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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

Caveat: I think it’s valuable to avoid creating threads that devolve into flame wars over gender politics, and largely respect the decision of moderators to flag these articles as a result.

However, I’m a woman, 21 years old, and I’ve been a Hacker News member since 2014 and a reader for much longer (perhaps since I was 11 or 12?). I passed 500 karma years ago. I lament that I cannot easily connect with other women over our use of this medium, because this article alone gave me a lot of valuable advice and more things like it would definitely help me feel more welcome in the community. It’s a complicated situation and I think dang and sctb have done a laudable job of splitting the difference in this space over the years, one that more internet moderators of tech spaces that want women to participate would do well to emulate.

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Moderators didn't flag this article. Users did. If you see [flagged] on a story, that always means user flags.

We didn't see it until someone pointed it out to me just now, and I'm just taking a look now.

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you had flagged the article, and I didn't think that you had in this instance. Thanks for clarifying what [flagged] means, I was unsure about this.

Your engagement with this article here makes me see that we are in a new sort of space for these discussions. And I really appreciate the moderator too. I am 47 and it's been a lonely, long haul. Thank you.

I don't really understand what "welcome" means. Historically on the internet people are simultaneously "welcome" and "not welcome," i.e. people discover places of socializing and choose to participate or not. In my decades of socializing on the internet, most places are hostile to some degree. I also wouldn't bother to complain, because hostility is an unavoidable part of human nature, even hostility toward hostility. Some set of people within a given community will be "nice," and some will be "mean." Most people inhabit some indefinite point on the nice-mean continuum. It would be ideal if comments like "females suk lol" were removed, but something tells me that's uncommon.

I think that "I would feel more welcome if..." (a very common motif in modern activism) suggests a few things:

(1) The operators should care about me/my demographic (2) The operators should signal that they care about me/my demographic (3) The operators should preferentially signal that they care about me/my demographic (4) The operators should counter-signal, i.e. counter-welcome other people/other demographics (determined by perceived opposition to me/my demographic)

This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole. Consider how non-welcome a white male might feel on Twitter, etc.. Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

>It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe, as don't I suspect a lot of people on HN (most?). Spaces that prioritize making religious white nationalists feel safe are not interesting spaces to participate in in general (check out the front page of Gab (edit: I think I meant Voat) if you need a sense of what I mean).

It's also not really about being nice or mean, it's about comments like these suggesting I want preferential treatment from moderators. If my original post wasn't clear: I think the moderators are basically doing the best job that they can at weeding out obviously sexist, racist, and otherwise unproductive comments.

So, I'm not really complaining about how the space is moderated, I think it's at a pretty stable equilibrium and I'm pessimistic about it getting much better than this for women, with what it prioritizes (primarily, open discussion about controversial topics, so long as it remains civil, even when one side is expressing repellent views in a civil manner). Obviously, this is not disqualifying for me, because I'm still here, and I have a lot more karma than you.

However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.

FWIW, I don't read any of your comments as wanting preferential treatment from moderators.

Edit (sorry, got interrupted while writing this) - and I particularly appreciate the even keel of your comments in this thread, when it would be so easy to get thrown off balance by the sharp elbows of others. It's clear that you've worked at developing a reflective rather than reflexive style [1]. I wish we could convince/teach more users to do this.

I also agree that there is an issue with this place coming across as unwelcoming in a number of important respects, including (the topic of this thread) to women. My sense is that it has been changing, but slowly. If you have any ideas about how to encourage that, I'd love to hear them.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

@tptacek and I discussed this a bit downthread. I’m not an expert in community moderation and I’ve seen a lot of them go from decent to terrible very quick, so I know roughly how much effort it takes to prevent that. I do think it’s improving, and I think slow is the only way it ever improves.

I think a lot of women see terrible stuff come up here either in comments or on the front page and assume (wrongly) that the community as a whole is ok with it, before it ends up flagkilled by everyone else and often you will come into the thread and warn them if it’s particularly bad. I know I’ve had a good few “why the FUCK is this garbage on the front page” reactions over the years, but those submissions inevitably end up flagged too.

