3 ms·

To pick out this comment when people upthread are calling what amounts to a party in downtown Ottawa an insurrection and an attempt to overthrow a democraticall

To pick out this comment when people upthread are calling what amounts to a party in downtown Ottawa an insurrection and an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government is pretty gross.

busterarm 5y ago
It's because I called this all out for what it is and the moderation here has the thinnest veneer of fairness. A few very high profile posters get away with absolute murder on this board (especially in the form of personal attacks) because they pass the SV ideological purity test, but the rest of us have to keep our opinions to ourselves.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  This is way off base. dang is an excellent and fair moderator.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Usually. Nobody is perfect. There are certain topics and certain people that do not get moderated fairly and HN itself has certain biases that are encouraged or have opposition to them discouraged. If you know what they are, you know what they are. Bringing up HN's (often subtle but often not-so) bias against average poor people gets heavily moderated here. I give dang credit versus other moderators elsewhere who are explicitly biased and don't give a fuck how you feel about it.
    - dang 5y ago
      > If you know what they are, you know what they are. I don't know what they are! Perhaps you could clue me in at hn@ycombinator.com?
      - useragent86 5y ago
        Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized, the comment gets downvoted, and often flagged. Even comments written by people who lived in communist states, offering first-hand accounts, without breaking any HN guidelines, get downvoted and flagged. In the same threads, "conservatives" and "conservatism" and Republicans and "liberty" are freely condemned, mocked, and accused of all sorts of evil behaviors and intent, without even being downvoted, much less flagged. This happens regularly, any time these topics come up in a popular thread. So it's hard for me to understand how you could be unaware of this de facto community bias.
        dang 5y ago
        > Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized The active ingredient here is the phrase "I see". What you're seeing feels obvious to you because you feel strongly on the topic. People who feel differently have very different "obvious" perceptions. (Edit: like here, which was just posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063.) These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver, and I do mean entirely—it is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN. Because these perceptions are predictable from the passions of the perceiver, it follows that they don't tell us anything about the community. They only tell us something about you—namely, which position you personally favor or disfavor, and how strongly. That's why other users perceive the opposite bias to what you perceive. Their passions are producing their perception the same way that yours are—they just happen to have opposite passions. Consider these gems: zero left wing chatter. instant ban by this fash site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302617 a community full of some pretty extreme opinions, generally right-wing and regressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439442 most of people on HN are ancap or fascists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958681 There are reams of this stuff, coming from all ideological tribes. Same community, incompatible perceptions—why? Because they're not actually incompatible. They only appear so if you take them as objective claims about the community. As expressions of the preferences of the perceiver, they're not only compatible, they're isomorphic. Whatever mechanism is producing these nearly-identical comments, it can't be "political skew on Hacker News", because the claims are coming from all factions. Usually at this point someone objects, "so you're just claiming that HN is perfectly neutral in every way? the community has no biases of any kind?" No, that doesn't follow. I'm only saying that comments like yours and the 3 I just linked to don't contain any signal about this, because the feeling of bias tells us nothing about the actual statistical and demographic situation. (Well, it tells us that HN produces enough data points for everybody to run across some that rub them the wrong way. But that's not enough information to conclude anything about HN as a whole.) It's incredible how deeply these feelings go and how convincing they are, so the mechanism is probably hard-wired into all of us. My hypothesis, which I call the notice-dislike bias (a terrible name), goes like this: because painful experiences make a deeper impression than pleasurable ones, we're all more likely to notice the data points that bring up dislike/disagree reactions in us (i.e. give us pain) than we are to notice the kind that we like/agree with (i.e. give us pleasure). Not only that but we weight the painful ones much more heavily. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22false%20feelings%20of%20generality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), in which people are convinced that the community (and usually the moderators too) are overwhelmingly stacked against their particular views (for example, your view that communism is bad). It's easy to see that these generalities are false, because the opposite side has exactly the same feeling—they just perceive the bias the other way around, like the other 3 I linked to. Usually at this point someone objects, "You haven't proven anything—just because somebody else has a wrong perception, it doesn't follow that mine is". Yes, a perception of this type may happen to correspond to the real situation, but only by accident—like a wrong solution to a math exercise that ends up at the right answer, but is still incorrect. What matters is how the answer is derived. The perceptions we're talking about are derived from the perceiver's internal pleasure/pain experience, and that mechanism is not capable of assessing reality accurately. Essentially, we are all projecting the inverse of our own preferences onto the outside world, and then feeling surrounded by hostility. Normally I don't offer a verdict on particular claims about this, but I feel pretty confident in saying that there is no pro-communist bias on HN. The comments that you see getting downvoted are, in many cases, downvoted because they're breaking the HN guidelines. Any comment that makes grandiose, repetitive ideological claims is already breaking the site guidelines, and when people go after each other about communism (or any other $classic-ideological-flavor) they're nearly always doing that. I have to ask commenters to stop doing this all the time on HN—not because I'm a secret communist or secret-anything-else, but because these discussions are not interesting in HN's sense of the word. We want curious conversation here, and people bashing their $other-side with well-worn talking points (be it "communism killed x-hundred-million people!" or anything else of that nature), they're not having curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y ago
