2 ms·

and yet, to make your point, all you had to do was upvote the parent to make it more visible.

dredmorbius 3y ago
There are a significant number of instances when this isn't the case. A comment is killed by flags, and dang will comment on how it violates HN guidelines. This isn't super-frequent, but does occur at least a few times a year that I see it (both through my own browsing of HN and by following up on dang's moderation comments, the overwhelming majority of which I agree with, just to be clear). Often what's being criticised in the comment is also being practised either in a parent comment (which generally isn't flagged or admonished by dang), or in the source article itself. Abuses by the Catholic Church are one somewhat typical case, there are a few others. Climate / resource discussions that I see, though I think that's becoming less the case with time. Virtually always it's a truth-to-power situation, with truth getting emotional, as might be expected in cases of long-standing abuse. Dang's consistent response is that HN's prime directive is to satisfy intellectual curiosity, and that there are a set of stories (and discussions) that just don't do that. Fluffy floofs, sportsball, celebrity, and horse-race politics are a large fraction of these, and I'm OK with that. I see significant spillover into hard problems as well, though. These are hard to discuss productively, and it's even harder to move that discussion along (new points, new insights, deeper mutual understanding), but my complaint to HN is that it doesn't seem to want to try, or at least, not as hard as I'd like it to. Sinead is a case where Celebrity intersects with Hard Problems, as it occasionally does. Also: for all that this is a fairly consistent complaint of mine, HN does far better than any other general online forum of which I'm aware. There may be some less-frequented corners, and I'd like to check out how, say, MetaFilter scores in this regard. But of major social sites --- Birdsite, FB, Reddit, and even the Fediverse (which shares some characteristics of its larger cousin) --- HN is well above mean IMO. I'd like it to be better. And some latitude in the case of truth-to-power conversations seems one route there.

There are a significant number of instances when this isn't the case. A comment is killed by flags, and dang will comment on how it violates HN guidelines. This isn't super-frequent, but does occur at least a few times a year that I see it (both through my own browsing of HN and by following up on dang's moderation comments, the overwhelming majority of which I agree with, just to be clear). Often what's being criticised in the comment is also being practised either in a parent comment (which generally isn't flagged or admonished by dang), or in the source article itself. Abuses by the Catholic Church are one somewhat typical case, there are a few others. Climate / resource discussions that I see, though I think that's becoming less the case with time. Virtually always it's a truth-to-power situation, with truth getting emotional, as might be expected in cases of long-standing abuse. Dang's consistent response is that HN's prime directive is to satisfy intellectual curiosity, and that there are a set of stories (and discussions) that just don't do that. Fluffy floofs, sportsball, celebrity, and horse-race politics are a large fraction of these, and I'm OK with that. I see significant spillover into hard problems as well, though. These are hard to discuss productively, and it's even harder to move that discussion along (new points, new insights, deeper mutual understanding), but my complaint to HN is that it doesn't seem to want to try, or at least, not as hard as I'd like it to. Sinead is a case where Celebrity intersects with Hard Problems, as it occasionally does. Also: for all that this is a fairly consistent complaint of mine, HN does far better than any other general online forum of which I'm aware. There may be some less-frequented corners, and I'd like to check out how, say, MetaFilter scores in this regard. But of major social sites --- Birdsite, FB, Reddit, and even the Fediverse (which shares some characteristics of its larger cousin) --- HN is well above mean IMO. I'd like it to be better. And some latitude in the case of truth-to-power conversations seems one route there.