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Comment by x3n0ph3n3 | Hacker News Reader

@dang -- you're not going to get the polite, respectful conversation on this topic that I think you're hoping for. Instead, you're going to get criticisms on the legitimacy of each organization involved in this conflict. I don't understand why you even want this topic on HackerNews.

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Having spent entire days moderating previous threads on this topic, I know what kind of conversation we're likely to get. But abandoning discussion altogether is also not an option.

> I don't understand why you even want this topic on HackerNews.

I don't think I'd say 'want' (what I want is to spend Sunday afternoons working on something else), but the issue is the principles by which we moderate the site. If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862 (edit: which I just posted in the current thread) and then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 and the links back from there, you should find plenty of explanation of the relevant points. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with those answers and still have a question I haven't addressed, I'd be happy to try.

I've been part of this but these are different than the typical political heated discussions on HN like in the trump era. These here tend to swift quickly into antisemitism.

Comments do that are usually swiftly and correctly flagged by users (or mods). In egregious cases, or repeated cases, we warn and/or ban the account.

If you see cases where this is not true, the most likely reason is that we haven't seen them yet. (We don't see everything that gets posted to HN, or even everything that gets posted to a large thread.) The thing to do then is flag the comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag) and/or to email us at hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.

Alternatively, since different people have different thresholds for considering something to be antisemitic, there may often be things that are not flagged that others think should be, and vice versa. It's difficult to determine what the right threshold should be, but it often won't match the preference of the most sensitive users. If productive conversation is to happen, it may require some degree of discomfort.

> But abandoning discussion altogether is also not an option.

I don't see why not. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be an option.

This attitude toward moderation is a large reason I do not participate on this site like I used to.

The site hasn't changed in this respect. If you look at the examples in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, you'll see that all these things—the moderation approach to politics and all the common complaints—go back 15 years.

> because it's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be an option

I hope it's not. Trolls aside, I've found HN's discussion on this topic to be interesting.

For example, this comment [1]. I hadn't considered belligerent status as a relevant factor before. (It's obvious once pointed out, and not a decisive factor. But it has weight nevertheless.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40268043

This point inadvertently exposes an aspect of information management which is sorely unaddressed and inadequate to purposes of understanding within a commonwealth:

That situations conflict which are already well understood to history are regurgitated as mysteries, and the knowledge system is practically useless to providing coherent access to previous experience and context.

When a mod has to write:

> If you look at <URL> and the links back from there, you should find more than enough (indeed, frequently repeated) explanations of the relevant points. If you (or anyone) want to familiarize yourself with those answers and still have a question I haven't addressed, I'd be happy to try.

Why has a new thread been created?

Why isn't this article and the attending thread of comments already situated within existing paths of discourse helping readers to assess the long prevailing (say 100 years) of understanding on the topic and identify, explore and integrate the outlying views? Why hasn't all the redundant and trivial junk of the previous thread been sifted and gleaned into salient regards for the situation?

Does any media apparatus help with us with knowing how what's happening today relates to what we understood yesterday and the days before?

Why is all news manifest as a reverse chronological list of forgettery, de-contextualized factoids and rediscovery of precedents among initiates?

> Why has a new thread been created?

A user posted it and other users upvoted it. Other users flagged it, but I chose to turn off the flags on this one, for reasons I've explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862 and in many other places linked to there.

> Why isn't this article and the attending thread of comments already situated within existing paths of discourse

It is in the sense that the web already does that. I often post lists of related links from past HN discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but that's not doable when my hair is on fire and I'm also trying to keep my head above water.

> But abandoning discussion altogether is also not an option.

This is the most interesting position i ve seen on the subject.

> what I want is to spend Sunday afternoons working on something else

You are deceiving yourself, dang. You cherish every single second of it.

Well that's one word for it!

I think freedom of press is of some significance on a site using news sources as content.

Seems pretty civil at the moment

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