5 ms·

If you feel restricted by rules preventing you from being hurtful towards others, the problem is you, not the rules.

nexuist 6y ago
If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society. The small groups of Twitter and Reddit moderators are far too small to ever represent the diversity of human thought. You may think the rules prevent harm today, but what happens if and when they encourage harm tomorrow? What if the rules turned against you? Wouldn't you want to be able to speak out? This just feels like a rehash of the "think about the children" argument. We should not base human communication on the idea that some grown adult somehow somewhere could have such an adverse reaction to your content that they suffer serious mental or physical harm. Especially when said communication is hidden behind NSFW spoilers and other appropriate trigger warnings. Nobody could have possibly stumbled upon r/watchpeopledie and thought it was anything other than what it said it was.
- prox 6y ago
  I think there is a dichotomy here, one is rules, the other is ethics, both are different discussions. For instance, can an ethical case be made for watching people die? Is there any benefit to be gained from this beyond the first novelty factor. (A rhetorical question, just to note that the ethical debate precedes rule making)
  - nexuist 6y ago
    Ideally an ethical debate would precede rule making. But last I checked nobody who didn't already work at Reddit was involved in making those rules; there was no site-wide referendum, no discussion with users, no warning that these decisions were being made. Every other social media giant operates the same way. To my knowledge no mainstream social network has ever polled its users for changes to its community policing model. Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. It's entirely up to chance whether your case gets seen by someone who would be sympathetic to you (assuming it even gets seen by a person instead of some glorified regex matcher posing as 'AI'). I know in tech we like to outsource lots of hard problems, but nobody should accept outsourcing their moral framework to Twitter, Inc. or Condé Nast.
    - toofy 6y ago
      > Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. I think the decision of users to continue to spend their valuable free-time using these social media sites is their vote in this scenario. And I don’t mean that to come across as a flippant dismissal, I really don’t. When we consider those who like to say they simply want a place to explore unpopular ideas, people are correct to question why they keep coming back to these sites. The wider internet has no shortage of places for these people to explore the craziest ideas imaginable, and if there isn’t a place for some idea, it takes minutes to spin a server up with already packaged freely available open-source platforms. People are voting with their valuable free-time to go back to these platforms, it is personal preference in action.
  - shpongled 6y ago
    Why do we need to make an ethical case for it? I don't feel the need to make an ethical argument for or against HN
- brnt 6y ago
  Not all rules are created equal. Reciprocity in outcome is an important differentiator and fundamental to a functioning democracy. To equate a rule like 'no guns allowed' with 'all people are granted to right to vote' would be silly and naive.
- stopratelimit 6y ago
  >If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society. That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.
  - dang 6y ago
    Nobody "stifles talking about the rules". We answer questions every day. When we ban an account, we don't shadowban it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2]. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that. Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20rate%20limit&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - stopratelimit 6y ago
      the fact that you don't inform users of shadowsbans an rate limiting without due process is pretty stifling. it's the reason i have this account, as I'm sure you know. It's very clear that this is YOUR community. I don't think that's a bad thing, community wise. Just own it. It's OK. Being dictator-like isn't bad if you have clear goals and limited scope. It's just unfortunate that one of your goals is to squelch those who have unpopular opinions. And I'm not talking about neo-nazi white supremacy bullshit, it's clear you support that edge.
Thomas812 6y ago
If you can't comprehend that hurtful is completely subjective you should not be writing any rules.
- toofy 6y ago
  Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit. Most things in the world outside of pure mathematics are subjective. If you’re looking to do nothing if it involves subjective decision making, nothing would ever get done. All around us, all day every day, we look at a problem, we take the best info and expertise available to us, and we make a judgement call. The fact that almost always some level of subjectivity exists doesn’t mean we do nothing.
honksillet 6y ago
I think most people would interpret "hurtful to others" as incitement to violence, but in practice what is being enforced is a much weaker, blurry and often political standard of hurting other peoples feelings.

