Yes in the sense that users flagged it, but not in the sense that moderators penalized it. I didn't see it until someone emailed a couple minutes ago.
The only thing I've done since then is mark the post so it won't be killed by excessive user flags. This means the thread can stay open for new comments.
I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction, though of course some users will have the opposite reaction as well; this is normal.
Wouldn't excessive/above average flagging rather indicate a post is controversial/counter narrative enough to warrant longer front page exposure? It certainly seems to have gotten the people going in the short time it was up, and it's not a secret that early vocal users can be quite generous with the flag button.
IMHO, for fairness, upvotes should be the vouches countering the flags. I think unless the amount of flags is really significant, they shouldn't have priority over the 117 upvoters (and counting) who are clearly interested to have this discussion here.
My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.
Flags having a stronger influence than upvoting is a necessary algorithmic check against genuinely bad behavior/brigading, not disagreement. In general it works as intended, which is the best you can do without something potentially worse.
In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.
I applied it in this case by preventing the thread from getting killed outright, which would have closed it to new comments. This is moderating less than we normally would, since normally a thread that is flagged this heavily would get killed.
It's important to understand that "moderating less" means moderating less than we normally would. It doesn't imply "not moderating at all", and certainly not "always override user flags". Those would be loopholes that any internet provocateur could drive a truck through, as I've mentioned from time to time over the years:
I'm curious - Do you have a reaction to the specfic point of suggestions that were brought to you, per the article? Do you recall specific ones, and if they were considered/deliberated?
Quite the choice to say he doesn't deserve attention. Doing a public work to raise some much needed attention, to give people a basic heads-up what they are stumbling into.
Once again here Drew just letting the fishes know what particular brand of wet the water is.
All of these "reasonable political" comments that he points out for being moderated out SHOULD have been moderated out. They are absurd, not in good faith, extreme leftist arguments.
> Unexamined bias against progressivism and the rights and interests of anyone who isn’t the “default” middle-class white cis male
This is just stupid as well. The default is a middle-class white cis male? Its tech, the average is a 1/3 Indian 1/3 Chinese and 1/3 White man.
Sorry to say DHH and Elon Musk are both not Nazis, and the demand for Nazis seems to be perpetually outstripping the apparent demand for them.
I think it's not crazy to say they both hold opinions that a Nazi might hold, but that's also usually just an excuse to insult somebody, rather than engage (I'm thinking more of DHH - I don't follow Musk, so maybe he's closer to a holistic Nazi). The point is not that one can not equate any right-leaning opinion to a Nazi's opinion - obviously they both share some opinions. The point is that the umbrella insult "Nazi" is used to mean "you're wrong and evil, so I don't even have to engage", when often that's going too far. It's an escape hatch.
That was rambly, but I'm saying I 75% agree with you.
"I hold views that are acceptable and conventional in most elite/academic circles. There's an organization and network of people who hold different views from mine. I don't like theirs. They don't seem to like mine, and sometimes say so out loud. Also, they have a website that looks like it's from 2005 but is popular, at least among them. For these reasons, I'm big mad."
This is almost comically backwards. HN is very pro-union, like reddit. In fact, it's pretty much the same users and political opinions as reddit.
It's funny he mentioned the grok discussion. The other day I saw grok got some new release, and although I don't use it, I was curious whether it is any good, and was pleasantly surprised people were actually discussing it and not all running to the keyboard to see who could get their EM comments in first. Like they really cleaned up the place.
This article complains that all their political comments got removed for calling Elon 'fascist', 'nazi' etc. - yes, that's the point; your useless, political opinions nobody else wants to hear, get removed.
The article is practically a meme, using every buzzword imaginable. Racism, sexism, nazi, hate, bigotry, wokeness, etc., they're all there. The person who wrote this article is practically an NPC.
This doesn't mirror my experience, which is that most posts and comments criticizing the current administration and conservatives in general get significant positive engagement. There are few posts taking the opposite side, and those that try often get downvoted to oblivion.
As a recent example, anti-progressive themes (being supportive of Israel, for example) are nowhere to be found. Pro-Palestinian views abound with little counter-engagement.
In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome. HN used to be a respite from political insanity on both sides. Now some days it's no better than reddit.
From my (politically neutral, believe it or not) perspective, this site is extremely hostile to conservatives. It's interesting that progressives feel the same way. Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.
