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I'm sorry, I got carried away. I shouldn't have aggravated the troll after they started stalking my past comments on HN with childish insults. Edit: Not that t

I'm sorry, I got carried away. I shouldn't have aggravated the troll after they started stalking my past comments on HN with childish insults. Edit: Not that this excuses it, but I didn't react the way I did because I thought someone was "wrong", but because this is a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults. Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that.

dang 3y ago
> Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that. Not tolerating it isn't as simple as you might think. You made it harder in this case by breaking the rules yourself. If you hadn't, I could have banned the other account. But if I had banned the other account without also banning you, they (or someone else) would have asked why it was ok for you to break the rules but not ok for them to. (I didn't want to ban your account because when I looked at its history, I didn't see much egregious abuse, although I did see you casually breaking the site guidelines quite a bit.) You did the same thing again just an hour ago. That is, you replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891679 by breaking the site guidelines yourself, thus preventing moderation from working the way it normally would. Edit: Since you're more or less asking why moderation works the way it does in a case like this, I thought it might be interesting to unpack the following sentence from a moderation point of view: "I didn't react the way I did because I thought someone was "wrong", but because this is a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults. Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that." This may sound odd, but when I read that through (let's say) moderator glasses, it reduces to two things: "they [i.e. the other person] were wrong" and "they were breaking the rules". At risk of being tedious, I can show the steps I take from what you wrote to those two things. Maybe this will be of interest, maybe not, but it's certainly a representative example. > a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation When I read this, I have to take out the parts that I (as a moderator) can't act on. The first thing that has to go is the word "deliberately". That refers to intent, which is difficult to assess on the internet and impossible to prove. I can't act on that. (Past explanations on this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=intent%20effects%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) Commenters use words like "deliberately" all the time about other commenters that they're annoyed with. Such words are intensifiers for expressing how they feel about the other person. In processing such language as a moderator, I have to cut "deliberately", and I also have to cut "a clear case" for the same reason. These things are not at all clear; they just feel clear to the people embroiled in an argument. One can safely assume that the other person feels just as "clearly" about oneself. Once I cut "deliberately" and "a clear case", we have: > repeatedly spreading misinformation The word "misinformation" is another that commenters use a lot, mostly as an intensifier for how they feel about the other person or their view. It's not so different from saying "deliberately wrong". If, again, I cut out the assumption about intent, it reduces to "wrong". In other words, from a moderation perspective your phrase "a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation" really does boil down to "they were wrong". There are additional layers of intensity in what you wrote, and I can listen to them as an expression of how you feel, but it's no basis for moderation. (Nor is someone being wrong; more about that in a minute.) That leaves: > followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults Yes, this is basically how the other user was breaking the site guidelines and what I scolded them for. Putting all that together, if I go back to your point as a whole, which can be restated like this: > Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults ... and if I run that through the processing steps I just outlined, for me qua moderator it reduces to: "I don't understand how you can tolerate someone being wrong and breaking the rules." Let's take those two in turn. Someone being wrong is not a moderation issue. People sometimes want it to be, but asking the mods to be the arbiters of truth is a disastrous idea—it would satisfy no one and enrage everyone–a sure path to destroying the community. Nor do we have any power to do so—it's not as if we have a truth meter (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22truth%20meter%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Sorting out what's true from what's false is the community's job, not the mods'. Asking mods to decide the truth is like asking the janitor which books belong on library shelves. So in the end the sentence reduces to "I don't understand how you can tolerate someone breaking the rules", and the answer to that is that I didn't tolerate it. I scolded the user, warned them, and asked them to follow the rules from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887733). As I said, I might have done more if you hadn't also been breaking the rules; but when two warring parties are both doing that, the dominant variable becomes the community's concern for even-handedness. That's a complex issue in its own right, and because it's about the community as a whole rather than individual users, it takes precedence.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  I appreciate your elaborate response, I'm going to try to elaborate on my thought process. In this thread they claimed that both Gemini and ChatGPT were banned by EU and used that as basis for expressing general anti-EU sentiments, but just a few days ago they were talking about life in Italy and how they use both Gemini and ChatGPT (one of them being paid, if I recall correctly). How could someone genuinely believe that these tools were banned if they were a paid user of them, in the EU no less? An an aside, I believe this comment had been edited, could you confirm? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882180 I used words such as "deliberate", "misinformation", and "troll" because they expressed obviously incompatible claims just days apart, and my opinion was strengthened after after they kept repeating the claim of an EU ban in the face of other people who chimed in to say that both of those services were in fact available in the EU. Regardless, I shouldn't have responded to them after my initial comment in this thread, but from my perspective, nothing really happened moderation-wise. I find it odd that you would later equate[1] their actions with my continued responses that steered clear of flame-bait insults and focused on the subject of this discussion. My tone was snarky but it largely developed after they had followed me across 3 threads and repeatedly spammed insults in my feed every few minutes (this triggered notifications, which didn't help in this case). I apologized, but then I received another reply which I just flagged and ignored because it resorted to insults again. Later in the day (>12h later) I was curious and checked to see if any action had been taken and it hadn't, which I took as a sign that it was tolerated. I then responded with what I think was a very neutral response to someone essentially calling me retarded again. My comment directly addressed most of the claims they had made in this thread because I considered it to be my final response to this topic but instead my comment was flagged in short order. I try to stick to the guidelines (as you've pointed out, I find myself overstepping in certain situations, but as a rule, I try not to), so I don't understand why I'm being scolded in this instance. (1) Was I not supposed to respond at all, or (2) is there something severely wrong with my response? In the case of (1) why wasn't their instigation acted on? I tried to do the right thing at first, or (2) why does my comment require swift moderation action when it's a comparatively mild and on-topic response to their insults? I don't believe that my actions rose to the same order of magnitude of rule-breaking as theirs, but if you believe that my actions have been ban-worthy on their own merit, then so be it, I'll take it. [1] You said otherwise, but you're equating them in practice by saying that you can't ban them without banning me too. I was also close to shadowbanned after your initial action, so it seems like the consequences were equal nonetheless.