  I'd like to see links to the personal attacks you claim we're tacitly ok with. I can only think of one user who I carve out occasional exceptions for (for reasons other than you'd expect, and not someone very-high-profile). Other than that, I'm pretty confident in saying: no, we don't do that. All this has zero to do with "SV ideological purity tests". If you follow the moderation here, you should know that we have no such "tests" and couldn't care less about "purity". Unfortunately, one consequence of that is that everyone with strong ideological passions ends up accusing us of being enforcers for the side they don't like. It's clearly a cognitive bias and probably hard-wired in all of us: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
  - busterarm 5y ago
    Honestly fair. I had to cool off for a while and I will walk it back. First of all I don't know you and second of all I know that you do try hard from previous conversations that we've had. While I do think a certain one or two users have gotten a pass before, honestly it was a couple of years ago at this point and probably not worth considering today. I wouldn't say that I have a particular side here, but I do see one unfortunate (to me) point of view dominating all conversations and that's not even something that's localized to HN. People bring their tendencies to bully online and drown out and attack their peers (i mean, just look at this thread) and in professional life this is also very real and the consequences are nasty. You can't moderate everything at the end of the day though, so no fault to you. What does worry me is that there seems to be a growing sentiment on this board (as in life) that doxxing of ordinary people is okay even though this is a crowd that not only should know better but needs to be held to a higher standard because of our access to and skill with such data. It's simply not challenged enough, but that's also not your job either.
  - useragent86 5y ago
    Thomas Ptacek and Don Hopkins are two examples of very high-profile users who routinely post guidelines-breaking comments without being downvoted, flagged, or chastised by mods. Even if you were to concede that, you'd probably counter that you can't read all the comments. And, of course, that is so. But that is beside the point that I have made many times before: the community's bias allows such users (and those who espouse certain views) to break the guidelines without penalty, while heavily penalizing others and those with contrary views. Every time I see you tell someone that moderator bias is an illusion, I can't help but think that you are talking past each other, because the elephant in the room (which I have rarely seen you even acknowledge) is the extreme bias in the community's downvoting and flagging behavior, which naturally results in the official moderation actions being biased toward what is flagged, which amounts to a de facto official moderation bias. (If a community only calls the police when certain groups of people break the law, the police's actions will naturally be biased toward enforcing against those groups of people, because they aren't omniscient.)
dang 5y ago
I'm not picking out or singling out anybody's comments or any dogs in any of these fights. I'm trying to neutrally apply the site guidelines in a bog-standard way. Alas, that involves making mistakes—quite a few of them, because the quantity of material posted here doesn't allow for a close reading of everything, or even a quick reading of everything (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=likeliest%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Nevertheless we need to try to prevent this place from being engulfed in flames, since that's (a) the default internet outcome and (b) everything HN is not supposed to be for. One of many ways everyone can contribute to this effort is by resisting the reflex to assume that the moderators are secretly privileging the side you don't like. That's a common illusion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22always%20feels%22%20mods%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) but it makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jagger27 5y ago
Hey Nathan, I see you don’t live in Canada! You simply don’t have a clue what’s going on here if you think it’s just a party. Multiple organizers have openly made those exact statements. You are misinformed.
- 0xy 5y ago
  Do you have any proof, or is it isolated incidents of conveniently fully masked agitators waving Nazi flags?
  - jagger27 5y ago
    I am talking about written and video statements made by organizers, not individual protesters. > conveniently fully masked agitators I shouldn't even bother responding to this kind of disingenuous bait. Of course it's all a massive psyop false flag conspiracy to smear the good names of working class Canadians in it for the good fight, right.
    - dang 5y ago
      I don't mean to pile on, having just responded to you in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337439), but your comments on this topic are standing out as breaking the HN guidelines, and we need you to stop. Not only does this sort of flamewar contribute to destroying this place, it's not in anyone's real interest—including your own. I understand why emotions are super high on this topic, and legitimately so—but commenters here need to follow the site guidelines no matter how high their emotions are. Indeed, that's pretty much the only condition under which most of these guidelines are even needed in the first place: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