Right, I think it's basically just the permanent phenomenon that if a community is mostly politically on side A, then they over-perceive the presence of B-leaning comments and the downvoting of A-leaning comments, and vice versa. "Wow, HN is so B", says the A guy, because HN is 20% B. I've seen this exact same thing in conservative-leaning communities regarding liberal content.
When a person reads content that is more attuned to their political 'norms', it tends not to register as political information at all. When they come across opposing views, it creates friction, gets stronger attention, and becomes memorable. It can lead to the perception that "HN is extremely X biased" in either direction, based on who you ask.
Everything is political. It is impossible for it to not be. But it is easy to forget that when someone is espousing similar views, then the politics is just background noise and tuned out.
I do not believe one can really be politically neutral. One can be blind to their political inclinations, but what would being neutral even mean? Everyone has their views and values.
“Politically neutral" is a phrase used to distance oneself from the largely American habit of slotting one's values into the red vs. blue dichotomy. One can't be truly politically neutral, as you say, given that politics is a system of dealing with others and not an electric charge. However, it's a phrase that is easier to invoke just as it’s easier to describe oneself as an atheist rather than an agnostic when explaining why one would not believe in God.
Thanks for the comment, I guess it could be seen like that. I still think that being ”politically neutral” is more like being disinterested in politics and/or lacking introspection.
The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don't want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand. It's like every mention of an iPhone got a comment about poor conditions of Chinese assembly workers. These, and the Musk rants, absolutely belong on threads about those topics, but let's not turn every thread into a holy war - you're just pushing people that already agree with you away.
For the record, I vouched for this thread to keep it from being flagged, but that didn't seem enough. I think it's an interesting discussion.
One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.
So what they're doing is leaving low value comments and then they're probably the same people flagging it as "controversial" or "flamebait" when there wouldn't be any of those things if they didn't leave those comments. It's incredibly bad faith behavior (by some of them, not you to be clear).
We're at the precipice of AI unravelling the fabric of society. Many tech issues now are so consequential that the politics simply cannot be ignored.
I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.
> I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.
This little part is the whole thing! Political discussion is really much more interesting than say, product advertisements or corporate announcements. And better aligned with the spirit of curiosity and hacker ethos too.
Why not flag both or neither as "trampling curiosity"? Inconsistency and hypocrisy is worse than any policy or preference could be.
Why no topics tags so that nerds/hackers/curious can sort themselves away from the hustle/biz/finance types? Well.. platforms do not want to empower their users.. they want to herd them and force-feed them and profit from the engagement boost that bad feelings create. And boom!, just like that tech is suddenly political again, now we can all pick a side, cue the cliches, vote with your wallet, if you don't like it leave, make your own why dontcha, and yada yada.
> people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things
I think that's probably overinterpreting in most cases. No doubt there's a long tail of weird behavior, but the fat part of the distribution is covered by a simpler fact: humans change when emotions get activated. People who have interesting things to say when their curiosity circuits light up have entirely different things to say when their amygdalas are inflamed.
Edit: their right amygdalas, that is! it isn't clear to me what the left one does but it's a puzzle why everyone says "the amygdala" when we all have two. Perhaps it's a metaphor for how the fight/flight system closes all attention to anything else.
I mostly avoid this place these days, but there are certain topics where people hyperrationalize, i.e. they (silently) accuse others of being reactionary because an argument looks like reaction to them on the surface.
I started self-censoring on HN because I knew some very normal and on-topic things to say would be voted to oblivion because they had the shape of a controversial topic that the average HN commenter can not relate to except through some mainstreamed right-leaning cultural narrative. The mere mention that I was an affected party in some culture war adjacent thing was treated as if I had invoked a thought-terminating cliche. It was very... anti-curious.
So I principally agree on the conclusion, when emotions get activated this site gets worse. I just see the impact differently - anything that deviates from the libertarian-right leaning default is pushed away. I'm still relieved I had my pseudonymous account with a lot more HN internet points wiped and don't have to care about this site on an emotional level anymore.
> One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.
Interesting to see that others are doing this. I started this habit because I got curious to see what bad/downvoted/dead commenters would say elsewhere and noticed this same pattern. It’s not on all of them (some accounts seem to post comments that get killed in every thread they reply on which makes me think those are troll accounts), but it happens enough that it was noticeable. Not sure how I’d describe this category of user. They aren’t trolls but they are clearly doing this purposefully.
That's extremely untrue, look at thread about AI/models with showdead and you'll see tons of flagged low-effort comments (in both pro and anti-AI directions)
When it comes to submissions and comments, "political" or "controversial" is what you disagree with. As the article notes, capitalism (as just one example) is taken as a given. Anything else is "political".
