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Comment by luffapi | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered banning accounts that post racist trash like this instead of banning and censoring people who rightly call it out? You’re currently stewarding a white supremacist community and I have no idea how you sleep at night.

This thread needs a lot more attention on it. Not only does it demonstrate how racist and sexist this community is, it shows nicely how complicit you personally are in allowing this to happen.

Compare your response to this racist comment to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28542045

View on HN

People with strong ideological commitments always think the mods are stewarding their enemies, especially when they happen to run across a case of us banning someone who they agree with ideologically. The assumption is that we must have banned that account for secret ideological reasons. Actually I banned it because it broke the site guidelines egregiously, has a pattern of doing so, and has ignored previous requests to stop. I also offered to unban it if the account holder wants to commit to following the rules in the future.

If you think this is evidence of ideological bias, that's a misinterpretation—you're drawing a signal from the data (or rather, from one random observation) that doesn't exist. This is a classic cognitive bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since mods get this sort of attack nearly every day for years, you can understand that after a while we get a little desensitized to it—especially because the attacks are so contradictory. The other side thinks that we're secretly stewarding HN in your favor. Lots of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 and I could give you hundreds more.

I think your characterization of this community is wildly inaccurate, for similar reasons. Yes, HN gets comments of all sorts—to expect anything else from an open internet community with millions of members is unrealistic. To act like the worst of the comments, or the ones that you happen to disagree with the most, characterize the community as a whole is a big non sequitur, driven by the same cognitive biases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

That said, you're right that I missed something- I missed the pattern of behavior in the GP's comment history. That was a mistake.

I strongly disagree. It’s well known that this is one of the only technology sites that will allow racist and sexist comments. I’m not alone in seeing this. Remember ShitHackerNewsSays and #hnwatch? You need to clean up your house before lecturing anyone who’s rightfully upset that you and the site owners allow this site to be a haven for hate speech.

If anyone doubts this, take a scroll through here:

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

> It’s we’ll known that this is one of the only technology sites that will allow racist and sexist comments.

Even, for the sake of argument, assuming that that is true it doesn't prove the ideological moderation bias you are claiming, it is consistent with HN being one of the few sites which does not actively suppress such content and those who post it for ideological reasons.

Tangentially, this reminds me that HN needs a dedicated meta-forum and a policy of moving meta-commentary that is off-topic out of other threads and into the meta-forum.

If HN allows racist content, they are responsible for it. It's absolutely within their power to ban people for regularly complaining about BLM or "critical race theory". They just don't. Whether that's because HN mods are racist themselves or for some other reason, it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same. It even flies in the face of their so called reasoning because no intelligent conversation will arise from such a comment, yet they're left up anyway.

People can even predict the racist reactions this "community" will have:

https://twitter.com/cybertillie/status/1438073023500849156

Reply on news.ycombinator.com