3 ms·

I’m not done with you. You (dang) attacked me and threatened me because I said people were “afraid” of free speech. Meanwhile I have had multiple attacks clai

by zionic 4y ago

I’m not done with you. You (dang) attacked me and threatened me because I said people were “afraid” of free speech. Meanwhile I have had multiple attacks claiming that, since I disagreed with their radical ideology, I was “afraid” of them. Who are you, and why do you think you can act this way? Why do you think you can operate to shape the HN discourse with zero repercussions?

dang 4y ago
HN is a moderated/curated site and I'm one of the moderators. It's literally my job to do this and I would not be doing it otherwise. You might be under a misimpression of what Hacker News is for. It's for thoughtful conversation about topics that gratify intellectual curiosity. Ideological flamewar is the opposite of that, so we don't want it here and we ban accounts that keep doing it. If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you will hopefully get the idea.* You can call that 'censorship' if you want to—people use that word in many different ways—but you should understand why we moderate HN the way we do. It's because we're trying to have a specific sort of forum. If we just let the default forces of the internet have their way with this place, it would quickly cease to be that sort of forum. Therefore our only choices are either (a) to moderate HN or (b) to abandon the site's mandate (of intellectual curiosity) - and we're not going to abandon the mandate. Look at it this way: games need rules. If you're trying to play one game (say, chess) rather than another (say, football), you need to follow the rules of chess. Is it censorship that you're not allowed to tackle the opponent's bishop? or that you can't capture a piece by jumping over it, like you can in checkers? I wouldn't say so. In a similar way, we're trying to play a specific type of game on HN. It's not as well-defined as chess or checkers or football, but I think the analogy is still useful. * There are also lots of past explanations at these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

by zionic 4y ago

dang 4y ago

HN is a moderated/curated site and I'm one of the moderators. It's literally my job to do this and I would not be doing it otherwise. You might be under a misimpression of what Hacker News is for. It's for thoughtful conversation about topics that gratify intellectual curiosity. Ideological flamewar is the opposite of that, so we don't want it here and we ban accounts that keep doing it. If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you will hopefully get the idea.* You can call that 'censorship' if you want to—people use that word in many different ways—but you should understand why we moderate HN the way we do. It's because we're trying to have a specific sort of forum. If we just let the default forces of the internet have their way with this place, it would quickly cease to be that sort of forum. Therefore our only choices are either (a) to moderate HN or (b) to abandon the site's mandate (of intellectual curiosity) - and we're not going to abandon the mandate. Look at it this way: games need rules. If you're trying to play one game (say, chess) rather than another (say, football), you need to follow the rules of chess. Is it censorship that you're not allowed to tackle the opponent's bishop? or that you can't capture a piece by jumping over it, like you can in checkers? I wouldn't say so. In a similar way, we're trying to play a specific type of game on HN. It's not as well-defined as chess or checkers or football, but I think the analogy is still useful. * There are also lots of past explanations at these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...