I do recall being warned by you for responding in kind to somebody writing inflammatory stuff or acting in bad faith, and this is a reaction I have had to learn to control as a result. That doesn’t feel great, because in the moment it feels like being scolded for hitting back from a position of less power, and this happens a lot to minorities in tech. However, over time I’ve learned that there’s a discursive norm against flamey stuff in general, and that this norm prevents the conversation from being drowned in pile-ons about one person’s bad behavior, which of course ends up Streisanding bad comments too. HN seems like one of the few places where “don’t feed the troll” is actually sensible advice, because there is sufficient enforcement against trolls (community based and explicit moderation) that they aren’t allowed to fester and multiply.

I think a lot of women are jaded and burnt out from having to deal with ugly comments and bad actors in less-well-moderated areas of the web where the community sentiment is actually against us participating. I know it was really difficult for me to learn to set aside my gut reaction and ignore the ugly bits, but I did it because I believed it would be ultimately worth it. It’s a question of trust, right? People have to trust that this space is actually different, that misogynistic pot-stirring and verbal abuse aren’t actually welcome, and that they will be treated as equals. These are depressingly common and even quotidian almost everywhere else, which is I think what builds the reputation.

Yes to all this. I am a woman who has been online since 1989. For me, what has to happen is not so much moderation difference but about the inner work. Understanding that categories gender and race are always at play, and putting things in that context. That is what we as women or bipoc _have_ to do. My bad experiences are not rages and threats to rape me (that I can place in the category of ridiculous) but these get all the focus. For me it is the 1000s of times I have something to add but when I do, because it is from my gendered perspective, it is considered outside the field of the conversation. The technical term for this is the differend.

> That's easy: I don't want to participate in spaces where religious white nationalists feel safe,

As a white, religious person, - but not a nationalist: I always felt safe on HN and I hope most HNers are OK with that as long as I play by the rules?

Why shouldn't everyone feel safe as long as they play by the rules?

Edit: I'm not hurt. I'm hoping to get a better worded explanation from you :-)

Edit 2: The reason why I ask is because sentence is quite absurd and cannot be what you mean. Just try to imagine someone saying: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," here on HN.

You are arguing in bad faith. Obviously one should be made welcome no matter whether they're white, a nationalist, religious, or all of these, but it should be easy enough to infer from context that this is not what the parent comment was about. It is about making clear that this welcome does not extend toward making other groups feel unwelcome, that is, toward prioritizing that welcome over others.

> You are arguing in bad faith.

I'm not. I also read and re-read it too.

One possible explanation could be that I'm not a native speaker.

However if anyone wrote: "I don't want to participate in spaces where atheistic colored globalists feel safe," I'd flag it instantly as I originally did with this before I unflagged it and asked instead because while I think some kind of nazi crap could write that I don't think that is what she means.

Edit: also I think it is bad for the conversation to state as fact that I argue in bad faith. If you'd be kind enough to rewrite that I'll also try to remove this edit.

It's possible you interpreted this differently than it was intended as a non-native speaker. In case that's true, I'll note that rather than referring to people who are "religious", "white", or "nationalist", the OP was likely referring to people who are "religious" and "white nationalist". White nationalists are people who want to establish a white ethnostate, and typically this label is adopted by white supremacists who want to leave behind the "white supremacist" label but maintain the same ideology.

What I meant was that white nationalists feeling safe in a space (particularly them feeling safe expressing white nationalist views) is a decent heuristic for that space being poorly moderated or of poor quality overall. At the very least I’m not interested in the content of that space and I find white nationalists repugnant.

Just for clarity's sake: I spent a year monitoring HN (somewhat primitively, but with automation) for white nationalist content, and I stopped because it's become increasingly clear that the site itself finds white nationalism repugnant.

Though it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines (the guidelines would be long indeed if they had to state every pathology that emerges on an Internet message board), it's abundantly clear from the "informal moderation log" (the feed of comments from 'dang) that overt appeals to racial, national, or religious superiority are against the site rules. People are routinely banned for this stuff.

It's also just pretty clear that the community on the site has much less patience for racism and misogyny than the rap it gets on Twitter (which is an objectively worse site, for whatever that's worth). The real reason monitoring for white nationalism got boring is that practically every comment I'd catch would get modded down and flagged. I used to report things to Dan when I saw them, but I was batting less than .200 on reporting things that weren't flagged by the time Dan saw them.

