5 ms·

Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.

davidw 4y ago
dang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  I am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.
  - fotta 4y ago
    IIRC there’s more than one mod but dang is the most visible. sctb used to be another mod but it looks like he left in 2019.
  - dang 4y ago
    It is? (well I guess everyone's is)
- tomlockwood 4y ago
  I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    In my experience, you can post stuff that's politically as far left as it gets, so long as you phrase it politely.
TylerE 4y ago
I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted
- tomcam 4y ago
  Well HN is run by plutocrats. Who pay a lot of money to run the site. I’d rather have HN with this obvious bias than no HN at all.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    This doesn't feel like an expensive site to host/develop, but the moderation costs might be up there.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      It probably IS expensive to host because it’s written in a language no one uses without an optimizing compiler, and apprently most of the “db” is flatfiles on disk, some of which get read on every request.
      - jrockway 4y ago
        Computers are fast. This isn't a particularly demanding workload; pages for users that aren't logged in are cached, and there probably aren't a ton of people logged in. Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.
      - detaro 4y ago
        its hosted on a single random server, so no, in absolute terms it very unlikely is expensive. (or two actually, since there is a backup server afaik)
      - orangepurple 4y ago
        You vastly underestimate how much impact ONE server can make if you don't use modern cloud garbage tech
TylerE 4y ago
Turn showdead in and tell me this website is a “free speech absolutist zone”. I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.
- tomlockwood 4y ago
  Unfortunately, hypocrisy is possible. One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why? It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.
  - nyokodo 4y ago
    > there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why? Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.
    - puffoflogic 4y ago
      It's not that simple. A lot of censorship happens under the guise of "removing spam". For example, dang regularly censors HN comments promoting viewpoints he doesn't like by claiming that they are "flamebait" or similar, which is to say, if enough people dislike something then it is spam. Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently." I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.
    - tomlockwood 4y ago
      > Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true. Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?
ProAm 4y ago
HN is definitely not a free speech zone. It doesn't need to be, and I think they let a lot of legitimate discussions take place, but in no way shape or form is this a free speech discussion forum, it's a business (a I personally think a decently run one, as for moderation is very difficult).

dang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.

orangepurple 4y ago
I am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.
- fotta 4y ago
  IIRC there’s more than one mod but dang is the most visible. sctb used to be another mod but it looks like he left in 2019.
- dang 4y ago
  It is? (well I guess everyone's is)
tomlockwood 4y ago
I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
- int_19h 4y ago
  In my experience, you can post stuff that's politically as far left as it gets, so long as you phrase it politely.

TylerE 4y ago

I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted

tomcam 4y ago
Well HN is run by plutocrats. Who pay a lot of money to run the site. I’d rather have HN with this obvious bias than no HN at all.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  This doesn't feel like an expensive site to host/develop, but the moderation costs might be up there.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    It probably IS expensive to host because it’s written in a language no one uses without an optimizing compiler, and apprently most of the “db” is flatfiles on disk, some of which get read on every request.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Computers are fast. This isn't a particularly demanding workload; pages for users that aren't logged in are cached, and there probably aren't a ton of people logged in. Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.
    - detaro 4y ago
      its hosted on a single random server, so no, in absolute terms it very unlikely is expensive. (or two actually, since there is a backup server afaik)
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      You vastly underestimate how much impact ONE server can make if you don't use modern cloud garbage tech

TylerE 4y ago

Turn showdead in and tell me this website is a “free speech absolutist zone”. I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.

tomlockwood 4y ago
Unfortunately, hypocrisy is possible. One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why? It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.
- nyokodo 4y ago
  > there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why? Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.
  - puffoflogic 4y ago
    It's not that simple. A lot of censorship happens under the guise of "removing spam". For example, dang regularly censors HN comments promoting viewpoints he doesn't like by claiming that they are "flamebait" or similar, which is to say, if enough people dislike something then it is spam. Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently." I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.
  - tomlockwood 4y ago
    > Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true. Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?

ProAm 4y ago

HN is definitely not a free speech zone. It doesn't need to be, and I think they let a lot of legitimate discussions take place, but in no way shape or form is this a free speech discussion forum, it's a business (a I personally think a decently run one, as for moderation is very difficult).