Shouldn't intellectual curiosity challenge norms and assumptions?
What's changed I think is that Big Tech are essentially defense contractors. You can put Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the same bucket as RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
A huge portion of HN is simply after their bag. The idea of the countercultural almost beatnik "hacker" like early Steve Jobs (yes, yes, I know, he's not the tech guy) is long dead. We saw this with crypto dominating HN. Crypto is just a bunch of people who are hoping to be the first to do the rug pull. Now it's AI.
Silicon Valley itself grew out of the military industrial complex. It's simply returned to its roots.
It's a promotion platform for a specific way of conducting business, and for the liberation of these businesses from democratic oversight (if not the other way around). And in that perspective, that's politics.
This is a good example of a person observing a community, slotting the whole thing into one of a small handful of political categories based on the relatively tiny proportion of comments that lean one way or another, and then claiming that the community has changed or is hypocritical when it turns out people tend to have more dynamic opinions than that.
Yes. Just because this forum is frequented by loud Musk incels doesn’t necessarily color the whole community with some other label. This is a classic forum problem where extremist views are amplified merely by the enthusiasm of the extremists.
Tfa only spend a small amount of time using grok threads as a case study of the general views and actions of HN though.
I think this assessment is fairly reductive and doesn’t consider that the realm of start up tech is massive, the political affiliations and views of those at YC and the inherent stance that being “apolitical” actually ends up being.
I also feel that HN attempts to avoid these classic forum trappings and in my personal opinion it has failed. Either you are correct and this is a minority of people or it’s not a minority and HN is pervaded by extremists. Both are bad and if HN wants to continue to be good it needs to be solved imo.
It’s because people keep amplifying meta-discussions instead of focusing on the topic at hand. Hence, this article as example. I shouldn’t even be commenting.
Leftism, progressism or wtv tries to remove all social
value from individuals for their beliefs. Leftists tried to make the world lose respect for people like J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk and recently DHH. If some people say something that is not illegal but is deemed to be offending by leftists, they go tribal gang on that person and try to devalue all they work. I myself prefer to live in a world where people is free to express their thoughts even if they are being retarded at it.
Then they start to use their "well-earned" money to bend the world to their worldview, but "it's their right!". Of the people you bring up, i've been affected just by Musk (his endeavours are a net contributor for global warming), I'm still suspecting you should get fucked with your freely expressed opinion.
I think it's a mistake to put Musk in that category. It harms your entire point. The other two express real human opinions (that one is free to strongly disagree with). Musk purposefully makes himself first and foremost a troll. He negatively affects our society, socially speaking, and it's only human to hate him. He invites it willingly.
I'm not sure how much HN/YComb really does put it's finger on the scale.
But the system itself so conveniently allows for just a couple people to suppress and deny, to shut down topics, that it systematically gives quarter to the very worst, to the motivated bad actors, and the other lesser plagues that befall humanity.
I really wish there was some accounting, some visibility, some consequence for this abuse of the system, this steering away from hackeryly inquiry & examination of the world. The act of cloaking & hiding shouldnt be so easy to do from the shadows; HN should at least make you do such moderation acts in public.
>It’s no surprise that Hacker News favors capitalism, opposes labor, and objects to questioning the privileges of its largely white, male, middle-class audience. It’s “political” and “ideological” for it to do anything else.
I don't think leftists/progressives are nonexistent on this site. Maybe some of them don't want to bring politics everywhere because it's tiring and unproductive.
Regarding Musk and his antics, I just tune them out. His projects are vain and self-serving. Let them die, the community sooner or later will recognize them for what they are and move on.
Although Drew's points don't seem actually wrong to me, I would say that a far bigger problem for HN is the way in which the discourse is dominated by excessively confident and passively authoritative comments that are actually somewhere between "not really correct" and "not even wrong".
Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.
Yes—but a confounding factor is that people tend to have strong feelings about things they know a lot about. This makes it hard to tell what part of one's reaction is to wrongness/ignorance vs. having one's feelings offended.
To mention some (hopefully safe) examples, I know things about certain programming languages, and smoke comes out my ears when someone posts about how APL or K programs are "unreadable", or that Lisp macros lead to code no one else can understand.
The level of outrage in my inner self isn't a measure of anything particularly interesting, though.
Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.
When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.
Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.
