Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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We've banned that account for breaking the site guidelines. But why are you breaking them yourself? Insinuations about astroturfing without evidence are not allowed, for reasons I've explained extensively (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). And obviously you shouldn't be responding like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386438. Doing that helps nothing; it only makes this place even worse.

The guidelines specifically ask you not to feed egregious comments by replying (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls), but to flag them instead. Other users did that, and so the GP comment was rightly flagkilled. If you had done that instead, that would have happened sooner.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

(Edit: Fortunately your comment history seems just fine for HN so this isn't a longstanding problem.)

I'll read them today. Apologies for making the forum worse, I'll try to change. I've been struggling with a lot of anger surrounding this issue lately. Maybe it'd be best if I took a break from HN for a while.

How did I break site guidelines? The comment I was replying to made wildly exaggerated claims about police violence and racism. I am simply trying to improve the quality of discussion by focusing on what the evidence actually allows us to conclude.

I understand that for controversial topics many people have deeply held beliefs and so experience a strong emotional reaction if they are questioned. It is easier to dismiss someone as a "troll" rather than examining why they hold these beliefs.

This was admittedly my lowest quality comment, but it is hard to see what was objectionable about the previous three comments, which were almost instantly flagged. The statistical evidence points to a very small role for racial bias in explaining differences in the use of deadly force by the police. What's wrong with pointing that out when it is directly relevant to the discussion?

When a new account shows up and posts only about one thing, and it's an inflammation point in a flamewar topic, that's using the site for ideological battle. There's inevitably overlap between political topics and other things on HN, but when people are using the site for its intended purpose—intellectual curiosity—they don't use it this way. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for more explanation.

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