3 ms·

Moreover, dang, look at the vibe you're managing. This is on you, boo: 1. A group of people repeatedly use a euphemism to attack a much smaller and less powerf

Moreover, dang, look at the vibe you're managing. This is on you, boo: 1. A group of people repeatedly use a euphemism to attack a much smaller and less powerful group 2. When a member of that group points it out, the comment is literally faded, erased, by the editor responsible for managing the tone of that more powerful group And before you say it, this is me assuming good faith. I know you don't hear it. You're not evil. Neither is (most of) HN. But this is legit every day now. I've been a contributor to HN for over a decade, but now I hesitate before letting my fingers type 'news.ycombinator.com' into that location bar. It simply hurts too much. Like someone putting glass in your porridge.

dang 5y ago
I hear you, I'm sorry that you're having that experience, and I would like to find a better way to address it. I'm not sure what more we can do about it, short of imposing a single view on divisive topics—which would not be in the spirit of this community, nor something the community would support. We try our best to moderate the cases when people break the site guidelines and cross into attacking either persons or classes of people—those things are definitely not ok here. I'm not saying we catch all such cases, but rather that when we miss them, it's usually because we didn't see them—we can't come close to reading everything that gets posted here, and rely on users to point out most of the worst stuff. When we do see it, we do moderate it. But there are questions of interpretation here (more on that below). I don't see the community the way you describe it, in the following sense: yes, the comments that you're talking about exist, but so do a great many comments arguing the opposite (many more, in fact, from my perspective), and it's by no means the case that those comments get "literally faded/erased" either by users or by mods—quite the opposite (excepting the cases where such comments are breaking the site guidelines in their own right, and that's a different issue). On topics where much social change and churn are happening, I don't see how it's realistic for a large, pluralistic internet forum to avoid having a spectrum of views. It seems to me that it's probably in everyone's interest to tolerate that, because it's the way these things get hashed out in the long run. Winning people over happens by persuasion, not by punishment. Unfortunately, there's no agreement at all about what an acceptable spectrum of views should look like. In other words, it's not always clear how to distinguish being wrong (which is not against the rules, and not an abuse) from being abusive. Different people want us to draw that line very differently. One person will read a comment as "using a euphemism to attack a group" while another person (often the commenter themselves) will insist that the very same comment is well-intentioned good-faith discussion, rooted not in hate but in a desire to understand. If the first interpretation is correct, then the comment is abusive and should be moderated. If the second is, then the comment may be wrong, but it is not abusive, and therefore it should be tolerated and reasoned with. This disagreement means that not only can we not satisfy everyone, we can't even avoid plentiful accusations of being abusive in our own right, from every angle. From a moderator perspective, this is a lose-lose situation. All we can hope for is to lose more generously, and while I'm willing to do that better than we currently are, I'm not sure yet how. Add to that the international dimension—a high portion of the most provocative and/or bitter fights about these things are happening across national (and cultural) lines. The baselines in different countries/regions are in very different places about this stuff, and most people don't take that into account—they just assume they're talking to extremists from their own region, rather than moderates from further away. Those distinctions are easier to perceive in person than they are on the internet. In person, we all automatically regulate our responses to each other to avoid feeling quite so angered and hurt. On the internet, unfortunately for us all, the dynamics work exactly the other way, so many people end up feeling angry and hurt, and also feeling like the forum is being managed in a way that is unfair to their views and their group. I wrote more about that here, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

dang 5y ago

I hear you, I'm sorry that you're having that experience, and I would like to find a better way to address it. I'm not sure what more we can do about it, short of imposing a single view on divisive topics—which would not be in the spirit of this community, nor something the community would support. We try our best to moderate the cases when people break the site guidelines and cross into attacking either persons or classes of people—those things are definitely not ok here. I'm not saying we catch all such cases, but rather that when we miss them, it's usually because we didn't see them—we can't come close to reading everything that gets posted here, and rely on users to point out most of the worst stuff. When we do see it, we do moderate it. But there are questions of interpretation here (more on that below). I don't see the community the way you describe it, in the following sense: yes, the comments that you're talking about exist, but so do a great many comments arguing the opposite (many more, in fact, from my perspective), and it's by no means the case that those comments get "literally faded/erased" either by users or by mods—quite the opposite (excepting the cases where such comments are breaking the site guidelines in their own right, and that's a different issue). On topics where much social change and churn are happening, I don't see how it's realistic for a large, pluralistic internet forum to avoid having a spectrum of views. It seems to me that it's probably in everyone's interest to tolerate that, because it's the way these things get hashed out in the long run. Winning people over happens by persuasion, not by punishment. Unfortunately, there's no agreement at all about what an acceptable spectrum of views should look like. In other words, it's not always clear how to distinguish being wrong (which is not against the rules, and not an abuse) from being abusive. Different people want us to draw that line very differently. One person will read a comment as "using a euphemism to attack a group" while another person (often the commenter themselves) will insist that the very same comment is well-intentioned good-faith discussion, rooted not in hate but in a desire to understand. If the first interpretation is correct, then the comment is abusive and should be moderated. If the second is, then the comment may be wrong, but it is not abusive, and therefore it should be tolerated and reasoned with. This disagreement means that not only can we not satisfy everyone, we can't even avoid plentiful accusations of being abusive in our own right, from every angle. From a moderator perspective, this is a lose-lose situation. All we can hope for is to lose more generously, and while I'm willing to do that better than we currently are, I'm not sure yet how. Add to that the international dimension—a high portion of the most provocative and/or bitter fights about these things are happening across national (and cultural) lines. The baselines in different countries/regions are in very different places about this stuff, and most people don't take that into account—they just assume they're talking to extremists from their own region, rather than moderates from further away. Those distinctions are easier to perceive in person than they are on the internet. In person, we all automatically regulate our responses to each other to avoid feeling quite so angered and hurt. On the internet, unfortunately for us all, the dynamics work exactly the other way, so many people end up feeling angry and hurt, and also feeling like the forum is being managed in a way that is unfair to their views and their group. I wrote more about that here, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.