What's problematic about evaluating the site --- and you don't have this problem, because you're a regular, but lots of other people do --- is it can be extraordinarily bad if you snapshot it at the wrong time. Anyone can join! Without a credit card or a phone number! They can post whatever nonsense they want! You have to watch the site in action over the course of hours to see what the community actually thinks about something. That's plenty of time to make an effective Orange Site Dunk on Twitter.

I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

> I don't believe the status quo is really acceptable, and there must be room to improve it. But it's better than a lot of people think it is.

This is basically my position. I have a hard time convincing others of it because of the reputation, though. It’s been an invaluable space for me in learning from people like you posting and I have no doubt that I have gained a significant amount of social savvy and also technological sophistication in using the site. I have trouble thinking of specific ways that it could be improved, specifically because of what you mention.

It's hard! Like, I don't think it's reasonable to say "the site needs 6 more Dans" because it's hard enough to find one Dan that no other site like HN has managed to accomplish it.

I appreciate you sticking through it, though. I know this place can get hard to take.

Part of it is a flip side of hiding comment scores. I think it's helped, but it also means that horrible comments that are too young to have been modded down yet are just as prominent as comments that the community agrees with. (If not more, due to the comment-order-semi-randomizer.)

One thing I have noticed in that vein is that it's impossible to tell whether a particular thread of comments is representative of a commonly held viewpoint, or if it's one commenter with an axe to grind. And if it's one commenter, they may have an entirely valid axe to grind! And then, even if it is valid, that axe may be totally off-topic for the post and dominate the conversation, retreading tired old ground and sucking up all the air in the room for interesting, relevant, new conversation. (Collapsable threading helps a lot though.)

Check the post time. If it's only a few minutes old, it's likely it just hasn't been seen by other people yet.

You'd be a good hitter batting .200 in the majors. I don't think reporting an additional 2 egregious comments for every 8 that have that have already been flagged, downvoted, and / or otherwise dealt with is a loss. Unless it's just a matter of "if I wait a little longer, these will get taken care of, too," then I would say continuing your efforts is worthwhile.

You mean, like, compared to a random person picked off the street, right.

After a little research, it seems that "good" is a bit of a stretch. But, the current median batting average in MLB is .248, so you're not really that far off. And, I think it's fair to say that given your other contributions to HN, .200 is enough to be above the "Mendoza line." ;)

Maybe HN is anti-white-nationalism, but there's definitely a lot of ignorance about how the people here are impacting the system. For example look at the comments on this article that talked about paying for the news:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23372570

This kind of ignorance is going to end up making society a worse place. It's not white nationalism, but it's not a lot better either.

Being wrong about journalism is in fact a lot better than being a white nationalist.

Totally agreed.

Perhaps because you are not a native speaker you might not know, but "white nationalist" is basically the polite term for Nazis(and other groups with similar beliefs).

Thanks a lot.

I think if that's what people mean they should just say nazi.

Most of us (and I am definitely in that group) can agree on disliking/hating nazis.

In my opinion there's no reason to mix skin color or religion into this.

Again, thanks. Certain American cultural norms aren't obvious to me.

It's not an American cultural norm. It's just English grammar.

Things which are written as compounds in other languages often have a space in English, and English does not distinguish between word classes so that Noun-Noun compounds and Adjective-Noun phrases are ambiguous.

But if you hear “white nationalism” five times, when you hear “white nationalist” you don't hear it compositionally as “(white) (nationalist)” but as “(white nation)alist” - someone who advocates for a white nation.

“White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong. For instance, a person could support a multi-party white nationalist pseudo-democracy like the US during slavery. But nazism is going to be a form of dictatorship.

Based on this (actually enlightening, thanks) I have a new idea of what it meant had it been written in a more Germam way:

(religious whitenation-alism)[0]

That's kind of unfortunate because I read it as just the opposite of:

non-religious colored globalists

In hindsight it is possible to see, but right there and then it seemed obvious, and I guess we should come up with a better term.

Also, for what it is worth: I might have been able to catch that if "religious" hadn't been thrown in there.

> “White nationalism” is a word. It has a different meaning than Nazism in my experience, so calling for substitution would be wrong.

Good point.

We could need some clear words and definitions for this as I'm fairly convinced I'm not the only one to misunderstand the wording, kind of like a DSL for discussing bad ideas.

