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> As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.

Absolutely, and it’s an excellent principle! Notably, however, HN does restrict what types of stories can be submitted, which has much the same effect of limiting what "ideas can be presented" (particularly when combined with an expectation to stay on topic).

To me, the difference is that HN isn’t trying to be a one-stop destination for all of your communication, whereas Facebook absolutely is.

Which is to say, I agree that complete free speech on any individual website is impossible without it devolving into a hellscape, so the best way to support free speech on a societal level is to have a diversity of social networks, instead of a handful of major platforms.

And we're failing at the diversity part.

Wouldn't a diversity of social media platforms each restricted to a niche produce echo chambers?

Not making a case for Facebook, I just don't think we have a good solution to this yet.

It's a valid concern, but ultimately, a diversity of online spaces more closely matches the real world. The types of conversations which are acceptable at your workplace, your gym, your favorite bar, and your political party's local action committee will all be different, but there's enough cross-pollination that democracy seems to have always worked.

From where I'm standing, the rise of Facebook et al's recommendation algorithms seems to have been far more effective at creating echo chambers. And importantly, these algorithms only really work if they have a wealth of potential content to recommend—ie, if the social network is absolutely massive!

This fails spectacularly when the point of disagreement is one’s humanity, for example. I’m a lot less active here than I would be otherwise, and I know that’s the case for a lot of others who belong to groups that HN considers fair game. I largely consider it a hostile place to me and people like me, and because of this moderation attitude, it’s first mover dominance in certain areas is actively harmful. And no, I’m not going to expose myself by revealing by what aspects of my identity are regularly dehumanized on HN.

Social cooling is just as much a phenomena on HN. By its very nature, it’s invisible unless it affects you directly. HN loses plenty of voices it’s never aware of.

I was sincerely hoping to hear your side. I wish your response wasn't this vague.

I get it. But I also don’t have much of a tolerance any more for dealing with abuse, and it’s not possible to be open about this stuff without also making yourself vulnerable to that abuse. I wish there was a solution to that, not least because I wish I could participate more frequently and more openly, but if there is a solution beyond moderation for this purpose I haven’t figured it out yet.

An option is to use a throwaway account for comments that would leak personal information if linked to a main account or personalized username.

That's an option... but if the person behind the throwaway account still receives abuse, it doesn't matter that the abuse didn't come down on their main account. It's still abuse aimed at them as a person, and it still hurts just as much.

Be careful about assuming that a throwaway account guarantees anonymity. Based on what HN moderators have said in posts to users misusing throwaway accounts to violate the HN guidelines, they are able to link throwaway accounts to primary accounts. That necessarily implies if HN suffers a severe security breach, all throwaway accounts may be linkable to the main account which would reveal the email address on the main account, if present, and enable researching of the user's identity based on posts on the main account.

Aren't you able to provide examples that you've seen happening to others in this site?

Because if not nobody knows what you're referring to, and you could just as well haven't made the comment in the first place.

>Aren't you able to provide examples that you've seen happening to others in this site? Because if not nobody knows what you're referring to, and you could just as well haven't made the comment in the first place.

Why the aggressive tone?

You could activate "showdead" in the settings and watch any thread with controversial/political topics yourself.

Just want to say: I feel you.

I wasn't aware of this before, but can fully believe its existence. Even things like Apple, Java, or .Net incite personal or anti-personal reactions--you can probably guess which are which.

Totally understand the desire to not tip off personal details. However, it would be nice to hear what you consider to be blind spots on HN. I have found discussions here to be far more professional, courteous, and productive than most any other forum. Are there examples of better discussion forums? If so, how are they better?

I have never seen anyone on HN questioning another person's humanity. That's pretty messed up if it has happened.

I understand why you wouldn't want to provide any additional details, but it's also hard to take your claims at face value given my own experience. Perhaps you could share examples which do not compromise your own identity?

>I have never seen anyone on HN questioning another person's humanity.

It's subtle and masked by the "politeness", that's the trick.

Not the OP you were responding too, but a lot of the threads on immigration will have those types of personal attacks I don't have a specific one but they usually devolves in people against immigration being called sociopaths.

Take a simple browse through a thread about Trump or his supporters for one example. There are many, many other examples as well.

