Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> Not sure if you're being honest or poisoning the well

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What was the strongest possible interpretation of the comment, which aired a desire to shut down discussion before it happened? FWIW, my response applies to every interpretation.

Thanks for not flagging the entire thread, at the very least.

Your comment broke the Assume good faith part. If you begin a comment with "Not sure if you're honest or poisoning the well", you're already on the wrong side of HN's guidelines. If you do that on so inflammatory a topic as this one, that's definitely flamebait.

They were asking to shut down discussion on a discussion board instead of just hiding or flagging the thread and getting on with their day (speaking of the guidelines...). They said the discussion was going to hell before nearly almost any posts popped up. I asked what the strongest interpretation of this comment was. With all the context, to be frank, it is poisoning the well and I gave the benefit of doubt in deference to the guidelines.

You call it definitely flamebait, but I expected no flames and no one flamed me. Based on the responses, comments and votes, it seemed to be recognized as an honest post (as it was).

What makes it flamebait is the statistically expected response, not the actual responses, which are subject to randomness.

It's just obviously against the site guidelines to say things like "not sure if you're being honest or poisoning the well", so please omit that kind of thing from your HN posts in the future.

Intent makes a comment flamebait. If it was obviously against the guidelines, like complaining that a submission is inappropriate, I wouldn't have posted it. Anyway, I'm interested to learn. What statistical analysis did you run to conclude what the expected response to my post would be?

I'm just speaking from long experience. The word "statistically" above just means "if you look at enough cases".

What makes a comment flamebait is the effect it has on the thread (that's the "bait" part). Intent doesn't determine this. If it did, it wouldn't be possible to post flamebait accidentally—which is actually how most flamebait comes about.

I've got a lot of experience on message boards too. I've never heard of accidental flamebait as a concept. Baiting a line (of fishing wire or text) is a deliberate act. Anyway,

What makes it flamebait is ... not the actual responses

What makes a comment flamebait is the effect it has on the thread

Aren't the actual responses to a comment the effect it has on a thread (as opposed to what you think the responses might be)?

Many, in fact most, trollish comments are posted by people who had no intention of being trollish and had no idea that their comments might land in trollish ways. The resulting flamewars are the same as if they had intended it. Does that help?

No, because just like you've moved the conversation away from trying to justify how my post breaks the hn guidelines, you're moving it again away from your indefensible stance on the definition of flamebait. Flame wars gets started by accident sometimes, yes. There are a myriad reasons for this. It has nothing to do with the definition of flamebait.

Of course it's possible that we have different definitions of flamebait. What I mean by it is when a post includes something inflammatory which is likely to generate an indignant response in either the person you're replying to or readers at large.

It's different when a moderator uses personal definitions for words as justification for taking action. The guidelines might as well say "posts are subject to our whims" at that point.

We need some sort of definitions in order to moderate at all. I wouldn't call them personal, and since the definitions are principled, I wouldn't call them whims either.

Obviously there's some interpretation involved, so different people would apply the same definition differently, but I don't think "not sure if you're being honest or poisoning the well" is such a borderline call.

My comment wasn't borderline. It was fine. If you look up this chain, every possible reason you brought up was addressed, defeated and subsequently abandoned. All that's left is that it was your whim. I can't really argue against that.

There are so few places to talk about it because one side always has a higher footing then the other. There does not exist a place where both sides are taken at 50/50, that doesn't exist for anything politically motivated. So what you get is people who tend to be around the middle, accepting that both sides are at fault. And then you get the extremist views, and those get comments so they jet up to the top.

HackerNews is proportionally North American, so you tend to get larger view set from English speaking North Americans. And non-English articles are largely ignored. And neither of these two populations speak English as their first language. So limiting yourself to English limits your view to English speaking view.

Statistically that seems quite improbable as Jews are only 0.2% of the worlds population vs the Arab and Muslim world (which majority supports Palestinians)

Edit: not to mention the CCP and Russia taking an anti Israel stance as well, both known to conduct massive online campaigns to align with their own agendas.

There are a lot of zionist christians and publications are much safer when reporting from a pro-Israel bias. Most muslims don't speak english so if a muslim is commenting about this topic, they're probably one of the few million in one of the english speaking countries.

And idk how many evangelists you'll find online outside very specific communities.

Plus a large percentage of Jewish people also don't speak English that well / at all, not to mention that you don't need to speak English to click upvote/downvote/flag/etc

jews + usa protestant evangelicals (the only Christians that are specifically pro Zionism) are massively outnumbered by Western world Muslims.

There are 3 million muslims in the US. I don't know how many in the UK, NZ, and AU but if you added them up, well, I doubt your claim

24M in Europe says wiki

Reply on news.ycombinator.com