A positive side effect of this whole thing is that I am fairly certain I actually got to feel in my body what it feels like to be triggered :-D

If I should ask certain other people here to learn something from this thing it would be to be precise, and to not alienate people for no good reason, because I am fairly certain a number of people here would say I was dog-whisteling or something to that effect while I was legitimately confused.

[0]: Although when white-nation-alism (to be very clear) becomes religious about itself I think it is some form of nazism.

>However, in my years of being here, I had never read this piece before, and I frequently feel pretty alone as a woman when there are comments that make me uncomfortable. It is just nice to know that there are other women in the space who share my experience, and I wish there was something like a women HNers social group or something, I guess.

i would like to point out that there are some men that are made uncomfortable by comments that echo masculinity here as well and criticisms from such men never get much traction either. so it'd be nice if there were space (a space or just space) on HN for someone that wishes question the culture and all of the "high-minded" structure. r/twox is a good model - predominantly patronized by women but welcoming of good faith discussion from other genders as well.

I didn’t realize r/twox allowed trans women; the name has always made me a bit skeptical because rhetoric about chromosomes is so common amongst transphobes.

i guess you're right it isn't completely transparent but i think they are welcome

https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/fe6y66/im_...

Yeah, I noticed. Unfortunate early choice of name.

> Consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

I [an occasional mod] welcome people who think Rust sucks as long as they give some details why.

I don't welcome people who just post snarky dismissals of projects.

I'd say the majority of people who complain about their opinion being unwelcome here have been stating their opinion as a big loud raspberry, rather than making a substantive argument people can engage with. It's just the raspberry that's unwelcome.

I think this was the hardest part for me to learn: the site cares a lot about what I would describe as "tone," which is generally a good heuristic for interesting and productive discussions (but this can feel stifling for a lot of people, particularly but not exclusively minority groups in tech). Early on I definitely engaged in a manner that was less than pleasant, and the culture here seems to take a dim view of that no matter who it's coming from, which is the part I find the most impressive. I have since learned how to say what I want to say without just blowing raspberries (for the most part) and I am generally rewarded for it with interesting comments and upvotes.

> Early on I definitely engaged in a manner that was less than pleasant...

From your top-level comment, it sounds like you started when you were 15? So, um... I and a number of others don't really want to be judged by how we commented when we were 15. (In my case, not on HN - it didn't exist yet. But yeah, I was "less than pleasant" a lot of the time.)

Don't be too hard on yourself for the teen-age years.

Mostly I said a lot of inflammatory stuff when calling out sexism and racism, and was probably ignorant and worse on other subjects too. I learned relatively quickly that my assumptions about the site were incorrect.

> Don't be too hard on yourself for the teen-age years.

Just wanted to echo this and extend it for the older of us: don't be too hard on yourself for the past.

> Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

That would be me. I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN. But I don't feel unwelcome by HN, only by mods, who I don't think of highly anyway, as this pushed me to pay attention to what mods actually do over the years. Nowadays they punish my account again, at least they didn't ban it this time, presumably this time it was because of my opinion on something corporate capitalist they didn't like.

> It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

No matter how fringe, if mods allow, people will still be able to defend and express their opinions here, so only mods can make them feel unwelcome here.

> I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN.

That can't be true. We couldn't care less whether people criticize Rust.

I've seen accounts with green usernames that seem to have been shadowbanned for less. Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things. Getting flagged for the unreasonable things can really kill a brand new account with under 10 karma.

"Seem to have been shadowbanned for less" than...criticizing Rust? come on you guys. That's not even close. Perhaps you saw an account that was affected by a software filter, especially if it's new. We try to review the affected posts and immunize legit accounts against the software, but we miss some.

> Typically, it's a new account that says some reasonable things, and maybe one or two fairly unreasonable things.

Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. If one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire, "the majority of things I did were reasonable" is not much of a defense.

It's hard to speak in the general case though. People routinely overinterpret what they see based on what they assume is happening. If you haven't specifically asked and we haven't specifically answered, the explanation is probably wrong. It's not hard to get an answer if you try.

Yes, "seem to," as in, I have no idea why, because nobody tells me and it's not publicized anywhere how shadowbanning works.