dang 3y ago

> Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that. Not tolerating it isn't as simple as you might think. You made it harder in this case by breaking the rules yourself. If you hadn't, I could have banned the other account. But if I had banned the other account without also banning you, they (or someone else) would have asked why it was ok for you to break the rules but not ok for them to. (I didn't want to ban your account because when I looked at its history, I didn't see much egregious abuse, although I did see you casually breaking the site guidelines quite a bit.) You did the same thing again just an hour ago. That is, you replied to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891679 by breaking the site guidelines yourself, thus preventing moderation from working the way it normally would. Edit: Since you're more or less asking why moderation works the way it does in a case like this, I thought it might be interesting to unpack the following sentence from a moderation point of view: "I didn't react the way I did because I thought someone was "wrong", but because this is a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults. Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate that." This may sound odd, but when I read that through (let's say) moderator glasses, it reduces to two things: "they [i.e. the other person] were wrong" and "they were breaking the rules". At risk of being tedious, I can show the steps I take from what you wrote to those two things. Maybe this will be of interest, maybe not, but it's certainly a representative example. > a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation When I read this, I have to take out the parts that I (as a moderator) can't act on. The first thing that has to go is the word "deliberately". That refers to intent, which is difficult to assess on the internet and impossible to prove. I can't act on that. (Past explanations on this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=intent%20effects%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) Commenters use words like "deliberately" all the time about other commenters that they're annoyed with. Such words are intensifiers for expressing how they feel about the other person. In processing such language as a moderator, I have to cut "deliberately", and I also have to cut "a clear case" for the same reason. These things are not at all clear; they just feel clear to the people embroiled in an argument. One can safely assume that the other person feels just as "clearly" about oneself. Once I cut "deliberately" and "a clear case", we have: > repeatedly spreading misinformation The word "misinformation" is another that commenters use a lot, mostly as an intensifier for how they feel about the other person or their view. It's not so different from saying "deliberately wrong". If, again, I cut out the assumption about intent, it reduces to "wrong". In other words, from a moderation perspective your phrase "a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation" really does boil down to "they were wrong". There are additional layers of intensity in what you wrote, and I can listen to them as an expression of how you feel, but it's no basis for moderation. (Nor is someone being wrong; more about that in a minute.) That leaves: > followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults Yes, this is basically how the other user was breaking the site guidelines and what I scolded them for. Putting all that together, if I go back to your point as a whole, which can be restated like this: > Frankly I don't understand how you can tolerate a clear case of someone deliberately and repeatedly spreading misinformation, followed by stalking and a barrage of childish insults ... and if I run that through the processing steps I just outlined, for me qua moderator it reduces to: "I don't understand how you can tolerate someone being wrong and breaking the rules." Let's take those two in turn. Someone being wrong is not a moderation issue. People sometimes want it to be, but asking the mods to be the arbiters of truth is a disastrous idea—it would satisfy no one and enrage everyone–a sure path to destroying the community. Nor do we have any power to do so—it's not as if we have a truth meter (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22truth%20meter%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Sorting out what's true from what's false is the community's job, not the mods'. Asking mods to decide the truth is like asking the janitor which books belong on library shelves. So in the end the sentence reduces to "I don't understand how you can tolerate someone breaking the rules", and the answer to that is that I didn't tolerate it. I scolded the user, warned them, and asked them to follow the rules from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39887733). As I said, I might have done more if you hadn't also been breaking the rules; but when two warring parties are both doing that, the dominant variable becomes the community's concern for even-handedness. That's a complex issue in its own right, and because it's about the community as a whole rather than individual users, it takes precedence.

