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The mods here state that HN is immune. Anyone that calls out potential hostile information operations is threatened by the mods.

by sdinsn 7y ago

dang 7y ago
We've never said that. All we say (and have said for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9115965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9115965) is (a) that there needs to be evidence, and (b) that someone holding an opposing view is not evidence (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20"opposing%20view"%20evidence https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). The trouble is that most "calling out" that people do about this is easily seen to be bogus, even from just the public records of the commenters—unless you believe that Chinese (or, before that, Russian) moles were posting, say, GitHub projects in 2013 so they could get away with propaganda 6 years later. A lot of what we do as moderators is simply to sift carefully through the publicly available information. It's an indication of how lazy these accusations are that the users making them mostly don't bother to do that. It's a cheap shot to fire off "you must be a shill-spy-astroturfer-bot-troll" in an internet argument. It degrades discussion, and the overwhelming majority of the time, there's no information in it beyond "I don't like what you say". The users who do this need to learn how unreliable this impulse to denounce others is, and restrain themselves from letting those neurons fire. Not only does it degrade the community in general, it often targets individuals in ugly and distressing ways, which none of us wants to see here. For an example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. What Twitter and Facebook are writing about in today's posts is something completely different. The fact that such manipulations exist does not give HN users license to cheaply smear each other. Both are wrong.

The mods here state that HN is immune. Anyone that calls out potential hostile information operations is threatened by the mods.

by sdinsn 7y ago

The mods here state that HN is immune. Anyone that calls out potential hostile information operations is threatened by the mods.

dang 7y ago

We've never said that. All we say (and have said for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9115965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9115965) is (a) that there needs to be evidence, and (b) that someone holding an opposing view is not evidence (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20"opposing%20view"%20evidence https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). The trouble is that most "calling out" that people do about this is easily seen to be bogus, even from just the public records of the commenters—unless you believe that Chinese (or, before that, Russian) moles were posting, say, GitHub projects in 2013 so they could get away with propaganda 6 years later. A lot of what we do as moderators is simply to sift carefully through the publicly available information. It's an indication of how lazy these accusations are that the users making them mostly don't bother to do that. It's a cheap shot to fire off "you must be a shill-spy-astroturfer-bot-troll" in an internet argument. It degrades discussion, and the overwhelming majority of the time, there's no information in it beyond "I don't like what you say". The users who do this need to learn how unreliable this impulse to denounce others is, and restrain themselves from letting those neurons fire. Not only does it degrade the community in general, it often targets individuals in ugly and distressing ways, which none of us wants to see here. For an example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. What Twitter and Facebook are writing about in today's posts is something completely different. The fact that such manipulations exist does not give HN users license to cheaply smear each other. Both are wrong.