It's OK to foster right-wing ideology, or left-wing ideology. That's clear even if it's true that one of them is "more correct" or "more moral" on average. But regardless, it should go without saying, and it's disturbing that you are implying otherwise.
Maybe you forgot to add the "far" to "right/left wing", since that's usually what people use as shorthand for "the bad stuff on that side"?
Shadowbanning is an extremely evil and inhumane practice that should be discontinued if it is still done, not just here but anywhere. Human beings need to be treated like human beings, at least deserving of a regular ban.
We use shadowbanning (i.e. banning an account without saying so) in specific cases such as spammers and serial trolls. I don't think that's inhumane. In the case of spammers, telling them would only lead to more spam. As for serial trolls, they are usually aware of which of their stable of accounts have been banned yet vs. not.
But when you say "wait until it happens to you", I'm curious if that means that we banned one of your accounts without telling you so? It would be interesting to look up, if so.
If there is an established history of at least two prior accounts of an identity being banned via a regular ban in the last two years, I can then see the justifiable reason for a shadow ban. Without these strict criteria, I think it doesn't give the person a sufficient opportunity to remediate.
Fwiw, I do not have any other accounts on this site, and I haven't had any other accounts since this account was created. I had a different account many years ago, the login for which I had fully lost.
> I have heard from users having as many as a thousand karma points that were shadowbanned without warning
I don't think that can be true, at least not in the last 12 years. Far more likely is that someone incorrectly concluded that they were shadowbanned. But if anyone wants us to check a specific username, we'd be happy to do so.
People come to all kinds of mistaken conclusions, especially when they're upset about something that we or someone else did on HN. Self-reports of this kind, especially about being banned, are mostly unreliable.
though there must have been backroom warnings, the disappearance of breckyunits feels a bit Soviet
Considered that it seems valuable, but not terribly trivial for an outsider or breck(/g?????m) to understand what part of his value system was diametrically opposed to the spirit of HNtopia
The humaneness seemed at worst ambiguous but that's not the issue.. maybe self-compassion was?
By Soviet I meant more of inscrutability: [unsatisfactory] window into _why_ someone was thrown out of a window, not how.
Apparently that "unsatisfactory" does have (imagined) personal component for me. The process, for you, was less imagined.. so.. okay. I should be more careful next time
Your account wasn't banned per se but software was killing your posts. I realize that's not much of a distinction when your posts are getting killed, but from our side the difference is significant.
> I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll
Ok, but when you break the site guidelines badly (e.g. "Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670568), and use HN primarily for political/ideological battle—which the site guidelines ask you not to do [1], and which is a line at which we do start moderating and banning [2]—it ends up amounting to the same thing.
Having skimmed your comments, I have mixed feelings about how the system [3] functioned in this case:
On the one hand, you have been breaking the site guidelines and not using HN as intended. From that point of view, the software didn't get this wrong.
On the other hand, your account was arguing for contrarian positions which caused it to get penalized more by the community (which by definition disagrees with contrarian positions), and eventually by the software, than it would have if your views were closer to the majority.
Thank you for your comprehensive, cirumspect and considerate comment, thanks for overruling “the system” and resetting my -16 “karma” score.
Of course I understand the problem about minority and majority positions. Creating majorities, minoritizing dissent, and inciting the (gregarious) majority to actively trample opposition (by mere quantity, not quality; by mass and weight, not argument or intellect) is the bread and butter of how propaganda works and operates. It cannot ever succeed in convincing everybody, but it can succeed in effectively shutting down opposition, which is the purpose.
As for my comment 49670568 (“Incredibly stupid …”), if you read it in context with parent and gp 49668588, you'll see I was echoing to Rob's “Incredibly arrogant/racist take” wrt to Adrian, whose comments I'd been subscribed to via RSS for a couple months prior to creating an HN account, and whom I've never seen posting anything akin to what Rob alleged, and so I was simply taking Adrian's defense (because I felt someone had to).
True, there was a provocative angle to my comment in the last two paragraphs, exacerbated perhaps by being also analytical. People from the US, in my experience, often don't realize how arrogant their self-content attitude in political matters comes across based on how much the US is trampling on other countries (and by trampling I mean to kill and destroy, to cheat and deceive, to plunder and tax, and then to justify or deny).
« The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. » — I usually try to remain factual. Trouble is, facts often are not welcome because psychologically and psychosocially, persuasions dictated by propaganda prevail, and there is pressure to “conform” and “comply”, and to even dismiss dissenters as “whacky” (example 49711252, in context 49708657).
