Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen)
hckrnews.com
hckrnews.com
I guess it comes down to a value judgement: is it worth discussing tech politics even if it spawns flamewars and heated arguments? I think it's worth it, but this is certainly debatable. Curious what other HN users think.
My own thinking is that political discussion between opposing factions is always going to be contentious, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed. However, angry rhetoric can lead to further polarization, so I'm not sure what the right approach is.
Edit: funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! I've vouched it, but I'm open to hearing arguments for why this link doesn't belong.
I mostly accept that they don’t belong on HN though.
But it feels deeply hypocritical when some political stories stay on the front page for hours until more information starts to arrive and they get flagged off swiftly.
It would be a pretty simple affair software wise, those that need it can have their safe space and those that don't can discuss whatever they want without being shouted down.
Seems like the optimal solution to me.
But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people.
I highly doubt that. Typically a normal discussion (such as this one) is underway and the suddenly the whole thing is killed. That's rude, to put it mildly and I see absolutely no harm in letting those discussions continue with the normal 'up/down' vote mechanism taking care of the moderation. Flagging just affects the ordering of the stories and does not have anything to do with the comments within those stories.
Note that there is no reason that you would not be able to discuss this site and yet the discussion is flagged so the majority of HN will never see it. I don't like that, I think it puts too much weight to the flags in relation to the upvotes.
Flagged because of the stupid -rule breaking- title.
This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue.
I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about business. It's all of that.
This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics, we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for their use"
And here we are in a security and surveillance state that we've created. We're refusing to even talk about Google's desired monoculture because we're unable to maintain civil discourse.
I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer working towards the betterment of mankind.
Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.
This happens all the time. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further some political goal they do not agree with.
But when I look at huge messed up things in society, and I know there are people on HN who had a big role in making them that way?
At some point you gotta cut the crap. Not taking a stand is taking a stand. Nobody gets a free ride. There's no special "get out of difficult conversations for free" card that we tech folks get that others don't have.
I do not think HN needs to be reddit. But yes, I do think a second room for the intersection of tech and politics (and only that topic) is way overdue. We are better than this.
We could be, but we're not. This is what we are right now, a bunch of people that can't even have a rational discussion on a subject such as this.
And this it what we got? Tweeting and liking posts? This is the scary tech that's destroyed mainstream media and now threatens to lay waste to civil discourse in general? Typing little comments into boxes? Really?
Nobody can say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.
To call upon the topic of "safe spaces", I think HN ought to be a safe space for people involved in technology to simply... be... without having to constantly add disclaimers to their comments referencing their employer, or watching out for attacks due to their involvement in something that's suddenly politically volatile.
There are many different forums in the world, and the only way they stay different is by drawing a line as to what topics and discussion patterns they won't except.
The line drawn on HN is hardly a "hard line". Political topics are acceptable, but only one at a time and only if participants remain somewhat aloof.
In conclusion, I think HN is nice simply because it has only one room. Adding other rooms isn't something I'd like to consider, whilst the existence of other multi-room sites exist with the same population.
I am on Reddit, but I use pseudonyms there ... merely because I am afraid.
That doesn't parse, but even if it did I disagree with it, i don't think that those other sites exist with the same population.
It might be okay to turn away if that "new impact" is something like faster pizza delivery. It's another thing entirely when we're instrumenting every action that every cell phone user does and then selling the data off to the highest bidder.
There might be plenty of other places for this discussion. There are no other places with these people who are responsible for doing these things.
And this is exactly what the social media companies want: everybody to find some other place besides their forum to talk about difficult things, because difficult conversations turn away eyeballs.
It's us. The founders, inventors, and senior executives and engineers at these companies that are most in need of these discussions. And we not only have created a world where these things don't happen, we revel in the fact that we've separated all these concerns into different compartments
It is a vile and corrupt system. I refuse to believe that people who give some time to think about it would continue supporting it the way it is.
For instance, you said "I would want a teensy bit more nuance before we decide to stake people out as corrupt."
But I never said that. I said it was a vile and corrupt system. I also explicitly said that I had faith in people. I believe if they consider these systems (that I believe they created in good faith) they would realize that they are hurting mankind, not helping it.
