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Comment by throwawayadvsec | Hacker News Reader

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throwawayadvsec

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Oh no, another HN conspiracy!!!

Not everything needs to be a conspiracy when some of us are sick of other people's nonsense.

not a conspiracy, HN mods routinely delete stuff they don't personally like even when it doesn't go against the rules

There are no real "HN mods", this isn't reddit. There is basically one admin, dang, who does not do this.

What is actually happening is enough regular users who have been on the site long enough (myself included) just disagree that some particular piece of content belongs on this site, so they flag it.

What people really have a problem with is not understanding that lots of other people just disagree with them.

Don’t think I’ve ever seen the mods remove anything like that, plenty of user flags do that all the time though. The worst I’ve seen the mods here do is focus on the most pendantic, barely rule breaking comments while allowing explicitly off topic flamebait to simmer.

That's definitely not true. What specifically did you see that made you think that?

It was flagged by users. Moderators haven't touched it.

Dan, you can avoid all this by fixing your moderation. Start banning the transparent bigots (like the "colored flag" person here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231243) right away. Care about what the actual hackers like marcan have to say. Even do a little thing like put a little pride flag on HN during June. (People are going to complain about it. Ban them!)

This isn't that hard, it just requires a clear commitment.

So your solution is to ban everyone who disagrees with you? In fact, your solution is to ask HN to take an explicitly political position of no relevance to its intended purpose, and then ban everyone who objects to that?

Tolerating overt bigotry is absolutely something HN should NOT do. That's not politics. That's being a decent human.

HN should start by aggressively banning clear bigotry before we start getting into more complex cases. To the extent that that is a political position, yes, HN should take a political position.

As it should. Personally speaking, I flagged this thread, and I hope others do as well. There's nothing productive to be accomplished here, nor anything intellectually stimulating to discuss. So yeah, I'm totally for deleting/killing this entire post.

I think a public review of what to do by Dang (responded to this thread) is not only productive, but highly valuable. It's unreasonable to sit around and wait for a neutral version of this discussion to pop up, it likely never will and the issue is only going to get worse.

I respectfully disagree. IMO, this is all just a lot of pointless meta navel-gazing which is of no value whatsoever. But I'm just one guy, and we all know what they say about opinions. shrug

Well I’m still wondering how they are showing a text only to people who submitted something to HN and nobody seems to know either in the thread so at least there’s that…

It uses a CSS rule that checks if you have visited the link to submit on hacker news.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503368406970051

wait so you can detect if any of your visitors visited any link before? isn't that a huge privacy risk?

It's probably not being done here , but it's possible to do. The CSS rule is processed in your browser, so it doesn't actually tell the server if you've been to the link, but in theory a website could have some javascript that tries to detect if the CSS rule was activated.

Fair enough. :-)

I think this is about as “productive” as the threads regarding the Rust foundation debacle(s). Did you believe those should be flagged too? I don’t think they were.

Personally I believe the communication from Asahi’s leadership regarding the users of HN to be relevant. And as others have pointed out in this thread, especially when HN users have supported development of Asahi.

Did you believe those should be flagged too?

I don't know, the whole issue was not important enough to me for me to spend much time reading those threads.

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