« But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try. » — I will try. But I have to say that the majority view is very often expressed “in battle mode”, like the bully making it clear there can be no other view, which, again, is simply the result of how propaganda works, by creating the vocabulary and talking points (“global war on terror”, you might remember, “Russian annexation of Crimea”, “pilot suicide”, “Hamas terror”, “Russian war of aggression”), which then are repeated over and over again, and have to be repeated precisely because they are either total lies or meant to suppress the true story, which is much more complex.
« where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic » — Yes, I know, a lot of people are frightened, which is also an effect of propaganda. Some, however, and these are the most vocal, do enjoy being in the majority because they enjoy trampling, which could be observed and experienced in real life during the CoVID hoax.
« there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position » — I can see this is the pragmatic conclusion that I would probably also arrive at from your vantage point.
Thanks again for taking the time to elaborate on this meta topic (which I understand is the mainstay topic for you). I might include a reference to your statement in future controversial comments I might make so it gets a chance to be considered by a wider audience.
Finally, on a meta level, the field of propaganda and psychology is interesting in its own right, an important part of social (or perhaps rather post-social) life as shaped by technological mass media, and therefore certainly not unworthy of many a hacker's curiosity, attention, and perhaps even investigation. — Best, Michael
It's because those comments insert politics and character attacks in threads they don't belong to. They just derive the discussion.
>>There’s often frustration that every thread related to a Musk company includes a discussion about Musk, but Musk himself caused that by being the only tech founder to actively campaign for Trump.
Supporting Trump is a perfectly normal political position hold by around half of the voting population. If you can't see how reasonable, smart, hard working and honest people vote for Trump you need to adjust your world view. I suggest getting out mor and talking to people.
"Musk is a Nazi" nonsense it just pure brain rot.
So those are low effort nonsense comments which don't belong.
One is that he's just a normal US politician, within the range previously seen, he was elected president via the usual mechanisms and will leave office and be replaced by someone else, again via the usual mechanisms. His policies and actions may (or may not) be more extreme than most previous presidents, and many may disagree vehemently with them, but that's the nature of representative democracy.
The other is that he's a major departure from previous elected presidents, via a combination of his corruption, illegal behavior and openly racist and sexist language. People who see Trump in this way also likely feel that the SCOTUS has aided and abetted him in acts that are plainly unconstitutional (despite overwhelming numbers of decisions by lower courts against him). They fear that his language around elections, and particularly even his raising the possibility that he would run again, mark him as having crossed a line that makes it impossible to consider him an ordinary elected president. Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.
If you hold the second view, then the fact that around half the voting population view him as a "perfectly normal" politician is itself a substantial and terrifying issue.
The point is that "Trump bad" or "Elon Nazi" are brain rot and pollute a lot of online discussion.
If one wants to discuss any of that they should make their own thread in their own space and invite people to discuss instead of poisoning discussion about rockets, robots, AI or what not.
>>Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.
That's an assertion which a lot of reasonable people disagree with.
Just don't insert it in threads which are not about politics and all will be fine.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 82.4 ms ] threadThe only thing I've done since then is mark the post so it won't be killed by excessive user flags. This means the thread can stay open for new comments.
I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction, though of course some users will have the opposite reaction as well; this is normal.
My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.
What's the reasoning for not having a vouch feature for stories like comments?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story, so I've refrained from doing that here.
I applied it in this case by preventing the thread from getting killed outright, which would have closed it to new comments. This is moderating less than we normally would, since normally a thread that is flagged this heavily would get killed.
It's important to understand that "moderating less" means moderating less than we normally would. It doesn't imply "not moderating at all", and certainly not "always override user flags". Those would be loopholes that any internet provocateur could drive a truck through, as I've mentioned from time to time over the years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Quite the choice to say he doesn't deserve attention. Doing a public work to raise some much needed attention, to give people a basic heads-up what they are stumbling into.
Once again here Drew just letting the fishes know what particular brand of wet the water is.
All of these "reasonable political" comments that he points out for being moderated out SHOULD have been moderated out. They are absurd, not in good faith, extreme leftist arguments.
> Unexamined bias against progressivism and the rights and interests of anyone who isn’t the “default” middle-class white cis male
This is just stupid as well. The default is a middle-class white cis male? Its tech, the average is a 1/3 Indian 1/3 Chinese and 1/3 White man.
Sorry to say DHH and Elon Musk are both not Nazis, and the demand for Nazis seems to be perpetually outstripping the apparent demand for them.
That was rambly, but I'm saying I 75% agree with you.
