Dang is a terrible moderator who engages in ideological censorship
I'm sorry, but after trying yet again to contribute and yet again being slapped around I've finally had it.
Dang, you are the single worst moderator I've ever had the displeasure of having to deal with. You regularly ban, throttle, shadowban, and otherwise censor used for purely ideological reasons while claiming that their posts are "unsubstantive". The entire structure of HN does inevitably lead to an echo chamber of people who are at times incredibly lacking in self awareness, but your actions only exacerbate this problem.
Anyway, this post is giong to be downvoted, flagged, and probably deleted with the account banned and maybe a weak redirection to an email account. God forbid we discuss the state of the site and moderation publicly.
25 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadIt sucks to get moderated, and often feels like the mods are doing it because they disagree with you. Whatever your ideology is, though, I guarantee you there are users on the other side complaining that yours is the one we secretly agree with and theirs is the one we're censoring.
Without the good moderation HN would be a very different platform.
It does suck getting moderated and it does feel like I'm being picked on, especially if it's a heated conversation. But for as busy as HN is, it still feels cleaner than a lot of other places on the web. I really appreciate that and it's why I keep coming back.
For the OP: there are many places like HN around the Internet with different moderation policies. Sometimes when I feel like I need to take a break from HN for whatever reason, I move to those other sites for a while. There might be sites out there you agree with more?
There is a real sickness on the net today where "moderators" have come to think of themselves as the thought police, but even worse, not just thought police of an authoritarian regime, but a kind of self-anointed little dictator that rules over the user rabble at will and upon whim.
If you want to silence people, at least have the spine of any other run of the mill authoritarian and tell users their fundamental human right to speech and expression was taken from them … don't just silently transport them to digital purgatory. Again, it is a vile act that only the most depraved people would excuse, let alone endorse, no matter what unapproved things were thought and said … which are only words/characters on a screen that can be dismissed and ignored.
Ok, I've said my peace. It's a sick and depraved practice and I cannot stand by just not say something when the topic comes up while digital regimes like HN, reddit have, what are essentially digital version of hellish totalitarian regime isolation cells that "mods" disappear people/accounts to.
Shadowbanning is for spam accounts and new accounts that are egregiously and/or repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, especially if they show evidence of being serial trolls. That's a fundamentally different case—there are many users who simply create new accounts as we ban their older accounts and carry on posting as before. It isn't a good use of resources to patiently coax them to improve or even to reply to their posts at all. These users know perfectly well when we've banned them; it's a cat and mouse game and not at all an "isolation cell".
It's certainly true that there are a few good-faith users who get shadowbanned because we mistook them for bad-faith users—people who didn't realize that they were breaking the site guidelines and could have reformed if we had explained and asked them. But there are orders of magnitude fewer of these than your comment implies. I'd prefer that there not be even one such lost lamb, but it's just a hard problem to solve. Software can't distinguish these and moderators can't read intent correctly in every case.
Just try to reflect on the authoritarian and supremacist mentality you have with language like "It isn't a good use of resources to patiently coax them to improve or even to reply to their posts at all"; yet your expend resources to censor and control and rule with an iron fist anything that is not to our liking.
No one is talking about obvious spam or any kind of illegal language like credible threats of violence or stalking or bulling, but if you were at least honest with yourself you would acknowledge that it has nothing at all to do with "good use of resource" and all to do with control. Because it is irrefutably true that if it were about "good use of resources" you would wholeheartedly avoid censorship of legal language and not violate what what has been deemed a human right, free speech.
You types, people with the authoritarian supremacist mentality you clearly have, are always quite to rationalize why it is fine that you be the arbiter of right and wrongthink, but it never avails you of the inherent evil exhibited by controlling speech and expression, no matter how much beneath you or inferior and unworthy you decree that speech to be.
There's room for lots of different kinds of internet forum. It's good for different sites to make different choices about how they operate—that gives users get a richer set of communities to choose from. The thing to realize, though, is that there are tradeoffs. For example, you can't both have a site that's dedicated to intellectual curiosity and allow aggressive comments and flamewars. If you try, the flames will burn out the curiosity. That has significant consequences for moderation on a site like HN, where curiosity is the core value. In order to preserve HN for its intended purpose, we have to respect that reality.
It isn't "authoritarian supremacist mentality", or any of the other things you describe, to want to maintain a particular kind of internet forum. If your job was to maintain a public garden, you wouldn't allow drag racing in the flower beds.
Bending to whatever ideology bonetopick wants to push, be it right, left or otherwise, would probably get equally angry posts from others so I encourage the moderators to give this post the minimal attention it deserves.
So thanks for all you do. You get lots of complaints (nobody likes being on the receiving end of what you do), but the site is far better because of you.
You say you've had it, yet here you are still.
There seems quite a lot of discussion of the "state of the site and moderation" on here, but you act like it's forbidden or something.
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What's your point? The search term is ensuring you only find moderation-hat comments, and of course they're not going to be contributing with substance of their own to the topic being discussed.
I thought you were saying 'look at all these comments of dang's, calling out other people, but not a single one of them is subtantive itself'.
On the other hand I don't envy his position. It is easy to be critical, but harder to put yourself in his shoes and suggest improvements.
Overall I think he wants to moderate for the most sensitive users of a particular persuasion. I view HN as a product of Silicon Valley's culture.
The end result is that I self censor when I disagree with what I perceive as a the prevailing view on HN.
Take it or leave it. Discussing political views online isn't an especially fruitful use of my time.
Occasionally there are a few interesting articles. If I need a diversion I focus on the ones I'd like to read. Commenting is rarely worth it in my view.
The first one I won't touch anywhere online. China has too many wumaos. There's very little room to question the role of the state without things devolving rapidly.
As it concerns cycling, suggesting that people can get out there as self-starters without the need for designated lanes had me warned for being impolite? Not sure how much gentler I could have said it.
I few comments later someone else was suggesting that I was an outlier as a former bike messenger and that most couriers are run-over so my opinion isn't valid. Somehow this one passed by the moderation team.
I get that the moderators can't be everywhere at once. Not here for Internet points. I want to be polite with everyone. But I view the pedantic wrist slaps as falling on one side and ignoring the other.
Group dynamics always and consistently create situations where "popular" views are much easier to express. This is not caused by moderation and not unique to HN. In fact, good moderation should give some pushback against such which makes it less awful to participate in good faith while disagreeing with the majority view.
My first-hand personal experience is that HN is generally better than most forums about allowing for and supporting disagreement with the popular views on the site, so long as you follow the rules concerning civility and the like.
I find group dynamics fascinating. It's unfortunate that moderation of online forums is one of the best real world "labs" for such an interest. It inevitably gets interpreted as me sucking up to the mods here rather than me simply finding the topic interesting and desiring to participate in the discussion in good faith.
I keep trying to find other outlets, but they tend to fail to satisfy.