Hacker News Reader

Comment by Impossible | Hacker News Reader

One question for the many people that believe Facebook should be a completely unmoderated communication channel is... Why are you active on Hackernews? Hackernews has a variety of community and moderator driven censorship tools, and does not encourage free speech in this manner. Would you call for a completely unmoderated Hackernews, maybe with local down votes and upvotes? Eventually the system could serve as a per user spam and filtering system, but arguably that's still censorship because an individually trained AI is still hiding and removing content. Or.. alternatively is Hackernews ok because if you have showdead on you can generally see the full set of content on HN?

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It is possible to think that a particular platform should be moderated heavily without thinking all platforms should be. It would be chaos if no forums had any heavy moderation, because some discussions can be easily derailed, and entire forums can be derailed with content not relevant to the topic. There is still value in having places where you can communicate and spread ideas online without certain views and opinions being censored. There is value in both approaches, and it is reasonable to prefer one approach on a targeted forum like Hacker News, and prefer another on a global social network like Facebook.

Uhh, if we elected local officials by playing soccer, I would be playing soccer. For the same reason, if I want to have discussion ( albeit moderated ) HN is not a bad place to go.

Moderation has to be neutral, and there's proof FB is not.

My personal opinion is that HN community voting and active moderators are a solid, definite net negative for me. I would indeed be happier if neither of those elements were present. Voting pulls conversation strongly to the mediocre center of the bell curve, and moderators only work if they're willing to strongly profess their own biases.

But it's what's here, so it's what I read. Though I rarely read the comments any more, it's mostly a link site for me at this point.

If you removed the voting and moderators, then the site culture would rapidly change. It wouldn't surprise me if it rapidly approached the culture of other tech sites with similar systems. If that's fine with you, then you could use those sites instead now.

I do.

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