> Accounts get banned for the worst things they do, not the best. Suppose one day I go get groceries, walk the dog, and set somebody's house on fire. It's not a defense that the majority of things I did were reasonable.

I'm not talking about "set someone's house on fire" though. I'm talking about a comment that triggers a handful of people to mash the downvote or flag link. Specifically, this account: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rbecker which, obviously someone else noticed as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23585354

That user's subsequent comments have not been great, but, at the time that I encountered them, they had something like 10 karma. Note how I wasn't the only one who couldn't figure out why they were shadowbanned?

> it's not publicized anywhere how shadowbanning works

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The account you mentioned isn't banned, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in this context. It has, however, shown signs of being an ideological battle account—quite distinctive signs in fact—and I've already warned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665090.

New accounts that have come here to use HN in the intended spirit don't typically post exclusively about racial statistics, immigration, China, why lynchings were not as commonplace as people suppose, and similar things for their first 52 comments. Could it be that that is just a random streak and a wave of intellectual curiosity is about to come? Sure. But at some point, if it walks like a duck, we ban it.

So, you're saying that both bans and shadowbans are manual interventions? I did not have that impression regarding shadowbans. What I, and the comment I linked to earlier saw was a combination of green username (new account) and every comment after a certain point marked as [dead]. If that's not "shadowbanned," I don't know what it is. This user also seems to attract downvotes to fairly reasonable comments for some unknown reason.

That said, yes, this user has some questionable comments, most of which seem to have come after the point where I initially noticed. I don't see any reason why posting about racial statistics, China, immigration, and lynchings is a big red flag, especially the way 2020's been going so far. It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however.

Sometimes it's manual and sometimes it's software. If it's software, it won't permanently ban the account, and you'll more likely see [dead] comments followed by live ones. On the other hand, a banned account can have its comments restored to live status by vouches from other users, which might be hard to tell apart. On the third hand, software sometimes will permanently ban an account, but that's linked to patterns of spamming. Spamming and trolling are different phenomena. Spam is easier.

> I don't see any reason why posting about [...etc...] is a big red flag [...] It is certainly easier to troll on these subjects than it is about how much Rust sucks, but, in isolation, I'd call this a chartreuse flag, at best. I do agree with you about your assessment of this user's current comment history, however

It isn't a red flag in principle but it's a big red flag in practice because these accounts pattern-match extremely reliably with certain classes of users who routinely end up getting banned. Once you've been doing this for 10 years you notice these things early. I don't mean to sound like this is some sort of special power. It's just gruntwork. Believe me, it's boring.

Occasionally someone comes along who (a) is truly a new user who hasn't been banned before; (b) walks like a troll and quacks like a troll on troll topics; but (c) turns out to be an intellectually curious person whose mind, let's say, functions a bit differently from most people's. They might even be that thing we all dream we are and basically none of us is: an independent thinker. Obviously we want such a user. But the sad truth is that the dreariness of pattern-matching turns out accurate the overwhelming majority of the time, and for every such outlier, there are hundreds of trolls - or dozens of trolls making hundreds of accounts. So we play splat-the-mosquito, the mosquitoes respawn, and the karmic wheel turns.

It's possible you could have been shadowbanned for other reasons. I really wish the mods at least sent a notification that you were shadowbanned at all with the reason; it would clarify things so much better.

I was personally shadowbanned when I made a new account, but I believe the reason was because I posted a link (to Imgur) in my first post. I emailed the mods and they fixed it for me, but only because I noticed my post wasn't visible after logging out.

To be clear I still don't know the exact reason, but it was apparently made in error.

That defeats the entire point of shadowbanning someone. Shadowbanning is used primarily _because_ it is opaque to the person who is banned. If you told them, they might then make a new account, rather than thinking that people aren't engaging with them and moving on. If you give them a notification that they have been banned and why in the interest of transparency, its no longer a shadowban.

Or, maybe the first ban shouldn't be a permanent shadowban. Maybe actually telling people what they're doing wrong would get them to not do it.

There is, in fact, research showing that this is how it works on Reddit: users who get told why they're being banned or their post removed go on to be better contributors than those who don't. I can dig up the paper if you're interested, but I don't have it on hand.

I 100% agree, and think that in general shadowbans are a gross idea. But my point is that if you send out info about why you banned someone, then you are explicitly not shadowbanning them, by definition. The whole concept of a shadowban is that it must be opaque to the person being banned; if you change that then you aren't shadowbanning them.

