Comment by farmaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by farmaway | Hacker News Reader

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If you care about the guidelines, enforce them consistently. This is the comment which spurred me to start posting yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480065

>Whatever your politics: The reactionary conservative movement, with its campaign to politicize everything (now working on the FBI and Department of Justice, for example), has permanently degraded the country; we won't have these institutions back for generations.

It's such clear flamebait and "ideological battle"-ish that your reply to me, upthread from the above which sits there unflagged, feels like a slap in the face. In all likelihood I'd have gone on with my day if I hadn't stumbled on such a ridiculous, inflammatory, un-moderated comment.

Incidentally, even my very clearly rule-following comments on this link appear flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34484182

I'm used to old high-karma accounts with clear biases abusing user flags and community moderation features. It's much more frustrating to see arbitrary, inconsistent enforcement from actual moderators.

Consistency in moderation isn't possible because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

I've read that comment and flagged it and posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34493349 now. Still, it was nowhere near as much of a guidelines violation as what you did. Your reply didn't even relate to what the GP had said—it was pure offtopic ideological boilerplate, plus name-calling. That kind of thing will get you banned here regardless of what you're arguing for or how wrong other people are or you feel they are.

People routinely accuse us of being secretly aligned with their enemies. It always feels like the mods are against you. This is a reflex response that has zero to do with how we actually moderate HN. Do you have any idea how many people accuse us of being secretly aligned with your views? They do that from exactly the same cognitive bias. Every side feels that way, and they all get super mad about it. The one thing you all ironically agree about is who to blame!

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

And here's another bullshit flamebait comment, upvoted and unflagged. I won't bother to reply to this one. Will you take action? I will watch and take note.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487518

I've reflagged that comment. However, there's a big gap between that and what you were posting here. That user was clearly engaging in a conversation, albeit using flamebaity terminology, while you were pulling in wheelbarrows full of pre-existing talking points, complete with lists of links. That's obviously using the site for ideological battle and obviously off topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com