I've seen this argument before and agree that some people do this. But often and sadly I think it's a case of both sides not understanding each other. Often one group has a moral code that excludes the others choices. Taken to an extreme this can be a problem. And if that person is a close relative it can be a problem but at some point you just have to be okay that some strangers in the internet think your political leanings, lifestyle choices, religious beliefs, natural tendencies, etc are wrong. There are probably things they believe that you think are wrong. But if we stop trying to be right all the time we can just find a way to live peacefully and cooperatively.

I'd urge you to reconsider. There are plenty of people here who don't agree with someone being dehumanized, no matter who they are. If it happens here, we want it to stop. We don't see much of that happening. But if it is happening and we're just blind to it, if someone doesn't tell us, then we can't fix it.

Now, we can't totally fix it, the way HN currently works. If I make a point denying your humanity, that post can be downvoted to death, flagged, and I can be banned. But the post is still there, and everyone with showdead on can still see it. So, depending on how sensitive you are to what was said, "fixing" it may not actually be fixing it.

You have your own reasons for deciding what you do. But I'd at least suggest that you give us some kind of hint, so that we can try to make HN better.

Are you a product manager?

"HN" isn't a person or even a coherent group. It can't "consider" anything anything. If you mean that a subset of HN users post things as horrible as you're describing, that's no doubt true, as it is on any large, open internet forum. When the long tail meets the bottom of the barrel, it generates dreck. The vast majority of it gets downvoted and/or flagged and/or moderated and/or autokilled. Some still gets through, and we ask people to tell us about those cases so we can moderate them. We can't see everything that gets posted here.

That subset of users is not representative of the community, or even close to 10% of it. If I'm wrong about that I'm open to changing my mind, but that would require real data. People's generalizations about HN are unreliable. The unreliability is proportional to the passion and confidence of the pronouncement. Typically, someone has seen a few egregious cases (or even just one) and then makes a generalization from them. The pain of running into egregious comments is real and needs to be taken seriously (and I'm sorry that you don't feel that we do—that really sucks). But the generalization is a non sequitur.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It even used to be a sport on Twitter for awhile to find the most egregious HN comments that hadn't been moderated yet and then pass them around as examples of things the HN moderators "agree" with (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But of course we don't. Anyone can look through the moderation comments and if they find even one example of us doing anything other than trying to get people to recognize and respect each other's humanity, I'd like to see it. We've written thousands of emails trying to do the same.

The assumption that we see everything that gets posted here is false (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), as is the assumption that there's any way to stop anyone from making an account and posting what they choose. It takes time for moderation mechanisms to kick in. That's the way an open forum is, and if you think about it, it's rather amazing that HN isn't dominated by such shit.

I don’t know if I’m reading this correctly, but it comes across to me at least as defensive, and is probably not going to encourage people who are already feeling vulnerable to come forward with specific evidence. I’m also not sure you’ve fully understood the complaint. I can’t speak for stonecraftwolf of course, so I can’t be sure about that. I suspect my own experience is similar though, because I’m hearing echoes of an experience I have here too.

The issue that I’ve experienced here isn’t, strictly speaking, a failure of moderation. It’s more an occasional failure of culture. For the most part discussions go very well here, and I see the hard work you do to make that happen. In fact if someone were to ask me to name the best and hardest-working moderators on the internet, you would come to mind first. There are, however, some topics where the tone of the whole discussion—not individual posts, but whole discussions—is toxic to the point where I have to take a HN breather. If you’d like, I can send you examples of these as I see them in the future.

It’s difficult to address this in a framework where the unit of moderation is an individual comment. A more significant challenge, and one that I think isn’t talked about nearly enough, is that the kind of toxicity I sometimes see here is of a subtle (but no less poisonous) sort. I suspect, in fact, that recognition of it might be difficult unless you’ve become attuned to it as a survival mechanism after experiencing it over and over throughout one’s life. I’m not necessarily saying “there’s no way for you to see it unless you already know it,” which would be tricky indeed—but I’m not ruling out the possibility either. In any case my point is that there is a holistic view that gets lost when we dive into the weeds of individual comments, and in my experience at least, the hurt happens at that holistic level.