dns_snek 3y ago
I appreciate your elaborate response, I'm going to try to elaborate on my thought process. In this thread they claimed that both Gemini and ChatGPT were banned by EU and used that as basis for expressing general anti-EU sentiments, but just a few days ago they were talking about life in Italy and how they use both Gemini and ChatGPT (one of them being paid, if I recall correctly). How could someone genuinely believe that these tools were banned if they were a paid user of them, in the EU no less? An an aside, I believe this comment had been edited, could you confirm? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882180 I used words such as "deliberate", "misinformation", and "troll" because they expressed obviously incompatible claims just days apart, and my opinion was strengthened after after they kept repeating the claim of an EU ban in the face of other people who chimed in to say that both of those services were in fact available in the EU. Regardless, I shouldn't have responded to them after my initial comment in this thread, but from my perspective, nothing really happened moderation-wise. I find it odd that you would later equate[1] their actions with my continued responses that steered clear of flame-bait insults and focused on the subject of this discussion. My tone was snarky but it largely developed after they had followed me across 3 threads and repeatedly spammed insults in my feed every few minutes (this triggered notifications, which didn't help in this case). I apologized, but then I received another reply which I just flagged and ignored because it resorted to insults again. Later in the day (>12h later) I was curious and checked to see if any action had been taken and it hadn't, which I took as a sign that it was tolerated. I then responded with what I think was a very neutral response to someone essentially calling me retarded again. My comment directly addressed most of the claims they had made in this thread because I considered it to be my final response to this topic but instead my comment was flagged in short order. I try to stick to the guidelines (as you've pointed out, I find myself overstepping in certain situations, but as a rule, I try not to), so I don't understand why I'm being scolded in this instance. (1) Was I not supposed to respond at all, or (2) is there something severely wrong with my response? In the case of (1) why wasn't their instigation acted on? I tried to do the right thing at first, or (2) why does my comment require swift moderation action when it's a comparatively mild and on-topic response to their insults? I don't believe that my actions rose to the same order of magnitude of rule-breaking as theirs, but if you believe that my actions have been ban-worthy on their own merit, then so be it, I'll take it. [1] You said otherwise, but you're equating them in practice by saying that you can't ban them without banning me too. I was also close to shadowbanned after your initial action, so it seems like the consequences were equal nonetheless.