3 ms·

No reasonable person would say som33's comment was an "unrelated controversy," it's a clear response to the question "Why was a case involving a wealthy corpora

No reasonable person would say som33's comment was an "unrelated controversy," it's a clear response to the question "Why was a case involving a wealthy corporation sealed?" The way HN is moderated does not welcome this line of questioning, though. You're not allowed to suggest that VC-funded tech might be a source of evil or bad ethics. Proof? Here's a similar "flame-baity" comment under this topic that sits on the other side of the argument, but dang doesn't care enough to respond or detach it from its parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23013083&goto=item%3Fid%3D23012320%2323013083 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23013083&goto=item%3Fi...

dang 6y ago
Oh you guys. The GP comment was just the sort of flamebait that we don't want on HN, regardless of flavor. We'd moderate it just the same the other way [1]. Big denunciatory rhetoric is just not what this site is for. Repetition and indignation are the two things that most kill curiosity, so repetition of indignation is the worst. [2] An arbitrary link doesn't prove anything except that we may not have seen a post. That's the simplest explanation, and the likeliest [3]. HN gets millions of comments a year. We don't come close to reading them all, and we can't moderate what we don't see. We rely on community members to flag the posts that most require moderator attention. You haven't flagged any, including the one you're complaining about here, so it's not clear to me how much you care about this. It sort of spoils the game of get-the-moderators when the mods finally show up and sweep the floor or whatever. For a while it was a sport on Twitter to pass such links around ("see what horrors the Hacker News moderators approve of!") but I hear that's mostly died out. [1] By the way, the last time you were upset about moderator bias, I ended up giving you an extremely detailed reply. You may not have seen it, though, because it took me a couple days to get back to the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602. Read those links—"The mods here are radical liberals", "socialist-leaning mods", "far-left social justice agenda" and the rest—and see how much evidentiary value you still think these gotcha games have. [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20repetition%20indignation&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20likeliest&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  There is some irony in claiming that the GP comment kills curiosity. Nothing kills curiosity faster or more completely than the concealment of relevant facts. Legal opinions in this case. See e.g. USSR.
  - dang 6y ago
    I don't agree that the comment was primarily factual (it was ranty-rhetorical), nor that the material was relevant (most readers would regard jumping to copyright law from this article as a massive leap off-topic). Even granting all that, though—nothing about copyright is concealed on HN. It's a well-discussed topic here. In fact, #1 thread on HN the very same day as this one was largely about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28 ... , and you can find endless debate about every aspect of copyright and copyright law in HN's archives. If that's the USSR, I'm Vladimir Mayakovsky.
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      I wasn't suggesting that HN or its moderators kill curiosity. I was suggesting that legal secrecy and related problems do. Thanks for the thoughtful response, though.

dang 6y ago

Oh you guys. The GP comment was just the sort of flamebait that we don't want on HN, regardless of flavor. We'd moderate it just the same the other way [1]. Big denunciatory rhetoric is just not what this site is for. Repetition and indignation are the two things that most kill curiosity, so repetition of indignation is the worst. [2] An arbitrary link doesn't prove anything except that we may not have seen a post. That's the simplest explanation, and the likeliest [3]. HN gets millions of comments a year. We don't come close to reading them all, and we can't moderate what we don't see. We rely on community members to flag the posts that most require moderator attention. You haven't flagged any, including the one you're complaining about here, so it's not clear to me how much you care about this. It sort of spoils the game of get-the-moderators when the mods finally show up and sweep the floor or whatever. For a while it was a sport on Twitter to pass such links around ("see what horrors the Hacker News moderators approve of!") but I hear that's mostly died out. [1] By the way, the last time you were upset about moderator bias, I ended up giving you an extremely detailed reply. You may not have seen it, though, because it took me a couple days to get back to the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602. Read those links—"The mods here are radical liberals", "socialist-leaning mods", "far-left social justice agenda" and the rest—and see how much evidentiary value you still think these gotcha games have. [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20repetition%20indignation&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20likeliest&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

rmrfstar 6y ago
There is some irony in claiming that the GP comment kills curiosity. Nothing kills curiosity faster or more completely than the concealment of relevant facts. Legal opinions in this case. See e.g. USSR.
- dang 6y ago
  I don't agree that the comment was primarily factual (it was ranty-rhetorical), nor that the material was relevant (most readers would regard jumping to copyright law from this article as a massive leap off-topic). Even granting all that, though—nothing about copyright is concealed on HN. It's a well-discussed topic here. In fact, #1 thread on HN the very same day as this one was largely about copyright: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28 ... , and you can find endless debate about every aspect of copyright and copyright law in HN's archives. If that's the USSR, I'm Vladimir Mayakovsky.
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    I wasn't suggesting that HN or its moderators kill curiosity. I was suggesting that legal secrecy and related problems do. Thanks for the thoughtful response, though.