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Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines. 99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals acce
by abtinf 7mo ago
Good. This helps establish it in the HN culture. That’s the purpose of guidelines.
99% of rule enforcement, both IRL and online, comes down to individuals accepting the culture.
Rules aren’t really for adversaries, they are for ordinary situations. Adversaries are dealt with differently.
- gr8tyeah 7mo agoThis is only meaningful if enough people read it and agree
- bhhaskin 7mo agoNah they are pretty good a banning users that don't follow the guidelines.
- abtinf 7mo agoYes, and it’s not like they just insta-ban every infraction. I’ve broken the guidelines on this site before. The mods reply and say “hey, stop doing that, here is the guideline”. I stopped doing it. Life continues.
- altairprime 7mo ago(They do react differently if you show a pattern of disregard rather than a one-time event; ‘dang before’ might pull up some of those in a search.)
- jbaber 7mo agoOne of the virtues of HN is polite prodding when the rules are broken.
- abtinf 7mo agoThat’s true. Fortunately, by virtue of it being added to the guidelines, quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule. Just search for “shallow dismissal” to see many examples. It will take time, but eventually everyone will know about it.
- bigiain 7mo agoSadly, I suspect the rate of generation of AI "everyones" vastly exceeds the community's capacity to teach culture.
- altairprime 7mo ago> quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule Note that the guidelines do explicitly say not to post about guidelines violations in comments, and to email them instead. I know this isn’t a well-loved guideline in this modern era, but duly noted: those well-intended comments are themselves breaking the guidelines.
- lokar 7mo agoAre you referring to: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. If so, that seems different. If not, can you clarify?
- altairprime 7mo agoThat one, yes. “Insinuations” is a less conditional form of “Accusations”, connected by the concept of “Claims”; they’re all synonymous from a general perspective: - I insinuate that you are a bot (often shortened to “Is this a bot?”) - I claim that you are a bot. (often shortened to “This is a bot.”) - I accuse you of being a bot l. (often shortened to “Are you a bot?”) The part where I’m interpreting to include accusations of bottery and slop is “and the like. It”; the first clause, ‘the like’ refers to the generic category of accusations against posted comments, which historically were the listed examples, but is also defined to include others not listed, such as today’s popular accusations of bot or AI; the second clause, ‘It’, refers to all insinuations-class content. Without the list of examples, this reads: ’Please don’t post insinuations. It degrades discussion Yep, this is true. Accusations, Insinuations, Claims, of bot or AI or astroturf; they all wreck discussions and I end up having to email the mods to deal with them. A lot of people use the rhetorical device of Discredit The Opposition by invoking this sort of thing, and while that’s less prevalent in ‘reads like AI’ insinuations, they still degrade the site. With AI-assisted writing is a violation of site guidelines, and even before it was, posting of AI-assisted writing was a clear ‘abuse’ of the community’s expectations of unassisted-human discussions. Aside from expectations, I can also classically understand in Internet history that ‘violating the guidelines’ is the phrase formerly known as ‘abuse of service’, by which I interpret the above reference to abuse to refer to breaking the guideline about posting accusations. The guidelines are not a legal contract as program code, and perhaps this one is clunky enough that it needs to be reworded slightly; thus my intent, once the flames die down here, to let the mods know about the confusion. As I’m not a mod, this is my interpretation alone; you might have to email the mods and ask them to reply here if you want a formal statement on the matter, given how many comments this thread got in a couple hours. ps. On ’and is usually mistaken’: I’m not a mod, so I can’t judge how often accusations of AI/bot are mistaken, but I’m also an old human who learned em-dashes in composition class, so I tend to view the modern pitchfork mobs out to get anyone who can compose English as being less accurate in their judgments than they believe they are.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- VoodooJuJu 7mo ago[dead]
- Apofis 7mo agoWhen creating an account, there should be a short screen with the salient points from the guidelines to follow.
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoThat's assuming community input / democracy, but especially online there's a good argument to be made for authoritarianism.
- loeg 7mo agoI mostly agree, although we've seen big shifts in the culture towards rule-deviating norms over time. Look at the guidelines for ideological battles or throwaway accounts, for example. And, as always: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- wombatpm 7mo agoThis discussion reminds me of the Paradigms of Power featured in Adiamante by L E Modisett; about consensus, power, morality and society. It’s a good read.