To pick out this comment when people upthread are calling what amounts to a party in downtown Ottawa an insurrection and an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government is pretty gross.

busterarm 5y ago

It's because I called this all out for what it is and the moderation here has the thinnest veneer of fairness. A few very high profile posters get away with absolute murder on this board (especially in the form of personal attacks) because they pass the SV ideological purity test, but the rest of us have to keep our opinions to ourselves.

dahfizz 5y ago
This is way off base. dang is an excellent and fair moderator.
- busterarm 5y ago
  Usually. Nobody is perfect. There are certain topics and certain people that do not get moderated fairly and HN itself has certain biases that are encouraged or have opposition to them discouraged. If you know what they are, you know what they are. Bringing up HN's (often subtle but often not-so) bias against average poor people gets heavily moderated here. I give dang credit versus other moderators elsewhere who are explicitly biased and don't give a fuck how you feel about it.
  - dang 5y ago
    > If you know what they are, you know what they are. I don't know what they are! Perhaps you could clue me in at hn@ycombinator.com?
    - useragent86 5y ago
      Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized, the comment gets downvoted, and often flagged. Even comments written by people who lived in communist states, offering first-hand accounts, without breaking any HN guidelines, get downvoted and flagged. In the same threads, "conservatives" and "conservatism" and Republicans and "liberty" are freely condemned, mocked, and accused of all sorts of evil behaviors and intent, without even being downvoted, much less flagged. This happens regularly, any time these topics come up in a popular thread. So it's hard for me to understand how you could be unaware of this de facto community bias.
      - dang 5y ago
        > Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized The active ingredient here is the phrase "I see". What you're seeing feels obvious to you because you feel strongly on the topic. People who feel differently have very different "obvious" perceptions. (Edit: like here, which was just posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063.) These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver, and I do mean entirely—it is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN. Because these perceptions are predictable from the passions of the perceiver, it follows that they don't tell us anything about the community. They only tell us something about you—namely, which position you personally favor or disfavor, and how strongly. That's why other users perceive the opposite bias to what you perceive. Their passions are producing their perception the same way that yours are—they just happen to have opposite passions. Consider these gems: zero left wing chatter. instant ban by this fash site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302617 a community full of some pretty extreme opinions, generally right-wing and regressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439442 most of people on HN are ancap or fascists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958681 There are reams of this stuff, coming from all ideological tribes. Same community, incompatible perceptions—why? Because they're not actually incompatible. They only appear so if you take them as objective claims about the community. As expressions of the preferences of the perceiver, they're not only compatible, they're isomorphic. Whatever mechanism is producing these nearly-identical comments, it can't be "political skew on Hacker News", because the claims are coming from all factions. Usually at this point someone objects, "so you're just claiming that HN is perfectly neutral in every way? the community has no biases of any kind?" No, that doesn't follow. I'm only saying that comments like yours and the 3 I just linked to don't contain any signal about this, because the feeling of bias tells us nothing about the actual statistical and demographic situation. (Well, it tells us that HN produces enough data points for everybody to run across some that rub them the wrong way. But that's not enough information to conclude anything about HN as a whole.) It's incredible how deeply these feelings go and how convincing they are, so the mechanism is probably hard-wired into all of us. My hypothesis, which I call the notice-dislike bias (a terrible name), goes like this: because painful experiences make a deeper impression than pleasurable ones, we're all more likely to notice the data points that bring up dislike/disagree reactions in us (i.e. give us pain) than we are to notice the kind that we like/agree with (i.e. give us pleasure). Not only that but we weight the painful ones much more heavily. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22false%20feelings%20of%20generality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), in which people are convinced that the community (and usually the moderators too) are overwhelmingly stacked against their particular views (for example, your view that communism is bad). It's easy to see that these generalities are false, because the opposite side has exactly the same feeling—they just perceive the bias the other way around, like the other 3 I linked to. Usually at this point someone objects, "You haven't proven anything—just because somebody else has a wrong perception, it doesn't follow that mine is". Yes, a perception of this type may happen to correspond to the real situation, but only by accident—like a wrong solution to a math exercise that ends up at the right answer, but is still incorrect. What matters is how the answer is derived. The perceptions we're talking about are derived from the perceiver's internal pleasure/pain experience, and that mechanism is not capable of assessing reality accurately. Essentially, we are all projecting the inverse of our own preferences onto the outside world, and then feeling surrounded by hostility. Normally I don't offer a verdict on particular claims about this, but I feel pretty confident in saying that there is no pro-communist bias on HN. The comments that you see getting downvoted are, in many cases, downvoted because they're breaking the HN guidelines. Any comment that makes grandiose, repetitive ideological claims is already breaking the site guidelines, and when people go after each other about communism (or any other $classic-ideological-flavor) they're nearly always doing that. I have to ask commenters to stop doing this all the time on HN—not because I'm a secret communist or secret-anything-else, but because these discussions are not interesting in HN's sense of the word. We want curious conversation here, and people bashing their $other-side with well-worn talking points (be it "communism killed x-hundred-million people!" or anything else of that nature), they're not having curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 5y ago
I'd like to see links to the personal attacks you claim we're tacitly ok with. I can only think of one user who I carve out occasional exceptions for (for reasons other than you'd expect, and not someone very-high-profile). Other than that, I'm pretty confident in saying: no, we don't do that. All this has zero to do with "SV ideological purity tests". If you follow the moderation here, you should know that we have no such "tests" and couldn't care less about "purity". Unfortunately, one consequence of that is that everyone with strong ideological passions ends up accusing us of being enforcers for the side they don't like. It's clearly a cognitive bias and probably hard-wired in all of us: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
- busterarm 5y ago
  Honestly fair. I had to cool off for a while and I will walk it back. First of all I don't know you and second of all I know that you do try hard from previous conversations that we've had. While I do think a certain one or two users have gotten a pass before, honestly it was a couple of years ago at this point and probably not worth considering today. I wouldn't say that I have a particular side here, but I do see one unfortunate (to me) point of view dominating all conversations and that's not even something that's localized to HN. People bring their tendencies to bully online and drown out and attack their peers (i mean, just look at this thread) and in professional life this is also very real and the consequences are nasty. You can't moderate everything at the end of the day though, so no fault to you. What does worry me is that there seems to be a growing sentiment on this board (as in life) that doxxing of ordinary people is okay even though this is a crowd that not only should know better but needs to be held to a higher standard because of our access to and skill with such data. It's simply not challenged enough, but that's also not your job either.
- useragent86 5y ago
  Thomas Ptacek and Don Hopkins are two examples of very high-profile users who routinely post guidelines-breaking comments without being downvoted, flagged, or chastised by mods. Even if you were to concede that, you'd probably counter that you can't read all the comments. And, of course, that is so. But that is beside the point that I have made many times before: the community's bias allows such users (and those who espouse certain views) to break the guidelines without penalty, while heavily penalizing others and those with contrary views. Every time I see you tell someone that moderator bias is an illusion, I can't help but think that you are talking past each other, because the elephant in the room (which I have rarely seen you even acknowledge) is the extreme bias in the community's downvoting and flagging behavior, which naturally results in the official moderation actions being biased toward what is flagged, which amounts to a de facto official moderation bias. (If a community only calls the police when certain groups of people break the law, the police's actions will naturally be biased toward enforcing against those groups of people, because they aren't omniscient.)

