinion.
- dang 7y ago
  Where did you request that?
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    In response to your removal message.
    - dang 7y ago
      Ah, you must be talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509. I don't remember that post, and it's possible I didn't see it. I try to read all the replies, but miss a few, especially when they are posted later. If you want to be sure we see something, the only way is to email hn@ycombinator.com. It's also possible that I saw it and was too exhausted to look back through all the flagged comments in the thread, identify which ones were explaining how AMP works, and see if they had been flagged correctly. That takes a ton of energy, which is not always available when the rest of the site is clamoring for attention and in varying degrees of onfireness. One thing you can do to increase the odds of getting a specific response is to include specific links to the post(s) you're worried about—that makes it an order of magnitude easier. I certainly appreciate your intention to defend fellow users who are being mistreated. But I think if I had seen your comment I would have replied at least to say that I believe you that your intention wasn't to downvote-bait.
tomcam 7y ago
I agree with everything you say. But… This site is moderated by two people and has 5 million guests. When you look at it from that perspective, I think the only conclusion you can come to is that they are doing a remarkably good job. I say this as a person who feels that his political opinions have been treated with disrespect by the site’s community and its moderators. I fervently believe that the moderators are doing their best to be impartial. And I also see people on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me who have the exact same complaints. When I look at it that way, I realize I literally can’t ask for more from the mods. As far as your making the distinction with platform companies and back bone companies, I think you have it completely right. I detest racist shit on the Internet, but ultimately no good can come from driving it underground. I think it’s much better for us to be able to see and come in time. Plus, my political affiliation, which is the same as Abraham Lincoln‘s, is considered by many of the powers that be to be inherently racist. When the platform companies start trying to decide who’s wrong and who’s right, they are forced to use extra-constitutional means. Not good.

epc 7y ago

Which "public accommodation law" do you refer to?

romaaeterna 7y ago
In the US, that would be title II of the 1964 civil rights act, taking the broad view of it that has developed in case law over the years. I would also support new FCC net neutrality style regulations or even new acts of Congress that strengthened this.
- epc 7y ago
  Any changes to include internet services under the Civil Rights act would likely run into a First Amendment challenge fairly quickly, and likely lose. Net neutrality was probably constitutional as long as it applied to physical carriers using public land (for wires) or regulated spectrum. A more likely path would be through Section 508 (the accessibility act). Even that is unlikely with the current partisan makeup of Congress and the US Supreme Court.
  - romaaeterna 7y ago
    I agree that there would be a better chance for this line of reasoning if Manhattan Community Access had gone the other way in the latest SCOTUS term. But it was 5-4, and the decision does leave open some lines of attack. In particular, Congressional action around this might probably be able to pass judicial review if it were to define broad due process rights around speech censorship for explicitly defined "public forums." The only thing that SCOTUS loves more than the 1st amendment is the 14th. No way to know until we fight it out.

magpi3 7y ago

> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. What you are asking for would take significantly more resources. I appreciate what you are saying, but all I ask is that a site be consistent. If it is consistently moderated, I as a user can vote with my feet (or my clicks in this case) if I approve or disapprove of the job that is being done.

romaaeterna 7y ago
Yes, I would only recommend it for the monopoly platform companies (Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.) and backbone companies (ISPs, Cloudflare!, etc.)

Fnoord 7y ago

> While Hacker News is great at protecting the community from disruptive individuals, it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob. Isn't every community -barring a few wild west's- like that? One Usenet, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up in people's kill file. On IRC, someone with an unpopular opinion would end up on people's ignore or would get kicked off the channel or klined off the server. Except for the kick and kline the effect of a kill file or ignore is akin to a global shadow ban. The solution to the problem you mentioned is that unpopular opinions with merit will find their way to become eventually popular enough that they're adopted. Whereas unpopular opinions without merit eventually end up existing on the cesspits of the Internet. Because somewhere on the Internet, any person can spout their unpopular opinion. The question is, who reads it? Is it so much different from a shadow ban?

romaaeterna 7y ago
I don't mind this sort of moderation on community sites like Hacker News. Still, as the error keeps coming up, I will repeat myself (I apologize to people trying to read the whole thread, but this is the main point): For the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), we need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  What about market competition? Won't that work out for the reasonable content? Won't a platform like Tor always allow all content (reasonable and unreasonable) to at least stay available as it is censorship-resistant?
luckylion 7y ago
Individuals putting someone on their personal ignore list is different from a moderator deciding to put someone on everybody's ignore list though. Your solution is a bit lacking, I believe. "If it's not popular, it has no merit, because if it had merit it would be popular". There's also no telling whether some unpopular opinion you'd consider without merit today will become popular tomorrow (and, if history teaches us anything, we've been generally bad at predicting which will become popular, which will remain popular and which will fall out of favor), so it's somewhat silly to make hard judgements.

