Address the content/message, not the speaker.
Address the content/message, not the speaker.
(If you didn't intend your username to be trollish, I apologize, but I'm seeing signs that other people are taking it that way.)
Applying rules evenly makes the rules seem better.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
If you're aware of accounts using HN primarily for ideological battle who we haven't asked to stop, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen them. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging such posts or, in egregious cases, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I don't want to complain about people doing it (but I have commented on it, and taken the punishment), I'd just prefer the moderation to be "either there's none or we keep our hands off".
I understand that it's not an easy position to be in, as you have to keep people happy, and enforcing the rules sometimes doesn't vibe with everyone, but I do believe that Facebook got that right (one of the few things!): if you say that you can't make sexist comments, you also can't make sexist comments about men. Twitter and Reddit got that wrong, and I believe you've got it wrong as well, as you'll ban someone like the person here, but you wouldn't bane someone who is the opposite.
I haven't said that and try to be careful never to imply it. Rather, my point is that these complaints about moderation bias (which come in from all political angles) are so isomorphic that there must be a common mechanism underlying them. (People sometimes interpret this as an argument in favor of centrist politics but that's a misunderstanding. It's an argument about social psychology on the internet.)
> I believe you've got it wrong as well, as you'll ban someone like the person here, but you wouldn't bane someone who is the opposite.
That's quite false—we've banned countless accounts on both sides of that divide—so I think you're kind of making my point here. You've assumed something that isn't true, for reasons that have nothing to do with our actual practice. Moreover the users with opposite politics to yours make exactly the same false assumption, just with one bit flipped.
Maybe there's a secret part of HN where they're posting and they're all banned, but I doubt it. Your house, your rules, but it certainly looks like these rules are a bit bendy, and having banned some crazy person with a Bernie quote on his profile makes you believe that you're applying them evenly when you also ban someone like this here, who just comments from a somewhat right-wing position and is rejected by some part of the community because of it.
I'd also look at links to specific comments (i.e. dead and shouldn't be, or live and shouldn't be). But that's less relevant because we have to evaluate these things at account level, not post level. For example, banned accounts can post good comments (and we hope users will vouch for those - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch, and we unkill them whenever we see them), but it doesn't follow that the account should be unbanned. That depends on the overall behavior of the account.