dang 5y ago

I'm not picking out or singling out anybody's comments or any dogs in any of these fights. I'm trying to neutrally apply the site guidelines in a bog-standard way. Alas, that involves making mistakes—quite a few of them, because the quantity of material posted here doesn't allow for a close reading of everything, or even a quick reading of everything (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=likeliest%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Nevertheless we need to try to prevent this place from being engulfed in flames, since that's (a) the default internet outcome and (b) everything HN is not supposed to be for. One of many ways everyone can contribute to this effort is by resisting the reflex to assume that the moderators are secretly privileging the side you don't like. That's a common illusion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22always%20feels%22%20mods%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) but it makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jagger27 5y ago

Hey Nathan, I see you don’t live in Canada! You simply don’t have a clue what’s going on here if you think it’s just a party. Multiple organizers have openly made those exact statements. You are misinformed.

0xy 5y ago
Do you have any proof, or is it isolated incidents of conveniently fully masked agitators waving Nazi flags?
- jagger27 5y ago
  I am talking about written and video statements made by organizers, not individual protesters. > conveniently fully masked agitators I shouldn't even bother responding to this kind of disingenuous bait. Of course it's all a massive psyop false flag conspiracy to smear the good names of working class Canadians in it for the good fight, right.
  - dang 5y ago
    I don't mean to pile on, having just responded to you in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337439), but your comments on this topic are standing out as breaking the HN guidelines, and we need you to stop. Not only does this sort of flamewar contribute to destroying this place, it's not in anyone's real interest—including your own. I understand why emotions are super high on this topic, and legitimately so—but commenters here need to follow the site guidelines no matter how high their emotions are. Indeed, that's pretty much the only condition under which most of these guidelines are even needed in the first place: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.