rimliu 7y ago

You've just voiced the thing I dislike most about the HN. And I do not fully agree with "Gackle and Bell, by contrast, practice a personal, focussed, and slow approach to moderation". The faceless "we" they love so much does not appear very personal to me. Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind having my account with 9k+ karma and dating back to 2009 banned for whatever. Despite that I am trying my best to look at the situation objectively and I still do not like it. It is popular to compare reddit with HN and my take would be like this: reddit is like a part of the Universe where stars are still (maybe moving a bit past this though) born, and there is life and dynamics. HN, otoh, seems to be inching closer and closer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

radcon 7y ago
Agreed, HN's lack of transparency is slowly killing it. You can see the discussions becoming more one-dimensional every day.
- diminoten 7y ago
  You're being downvoted because you're hitting on a trope/cliche that's called out in the rules, and while I doubt HN is dying from a user engagement perspective, I do believe the comments are less filled with value than they have been in the past, given how negativity dang sees conflict. Healthy conflict is good, but I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it.
  - dang 7y ago
    > I've participated in healthy conflict here and was stopped by dang because of it. Where did I do that?
    - diminoten 7y ago
      The majority of the time you've killed my comments.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

" it tends to fall down when protecting unpopular individuals against the community turned mob." I have experience with that given I got my early karma countering many popular people here with downvote mobs. I had no idea I was doing that, either. Never seen their names before. Just saw some mis-information that I'd correct. Dan hints in the article exactly what worked for me: just delivering the information in a logical way with sources that invited people, often engineers, to work out what was true for themselves. The folks with mobs used rhetoric and argument from authority. I used evidence. Eventually, most of the grey comments went dark again with some folks in the mob going grey. They mobbed less often, too. I was also told about a pattern where some hot-heads read threads earlier with some calmer folks (maybe older or more experienced) coming in later. Happened with most of mine, too. So, you can't stop the fact that they'll show up. You can diminish their power by simply remaining civil and informative with evidence backing up your claims. Also, I try to use links that maintain the same qualities. If it's a political topic, it won't help to link to a site that's 100% biased in a specific direction. Biased or rhetorical sources likewise get dismissed. Fortunately, most of my arguments were technical. Many good sources for that. I'll also add that it helps to remember the mobs on these sites represent cliques on these sites, not people in general. Most people I've met aren't much like folks on HN, esp the aggressive ones. It helps to remind myself that what's going on in these online forums might just be representative of their culture, attachments, traditions, etc. I don't internalize it. Still introspect about it since there are many times where I can learn something or improve myself. Doing this is a tough skill to develop. I think it's a necessity on the Internet given how much negativity is there, even waves of it at once. It will still tax you but a lot less than before. "Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights." We had more of that on Lobsters. That was part of the founder's experiment with the site. It was initially really different. Mostly due to our vetting process we did for invites with strict controls on quality and private messages to people. Eventually, did a mass invite bringing in all kinds of people. Many of them aren't doing vetting so much as just telling people about a site they like. The result is the site is now more like Hacker News than it was. There's differences for sure. I just think a lot of the problems are inherent to bringing in a lot of people from many different places and perspectives onto a tech site with open-ended discussions. They covered a lot of this in the original article, though. I won't repeat it. I just think more rules, even more accountability, won't change it. If you want the latter, turn on showdead to find most of what they moderate away is garbage. There's some filter bubble on specific political topics that aren't popular here. They're tiny percent of the comments, though. Based on volume, I'd say moderation here is pretty light-handed in general. I mean, if you look at New repeatedly over a day, you'd question how the heck some control-freak moderators could even keep up with it at all. I stopped looking at New more than once a day since I didn't have the time for it.

raxxorrax 7y ago

I completely agree, although I like moderation here since it is actually very accepting and I might just have another definition for it than the author of the article. Another example where moderation works well is stackexchange. I think a Q&A sites needs strict moderation to be able to stay on topic. I think what Google is doing right now is reprehensible for example. Ghosting content because it is controversial and therefore coincidentally bad for advertising leaves a very bad taste.