It's funny he mentioned the grok discussion. The other day I saw grok got some new release, and although I don't use it, I was curious whether it is any good, and was pleasantly surprised people were actually discussing it and not all running to the keyboard to see who could get their EM comments in first. Like they really cleaned up the place.
This article complains that all their political comments got removed for calling Elon 'fascist', 'nazi' etc. - yes, that's the point; your useless, political opinions nobody else wants to hear, get removed.
The article is practically a meme, using every buzzword imaginable. Racism, sexism, nazi, hate, bigotry, wokeness, etc., they're all there. The person who wrote this article is practically an NPC.
As a recent example, anti-progressive themes (being supportive of Israel, for example) are nowhere to be found. Pro-Palestinian views abound with little counter-engagement.
In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome. HN used to be a respite from political insanity on both sides. Now some days it's no better than reddit.
From my (politically neutral, believe it or not) perspective, this site is extremely hostile to conservatives. It's interesting that progressives feel the same way. Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.
Everything is political. It is impossible for it to not be. But it is easy to forget that when someone is espousing similar views, then the politics is just background noise and tuned out.
Maybe the volume is proportional to the impact each country has globally? (especially these years)
That might be a "grass is greener" effect. I know people from many countries who will tell you how terrible things are in their country.
> Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.
Any discussion here that touches on US politics becomes predictable and low quality.
For the record, I vouched for this thread to keep it from being flagged, but that didn't seem enough. I think it's an interesting discussion.
So what they're doing is leaving low value comments and then they're probably the same people flagging it as "controversial" or "flamebait" when there wouldn't be any of those things if they didn't leave those comments. It's incredibly bad faith behavior (by some of them, not you to be clear).
We're at the precipice of AI unravelling the fabric of society. Many tech issues now are so consequential that the politics simply cannot be ignored.
I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.
This little part is the whole thing! Political discussion is really much more interesting than say, product advertisements or corporate announcements. And better aligned with the spirit of curiosity and hacker ethos too.
Why not flag both or neither as "trampling curiosity"? Inconsistency and hypocrisy is worse than any policy or preference could be.
Why no topics tags so that nerds/hackers/curious can sort themselves away from the hustle/biz/finance types? Well.. platforms do not want to empower their users.. they want to herd them and force-feed them and profit from the engagement boost that bad feelings create. And boom!, just like that tech is suddenly political again, now we can all pick a side, cue the cliches, vote with your wallet, if you don't like it leave, make your own why dontcha, and yada yada.
I think that's probably overinterpreting in most cases. No doubt there's a long tail of weird behavior, but the fat part of the distribution is covered by a simpler fact: humans change when emotions get activated. People who have interesting things to say when their curiosity circuits light up have entirely different things to say when their amygdalas are inflamed.
Edit: their right amygdalas, that is! it isn't clear to me what the left one does but it's a puzzle why everyone says "the amygdala" when we all have two. Perhaps it's a metaphor for how the fight/flight system closes all attention to anything else.
I started self-censoring on HN because I knew some very normal and on-topic things to say would be voted to oblivion because they had the shape of a controversial topic that the average HN commenter can not relate to except through some mainstreamed right-leaning cultural narrative. The mere mention that I was an affected party in some culture war adjacent thing was treated as if I had invoked a thought-terminating cliche. It was very... anti-curious.
So I principally agree on the conclusion, when emotions get activated this site gets worse. I just see the impact differently - anything that deviates from the libertarian-right leaning default is pushed away. I'm still relieved I had my pseudonymous account with a lot more HN internet points wiped and don't have to care about this site on an emotional level anymore.
Interesting to see that others are doing this. I started this habit because I got curious to see what bad/downvoted/dead commenters would say elsewhere and noticed this same pattern. It’s not on all of them (some accounts seem to post comments that get killed in every thread they reply on which makes me think those are troll accounts), but it happens enough that it was noticeable. Not sure how I’d describe this category of user. They aren’t trolls but they are clearly doing this purposefully.
Except for comments you want hidden because you think they are "boring" or "low-calorie".
Musk is several orders of magnitude worse than Gates, yet here we are, cheerfully discussing his marketing and flagging dissent.
This is not a forum for “hackers” anymore, if it ever was. OP is completely right.
I would very much like to be reminded of and updated on the current conditions of those workers.
Much in the same way I'd like to be up to date on whether Mr. Musk has ceased to be a nazi. Seems not.
BTW, Anybody know if things have improved any on the Chinese assembly workers front?