If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society. The small groups of Twitter and Reddit moderators are far too small to ever represent the diversity of human thought. You may think the rules prevent harm today, but what happens if and when they encourage harm tomorrow? What if the rules turned against you? Wouldn't you want to be able to speak out? This just feels like a rehash of the "think about the children" argument. We should not base human communication on the idea that some grown adult somehow somewhere could have such an adverse reaction to your content that they suffer serious mental or physical harm. Especially when said communication is hidden behind NSFW spoilers and other appropriate trigger warnings. Nobody could have possibly stumbled upon r/watchpeopledie and thought it was anything other than what it said it was.

prox 6y ago
I think there is a dichotomy here, one is rules, the other is ethics, both are different discussions. For instance, can an ethical case be made for watching people die? Is there any benefit to be gained from this beyond the first novelty factor. (A rhetorical question, just to note that the ethical debate precedes rule making)
- nexuist 6y ago
  Ideally an ethical debate would precede rule making. But last I checked nobody who didn't already work at Reddit was involved in making those rules; there was no site-wide referendum, no discussion with users, no warning that these decisions were being made. Every other social media giant operates the same way. To my knowledge no mainstream social network has ever polled its users for changes to its community policing model. Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. It's entirely up to chance whether your case gets seen by someone who would be sympathetic to you (assuming it even gets seen by a person instead of some glorified regex matcher posing as 'AI'). I know in tech we like to outsource lots of hard problems, but nobody should accept outsourcing their moral framework to Twitter, Inc. or Condé Nast.
  - toofy 6y ago
    > Which is crazy, because in actual society we all have the right to vote, but online we are beholden to nameless moderators and provided no representation whatsoever. I think the decision of users to continue to spend their valuable free-time using these social media sites is their vote in this scenario. And I don’t mean that to come across as a flippant dismissal, I really don’t. When we consider those who like to say they simply want a place to explore unpopular ideas, people are correct to question why they keep coming back to these sites. The wider internet has no shortage of places for these people to explore the craziest ideas imaginable, and if there isn’t a place for some idea, it takes minutes to spin a server up with already packaged freely available open-source platforms. People are voting with their valuable free-time to go back to these platforms, it is personal preference in action.
- shpongled 6y ago
  Why do we need to make an ethical case for it? I don't feel the need to make an ethical argument for or against HN
brnt 6y ago
Not all rules are created equal. Reciprocity in outcome is an important differentiator and fundamental to a functioning democracy. To equate a rule like 'no guns allowed' with 'all people are granted to right to vote' would be silly and naive.
stopratelimit 6y ago
>If you can't speak out or express thoughts against the rules, you are ceding your own ability to ever change the rules. Allowing a small subset of people to control the rules for the masses has never, will never, and could not ever work in a free society. That's funny, I find the moderators stifle talking about the rules on Hackernews via secret shadowbans, post rate limiting, and other secret punishments...yet here you are.
- dang 6y ago
  Nobody "stifles talking about the rules". We answer questions every day. When we ban an account, we don't shadowban it unless it is relatively new and shows signs of spamming or trolling, or being related to past abuses [1]. When an account has an established history, we say that we're banning it and why [2]. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars [3]. We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that. Creating accounts to get around these restrictions is obviously a repetition of the original abuse and will get your main account banned as well if you keep doing it, so please don't do that. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20rate%20limit&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - stopratelimit 6y ago
    the fact that you don't inform users of shadowsbans an rate limiting without due process is pretty stifling. it's the reason i have this account, as I'm sure you know. It's very clear that this is YOUR community. I don't think that's a bad thing, community wise. Just own it. It's OK. Being dictator-like isn't bad if you have clear goals and limited scope. It's just unfortunate that one of your goals is to squelch those who have unpopular opinions. And I'm not talking about neo-nazi white supremacy bullshit, it's clear you support that edge.

Thomas812 6y ago

If you can't comprehend that hurtful is completely subjective you should not be writing any rules.

toofy 6y ago
Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit. Most things in the world outside of pure mathematics are subjective. If you’re looking to do nothing if it involves subjective decision making, nothing would ever get done. All around us, all day every day, we look at a problem, we take the best info and expertise available to us, and we make a judgement call. The fact that almost always some level of subjectivity exists doesn’t mean we do nothing.

honksillet 6y ago

I think most people would interpret "hurtful to others" as incitement to violence, but in practice what is being enforced is a much weaker, blurry and often political standard of hurting other peoples feelings.