radcon 7y ago

> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. Exactly. HN takes the tyrannical approach to moderation: We're right and you're wrong. If you disagree, too bad. The mob is happy to clean up any wrongthink the moderators happen to miss. > this moderation method succeeds for Hacker News I think that's a pretty generous statement. The quality of discussions around here has declined substantially over the past few years. In many ways it's even worse than Reddit.

elliekelly 7y ago

> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. I'm not sure I'd agree with this. An appeal is as easy as sending them an email. In my experience they're more than willing to hear you out.

lazyasciiart 7y ago
In my experience they aren't.
- dang 7y ago
  What was your experience? I haven't been able to find where we interacted with you.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    Of course not. I'm not insane and so I didn't continue using a shadow banned account.
    - dang 7y ago
      You said we weren't willing to hear you out, but that seems unlikely to me. People sometimes come to HN with stories of how badly we've mistreated them, but rarely provide links or enough information to let readers make up their own minds. Mostly these stories leave out important details about how the account had behaved and how we interacted with them. But we do make mistakes—moderation is guesswork, and we guess wrong sometimes. If there's a chance of that, I'd like to know what we did so we can correct it. We don't shadow-ban accounts unless they're new and show evidence of spamming or trolling, or unless there's evidence that the user has been serially creating accounts to abuse HN. It's possible we got it wrong in your case, but again, we can't correct mistakes if people won't tell us about them.
      - lazyasciiart 7y ago

arminiusreturns 7y ago

Very much this. I have been rightfully corrected by dang before, and it made me reflect and adjust my general approach to commenting online. I have also been very wrongfully dealt with a few times too though, and it made me very hesitant to comment further. I am thankful for a moderated space (there are other areas for unmoderated space, but those are under attack these days) and they do a good job most of the time, which is good enough for me. The backbone companies thing is the more important point you make imho, and is why discussion about what the modern public square really is and how the level of corporate dominance of media and the abuse of third-party doctrine allows the silencing of dissent. So a private company can censor whoever they want right?.. but how far does that go? First it starts with cloudflare, and then eventually it goes down to the ISP level... and that seems like a very dangerous slippery slope to me.

saagarjha 7y ago

> Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. As far as I'm aware, dang and sctb are fairly reasonable if you email them, and you can see what they're doing by just clicking on their account history.

SquareWheel 7y ago

>Hacker News moderation is not appealable, not auditable, does not have bright line rules, and there are no due process rights. It simply does not respect individual rights. Yep. After eight years on the site I finally had a comment removed, and my response to dang to discuss it was completely ignored. Made me feel dumb for even trying.

radcon 7y ago
"Those who do not move do not notice their chains." In other words: People who think HN moderation is all fine and dandy only believe so because they've never had the audacity to post an unpopular fact or opinion.
dang 7y ago
Where did you request that?
- SquareWheel 7y ago
  In response to your removal message.
  - dang 7y ago
    Ah, you must be talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20258509. I don't remember that post, and it's possible I didn't see it. I try to read all the replies, but miss a few, especially when they are posted later. If you want to be sure we see something, the only way is to email hn@ycombinator.com. It's also possible that I saw it and was too exhausted to look back through all the flagged comments in the thread, identify which ones were explaining how AMP works, and see if they had been flagged correctly. That takes a ton of energy, which is not always available when the rest of the site is clamoring for attention and in varying degrees of onfireness. One thing you can do to increase the odds of getting a specific response is to include specific links to the post(s) you're worried about—that makes it an order of magnitude easier. I certainly appreciate your intention to defend fellow users who are being mistreated. But I think if I had seen your comment I would have replied at least to say that I believe you that your intention wasn't to downvote-bait.

tomcam 7y ago

I agree with everything you say. But… This site is moderated by two people and has 5 million guests. When you look at it from that perspective, I think the only conclusion you can come to is that they are doing a remarkably good job. I say this as a person who feels that his political opinions have been treated with disrespect by the site’s community and its moderators. I fervently believe that the moderators are doing their best to be impartial. And I also see people on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me who have the exact same complaints. When I look at it that way, I realize I literally can’t ask for more from the mods. As far as your making the distinction with platform companies and back bone companies, I think you have it completely right. I detest racist shit on the Internet, but ultimately no good can come from driving it underground. I think it’s much better for us to be able to see and come in time. Plus, my political affiliation, which is the same as Abraham Lincoln‘s, is considered by many of the powers that be to be inherently racist. When the platform companies start trying to decide who’s wrong and who’s right, they are forced to use extra-constitutional means. Not good.