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I don't know, this place feels like the last haven of real conversations going on besides blind. I think people here do a good job with disagreements and provid

by k4ch0w 5y ago

I don't know, this place feels like the last haven of real conversations going on besides blind. I think people here do a good job with disagreements and provide good evidence to convince others. I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. Could you provide an examples of where this happened and one of the important narratives? Can you define wrong viewpoints and give an example?

whatev84583 5y ago
> I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. That's fair, but I'm not actually new. If you really joined in 2017, then you're many years newer than I am. Yes, I've been shadowbanned many times. I've lost count. Maybe thirty times? Most of the time it's hard to link to the evidence in such a way that you could see it for yourself. I'd like to link you to submissions of mine that got upvotes and had conversations going on, but were then anonymously flagged without justification, but it's not possible to link to them. It's not possible to see from the outside that an account has been shadowbanned without comparing the behavior of logged-in and non-logged-in accounts. Example of a wrong, unacceptable viewpoint: humanity is not actually on the brink of climate catastrophe due to CO2 emissions. Recently there was a fearmongering article from Nature about climate doom, and I linked to sea level graphs generated by NOAA that showed linear, rather than accelerating change in sea level, and was apparently shadowbanned for that. Obviously, linking to NOAA in support of a climate doom comment would not be a bannable offense. Edit: oh, and I've apparently already been placed in some kind of slow-play mode. I responded about an hour ago, but you can't see it. Are most people aware stuff like this goes on on HN?
mandmandam 5y ago
I've a good example for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged. I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic. This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it. Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned. What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know? If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
- krapp 5y ago
  You can have a forum for "lively and active" discussion or you can have a forum for curated, high-quality discussion. You can't have both, and to have the latter you need aggressive moderation. And the bigger and more diverse the userbase gets, the more aggressive the moderation has to be to prevent Eternal September from eating everything. Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does. I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is. If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will. And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
  - whatev84583 5y ago
    I'm sorry, I can't see how the first part of your comment is responsive to the comment you're replying to. > If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. OK. But it is the proper venue to have a group moan and hand-wringing session about impending climate disaster a few times a week? > if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of I think this is actually a great way of stating my point (no sarcasm): that HN is a curated echo chamber, which is very different from what it claims to be.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    The question was, are there off limit topics here and active censorship of such; I think we both agree that there is. Second; CIA torture is American torture. It's important to discuss it, here and elsewhere, until it stops. But it's an off-limit topic. Not cool. Many other people who voted the story to the top three times in one hour agree that it's worth discussing here, and they voted the story about its removal to the top as well. You may feel this isn't the proper venue, and dang may feel that way too. But there's no evidence that's the majority view; in fact there's quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

by k4ch0w 5y ago

whatev84583 5y ago

> I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. That's fair, but I'm not actually new. If you really joined in 2017, then you're many years newer than I am. Yes, I've been shadowbanned many times. I've lost count. Maybe thirty times? Most of the time it's hard to link to the evidence in such a way that you could see it for yourself. I'd like to link you to submissions of mine that got upvotes and had conversations going on, but were then anonymously flagged without justification, but it's not possible to link to them. It's not possible to see from the outside that an account has been shadowbanned without comparing the behavior of logged-in and non-logged-in accounts. Example of a wrong, unacceptable viewpoint: humanity is not actually on the brink of climate catastrophe due to CO2 emissions. Recently there was a fearmongering article from Nature about climate doom, and I linked to sea level graphs generated by NOAA that showed linear, rather than accelerating change in sea level, and was apparently shadowbanned for that. Obviously, linking to NOAA in support of a climate doom comment would not be a bannable offense. Edit: oh, and I've apparently already been placed in some kind of slow-play mode. I responded about an hour ago, but you can't see it. Are most people aware stuff like this goes on on HN?

mandmandam 5y ago

I've a good example for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged. I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic. This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it. Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned. What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know? If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.

krapp 5y ago
You can have a forum for "lively and active" discussion or you can have a forum for curated, high-quality discussion. You can't have both, and to have the latter you need aggressive moderation. And the bigger and more diverse the userbase gets, the more aggressive the moderation has to be to prevent Eternal September from eating everything. Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does. I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is. If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will. And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
- whatev84583 5y ago
  I'm sorry, I can't see how the first part of your comment is responsive to the comment you're replying to. > If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. OK. But it is the proper venue to have a group moan and hand-wringing session about impending climate disaster a few times a week? > if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of I think this is actually a great way of stating my point (no sarcasm): that HN is a curated echo chamber, which is very different from what it claims to be.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  The question was, are there off limit topics here and active censorship of such; I think we both agree that there is. Second; CIA torture is American torture. It's important to discuss it, here and elsewhere, until it stops. But it's an off-limit topic. Not cool. Many other people who voted the story to the top three times in one hour agree that it's worth discussing here, and they voted the story about its removal to the top as well. You may feel this isn't the proper venue, and dang may feel that way too. But there's no evidence that's the majority view; in fact there's quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.