I also believe there is a difference between "wanting to be right" and "wanting to have a difficult conversation" I have no desire to be right. Like everybody else, I believe I am in the right. But one person or group of people wanting to be proven right is not what this is about.
Jacques and I probably disagree on this particular Google issue. I don't know. I am a right-leaning libertarian and, I think, Jacques leans left. But I'm okay no matter how this shakes out. The reason I'm speaking out is that there is a innate conflict between efficiency, usefulness, and attractiveness of the public square and tolerance of dissent.
Mankind solved this problem and it gave us all of the technological miracles we see today. But now the concept of "public square" is primarily being owned by multinational corporations or governments with no knowledge or desire to hear or apply those lessons from our past. They just want a more attractive and useful public square, not one that encourages and tolerates difficult conversations.
The irony here is that this one conflict is driving what many perceive to be the greatest technological danger to the species.
The system we have created in response to this conflict made sense at the time. But it was short-sighted. By trying to compartmentalize troublesome people and conversations, oddly enough, it is contributing to a vicious cycle where the net swings wildly one way or the other. It is a vile and corrupt system. I continue to believe the people who created it are not.
I would rather not be trapped in an echo chamber, even if it is one of my own making (especially if it is one of my own making).
Note, "dead" comments are usually dead for reasons that have nothing to do with the same controversies. Turning off "dead" comments is, at least to me, a very different thing than turning off political submissions.
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962366
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961857
And it seems this thread itself is excluded in HN top
Personally I would rather have a HN that doesn't have politically charged topics. Although some of those topics are relevant to the community if we start letting more and more political topics then we can have factions of users and once that starts HN won't be fun to read anymore.
Reddit attempted to solve this through subreddits but that didn't work. Slashdot used moderation. Digg died because they released a new version. I suppose either the censorship or the flagging and removal of political topics and otherwise will be the thing that eliminates HN.
I think that any social news aggregator has a shelf life and you can't keep it from degrading to either something you hate and or something that doesn't serve the people who run the site.
I don't know if this is the correct place to criticize HN's moderation policies, it's kinda disheartening to see the list of submissions that were removed. News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason. If the actual memo is sexist/bigoted, then people can read it directly and decide it for themselves, instead of relying on second hand information.
I mean even if you agree with what Google did, isn't it good that we discuss about it and point out the things that were problematic with that memo. What good does it do if we just try to shove the incident into a closet and pretend that it never happened?
Edit: Even this post was flagged :/
No, this article, the first one to publish the full text of the memo, got 353 points and received 616 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895
Several subsequent submissions of the same content were flagged as duplicates.
That is reason enough for the existence of hckrnews.com, imo.
It's the majority of the sites users saying they don't want to keep seeing the same two toxic viewpoints throwing shit at each other.
So in that respect, I often agree with the submissions that get flagged (including this one), but I do think news.ycombinator.com could do a better job of collecting and displaying these flagged submissions. For example, duplicate submissions could be made children of the submission that was allowed to stay.
The biggest gripe I have with the flagging is the paternalistic aspect.
It seems like there's a lot of legit, even large threads that have been flagged and removed. Even ones that don't seem offensive, they're just related to or covering news on some things that perhaps some people find offensive. Seems crazy that they'd disappear.
I'd be interested in reading the justifications for removal.
There's a setting called showdead that you can change to see all the flagged posts.
I appreciate that some people feel that the "loss" of some submissions due to automatic flamewar detection algorithms or user flagging is a problem, but I, for one, appreciate that the discussions that remain on the front page (for a long time) have a reasonable guarantee of being high quality.
Relatedly, it may also have an effect on the non-controversial submissions by establishing that flamewars will not remain in high positions for long. (I realize that's a bit of a "broken windows theory".)
I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly.
Flags are the more powerful tool. A single flag is the equivalent of many upvotes and annihilates the whole discussion. That's a lot more power than a comment, which can be dealt with on an individual basis.
Thanks @dang and the rest of the team for keeping HN relevant and sane. It's never a fully objective decision, but I'm glad to leave that to them rather than have to dig through crap to find something good (cough unlike reddit cough).