Personally, I think that moderation transparency is a noble goal: I'd be in favor of all forums keeping explicit, public moderation logs with all moderator actions. But then again I have never had to moderate a particularly large forum, so perhaps my opinion would change when forced to deal with the same spammers, day after day.

I don't disagree with shadowbanning as a concept; rather, I disagree with HN's implementation of it. Being shadowbanned should be a last resort, after a warning and a more transparent ban. Once you've gotten a certain amount of strikes within a certain period, then I have no problem with a shadowban.

I agree with you on moderator transparency. There should be a certain amount of it visible to all, and that amount should definitely be more than what's available here on HN and Reddit.

Reddit is far worse, because you can be banned for arbitrary things without recourse, even though it's theoretically against the site moderation guidelines. You can be banned from one subreddit simply for participating in another.

I don't think HN has the same degree of problem, but I think the solution is the same. Sometimes, sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

We tell people that we're banning them, and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but only once the account has an established history. We treat new accounts differently, for reasons I've explained before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20289994

It's a bimodal distribution. With established accounts, we warn them before banning, usually several times, and then tell them we're banning them and why. With new accounts, we don't say we're banning, because banned-new-accounts are overwhelmingly spammers and trolls—often serial trolls who have been banned many times and know exactly what they're doing. The cost-benefit of explaining why we're banning the account in those cases is completely different. To repeat from one of the comments I just linked to:

it is a balance between transparency and defending the site against abuse. If we tried to give every banned account the same high-effort attention that we give established users, we'd do nothing else all day and still not get through them all. That would just be a new vector for people to DoS the moderators. A small number of abusive users can create a large number of disruptions. There is also a significant amount of spam, and if we told spammers we were banning them, they would spam us with emails demanding attention, asking why, and telling us how high-quality their articles really are. Actually they do this a lot already, and it's a pain.

This does leave one class of accounts who unfortunately are the losers in this cat-and-mouse game: new accounts that get shadowbanned even though they were neither spammers nor trolls. It sounds like that is what happened in your case. Sometimes a new account shows up, and in its first post(s) behaves like a spammer or a troll would. That's when we use shadowbanning, but since we don't see the future, later it sometimes turns out to be a legit user who goes on to make good posts that get killed because we banned them.

This happens and it sucks. We can't see into the account's future posts, nor can we ever know for sure that an account is spamming or trolling...it's all just pattern matching and sometimes a pattern matches on the early data points and diverges later on. The only solution I know of in such cases is to correct it later: either because we notice good comments that are [dead] and investigate, or because we hear from other users "hey, are you sure $username should be banned"? - and we look them up, see the mistake and unban them. It's particularly helpful to alert us to such cases, so if anyone notices an account that is banned and shouldn't be, we'd greatly appreciate hearing about it at hn@ycombinator.com.

> This may seem like a trivial exercise, but consider how non-welcome a person with conservative political interests would be not only on HN, but in the tech industry as a whole.

And here is a bit of a paradox. Not only are "conservative" (right wing) views marginalized here, but so are many leftist ideas that aren't one of HN's pet topics (UBI, land value tax, etc.)

You simply cannot criticize capitalism or the "free market" here without expecting downvotes. You can't talk about things that, for instance, the Soviet Union did right (e.g. going from an agrarian country of peasants to an industrial power in under 50 years) among all the wrongs it committed (gulags, the Holodomor, etc). The same, I suspect, for China, Cuba, Venezuela, or any other country that isn't the US and to which the US has not "brought democracy." Speaking of "bringing democracy," I strongly suspect that serious discussion of Western imperialism is off the table, as well. And, let's not even think about the US's broken immigration system.

On the world political scale, none of these things are remotely controversial. You can consistently say all of them, while holding a center-left ideology in basically all of Europe.

I don't particularly think having a "safe space" is all that productive, but I would appreciate if some of these topics got a little bit of lively and reasoned debate. Instead, people just mash that downvote button, which frustrates me to no end.

I've accepted that by pointing these things out, I end up losing a few fake internet points, and I'm okay with that. I'm so far about the downvote/flag threshold that it doesn't matter. But, I don't like it.

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