Shouldn't intellectual curiosity challenge norms and assumptions?
What's changed I think is that Big Tech are essentially defense contractors. You can put Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the same bucket as RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
A huge portion of HN is simply after their bag. The idea of the countercultural almost beatnik "hacker" like early Steve Jobs (yes, yes, I know, he's not the tech guy) is long dead. We saw this with crypto dominating HN. Crypto is just a bunch of people who are hoping to be the first to do the rug pull. Now it's AI.
Silicon Valley itself grew out of the military industrial complex. It's simply returned to its roots.
By this metric, HN is not a business promotion platform.
However, that doesn't equate to what I believe was being implied: HN as a business promotional tool specifically for YCombinator.
I think this assessment is fairly reductive and doesn’t consider that the realm of start up tech is massive, the political affiliations and views of those at YC and the inherent stance that being “apolitical” actually ends up being.
I also feel that HN attempts to avoid these classic forum trappings and in my personal opinion it has failed. Either you are correct and this is a minority of people or it’s not a minority and HN is pervaded by extremists. Both are bad and if HN wants to continue to be good it needs to be solved imo.
How self-serving.
But the system itself so conveniently allows for just a couple people to suppress and deny, to shut down topics, that it systematically gives quarter to the very worst, to the motivated bad actors, and the other lesser plagues that befall humanity.
I really wish there was some accounting, some visibility, some consequence for this abuse of the system, this steering away from hackeryly inquiry & examination of the world. The act of cloaking & hiding shouldnt be so easy to do from the shadows; HN should at least make you do such moderation acts in public.
Why are anti-capitalists like that?
Regarding Musk and his antics, I just tune them out. His projects are vain and self-serving. Let them die, the community sooner or later will recognize them for what they are and move on.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.
To mention some (hopefully safe) examples, I know things about certain programming languages, and smoke comes out my ears when someone posts about how APL or K programs are "unreadable", or that Lisp macros lead to code no one else can understand.
Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.
When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.
Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.
HN has a massive problem where it's low key fostering right wing ideology with inadequate moderation. I'm flagging what I can.
Maybe you forgot to add the "far" to "right/left wing", since that's usually what people use as shorthand for "the bad stuff on that side"?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We use shadowbanning (i.e. banning an account without saying so) in specific cases such as spammers and serial trolls. I don't think that's inhumane. In the case of spammers, telling them would only lead to more spam. As for serial trolls, they are usually aware of which of their stable of accounts have been banned yet vs. not.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
But when you say "wait until it happens to you", I'm curious if that means that we banned one of your accounts without telling you so? It would be interesting to look up, if so.
Fwiw, I do not have any other accounts on this site, and I haven't had any other accounts since this account was created. I had a different account many years ago, the login for which I had fully lost.
I don't think that can be true, at least not in the last 12 years. Far more likely is that someone incorrectly concluded that they were shadowbanned. But if anyone wants us to check a specific username, we'd be happy to do so.
People come to all kinds of mistaken conclusions, especially when they're upset about something that we or someone else did on HN. Self-reports of this kind, especially about being banned, are mostly unreliable.
Considered that it seems valuable, but not terribly trivial for an outsider or breck(/g?????m) to understand what part of his value system was diametrically opposed to the spirit of HNtopia
The humaneness seemed at worst ambiguous but that's not the issue.. maybe self-compassion was?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013861 was the end of a painfully lengthy process, not all of which was public.
Apparently that "unsatisfactory" does have (imagined) personal component for me. The process, for you, was less imagined.. so.. okay. I should be more careful next time
Now I remember benreesman.. but maybe the last flagged comment is beyond my search-fu?
(I remember these two oldtimers because I sympathize with their "far-left" anticorpo yet agentic vibes)
> I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll
Ok, but when you break the site guidelines badly (e.g. "Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670568), and use HN primarily for political/ideological battle—which the site guidelines ask you not to do [1], and which is a line at which we do start moderating and banning [2]—it ends up amounting to the same thing.
Having skimmed your comments, I have mixed feelings about how the system [3] functioned in this case:
On the one hand, you have been breaking the site guidelines and not using HN as intended. From that point of view, the software didn't get this wrong.
On the other hand, your account was arguing for contrarian positions which caused it to get penalized more by the community (which by definition disagrees with contrarian positions), and eventually by the software, than it would have if your views were closer to the majority.
[editing - bear with me...]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
[3] By "the system" I mean the entire system of Hacker News, consisting of community, software, and moderators.