I hope this is helpful, and does not feel accusatory; I have nothing to accuse you of, and I very much appreciate being able to work these issues out in good faith. Thanks again for all the hard work you do.

> If you’d like, I can send you examples of these as I see them in the future.

That would be great! And thank you for the thoughtful reply.

> As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say.

This is true and I've seen some extremely vile, reprehensible things said, but that went unmoderated because they were said politely (I've actually seen people responding to these vile things get banned because they weren't nearly that polite).

We don't know what's "vile" for you, and I'm sure you've seen people getting super offended over things that you consider essential discussions. Give us some details?

When people make grand claims about egregious moderation failures like this, they never supply links. That's because, nearly always, the reality of what happened tells quite a different story. I'd like to see what you're talking about, that is so vile and reprehensible, and I bet fair-minded HN readers would like to see that as well, so they can make up their own minds.

I never said it was a moderation failure, as I said it was politely given.

And I'm not providing links because I don't have them, these are things I've noted over the years as a lurker. There's so much back patting about the moderation on this site that I'm often miffed that no one sees the negative consequences. No system or approach is perfect, and the approach you guys take on this site has its share of downsides as well.

I once saw a person on this site argue all safety regulations should be gotten rid of and let the market decide the cost. The theory is that as more accidents happen the insurance will rise and that will self-correct by causing companies to enforce their own internal safety requirements.

The implication being it's ok for Bob to live the rest of his life without a leg because the company was willing to pay the insurance premium. That Bob's quality of life shouldn't factor into the equation.

The problem is that when someone has an opinion like this, they cannot be put down as strongly as they should. "In real life" if someone walks into a public space and announces they believe a 30 year old should be able to enter into a sexual relationship with a 10 year old, not only would there be a reaction, there would be a __very strong reaction__, and the strength of that reaction is a part of the policing we do amongst ourselves as a society.

But because of the values this site has, if someone were to express that opinion on these boards, the people getting banned would be the ones reacting strongly.

And _THAT_ is why I agreed with the other poster that you do, in fact, moderate based upon HOW someone says something while pointing out that it has its downsides.

> However... I've noticed a difference between HN and the likes of Facebook or Twitter. As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.

> Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to each other as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".

I don't think there's as much to this observation as it seems. Firstly, HN is a different site than Facebook, which means it has a different userbase with different moderation problems. It's not like people are civilly and respectfully planning insurrections here, and if they were, the moderation would probably shift to stopping those "wrong or 'dangerous'" things. Also, the kinds of dis- and mis-information the the major social networks are fighting hasn't gotten much of a foothold on HN, and is often moderated away when it shows up.

Secondly, to your earlier point: HN has human moderators who can (more or less) keep up. While Facebook has human moderators too, there aren't enough of them to keep up, so it relies heavily on automation and crowdsourcing. They don't have the capacity to pay attention to "how you say it," even if they wanted to.

It's sort of like day care: if you have one teacher and ten students, the teacher is doing a good job if each student gets a lot of high-quality personalized attention; if you have one teacher and fifty students, the teacher is doing a good job if she manages to just barely keep them from hurting themselves.

> I don't think the answer is to legally regulate free speech on social media platforms. I want online platforms to have the power to moderate.

I'm very anti-regulation in general, but I think that regulation is absolutely needed regarding censorship of DMs on platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, and the like. Posts and groups are one thing, but they're also censoring people's private conversations.

There are entire domains that you can't even link your friends to via Messenger. This is a dangerous situation. Much of our society's only contact details for much of their social graph is via these censored platforms that can suspend you on a whim.

Regulation to enforce availability of data and contacts export/takeout after suspension would be good at the very least. Saying something the platform doesn't like shouldn't cut you off from your address book.

The things that speaks in favor of HN moderation are several compared to other online platforms.

Actions are usually transparent and with a personal comment by the moderator.

There are no private space in HN.

Comments are focused on the text, while usernames and user identities are de-empathized.

HN moderation is handled consistently by the same persons, and there have been a open discussion with the community that seems to resulted in refocusing on tone rather than content.

The moderators do a great job but the users do not. If you post something that disagrees with the hive mind you’ll find it hidden at -4 and flagged really quickly.

So, it matters for you. Not others who hate the attachment to phrases used in the clickbate article you have. Please get this off hackernewz.