Of course I understand the problem about minority and majority positions. Creating majorities, minoritizing dissent, and inciting the (gregarious) majority to actively trample opposition (by mere quantity, not quality; by mass and weight, not argument or intellect) is the bread and butter of how propaganda works and operates. It cannot ever succeed in convincing everybody, but it can succeed in effectively shutting down opposition, which is the purpose.
As for my comment 49670568 (“Incredibly stupid …”), if you read it in context with parent and gp 49668588, you'll see I was echoing to Rob's “Incredibly arrogant/racist take” wrt to Adrian, whose comments I'd been subscribed to via RSS for a couple months prior to creating an HN account, and whom I've never seen posting anything akin to what Rob alleged, and so I was simply taking Adrian's defense (because I felt someone had to).
True, there was a provocative angle to my comment in the last two paragraphs, exacerbated perhaps by being also analytical. People from the US, in my experience, often don't realize how arrogant their self-content attitude in political matters comes across based on how much the US is trampling on other countries (and by trampling I mean to kill and destroy, to cheat and deceive, to plunder and tax, and then to justify or deny).
« The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. » — I usually try to remain factual. Trouble is, facts often are not welcome because psychologically and psychosocially, persuasions dictated by propaganda prevail, and there is pressure to “conform” and “comply”, and to even dismiss dissenters as “whacky” (example 49711252, in context 49708657).
« But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try. » — I will try. But I have to say that the majority view is very often expressed “in battle mode”, like the bully making it clear there can be no other view, which, again, is simply the result of how propaganda works, by creating the vocabulary and talking points (“global war on terror”, you might remember, “Russian annexation of Crimea”, “pilot suicide”, “Hamas terror”, “Russian war of aggression”), which then are repeated over and over again, and have to be repeated precisely because they are either total lies or meant to suppress the true story, which is much more complex.
« where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic » — Yes, I know, a lot of people are frightened, which is also an effect of propaganda. Some, however, and these are the most vocal, do enjoy being in the majority because they enjoy trampling, which could be observed and experienced in real life during the CoVID hoax.
« there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position » — I can see this is the pragmatic conclusion that I would probably also arrive at from your vantage point.
Thanks again for taking the time to elaborate on this meta topic (which I understand is the mainstay topic for you). I might include a reference to your statement in future controversial comments I might make so it gets a chance to be considered by a wider audience.
Finally, on a meta level, the field of propaganda and psychology is interesting in its own right, an important part of social (or perhaps rather post-social) life as shaped by technological mass media, and therefore certainly not unworthy of many a hacker's curiosity, attention, and perhaps even investigation. — Best, Michael
>>There’s often frustration that every thread related to a Musk company includes a discussion about Musk, but Musk himself caused that by being the only tech founder to actively campaign for Trump.
Supporting Trump is a perfectly normal political position hold by around half of the voting population. If you can't see how reasonable, smart, hard working and honest people vote for Trump you need to adjust your world view. I suggest getting out mor and talking to people. "Musk is a Nazi" nonsense it just pure brain rot.
So those are low effort nonsense comments which don't belong.
One is that he's just a normal US politician, within the range previously seen, he was elected president via the usual mechanisms and will leave office and be replaced by someone else, again via the usual mechanisms. His policies and actions may (or may not) be more extreme than most previous presidents, and many may disagree vehemently with them, but that's the nature of representative democracy.
The other is that he's a major departure from previous elected presidents, via a combination of his corruption, illegal behavior and openly racist and sexist language. People who see Trump in this way also likely feel that the SCOTUS has aided and abetted him in acts that are plainly unconstitutional (despite overwhelming numbers of decisions by lower courts against him). They fear that his language around elections, and particularly even his raising the possibility that he would run again, mark him as having crossed a line that makes it impossible to consider him an ordinary elected president. Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.
If you hold the second view, then the fact that around half the voting population view him as a "perfectly normal" politician is itself a substantial and terrifying issue.
>>Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.
That's an assertion which a lot of reasonable people disagree with. Just don't insert it in threads which are not about politics and all will be fine.
Also, I'd say that "Trump bad" and "Elon Nazi" are, in that form, shorthands for a much longer argument that most people don't want to rehash.
>>Also, I'd say that "Trump bad" and "Elon Nazi" are, in that form, shorthands for a much longer argument that most people don't want to rehash.
Yeah and others don't want to hear them because they are not relevant to the discussion about say xAI product, Tesla or something Trump endorsed.