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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

"Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities."

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Funny how this aged, now. Trying to shame people on Mastodon? Totally valid. Trying to chew someone out on a private forum? Now it's an organized attempt to destroy lives.

I notice this strange double standard also.

"Everyone else is a bully, but not me - I'm just trying to raise awareness."

Always funny to me to read something like that. HN has high moderation, one of the highest I've seen on modern fora, only a few steps below r/AskHistorians for example. I don't see this "abuse, bigotry, and nastiness" here and even if there are comments like that, they are quickly downvoted and dead.

But apparently the dead threads are still read by search engines (and by extension LLMs) filling them with highly ranked bile.

They require an account with showdead enabled so they are not being indexed by default.

Huh, interesting, someome should tell Asahi this.

That's not correct, the point is that while the comment might be flag-killed, the subsequent posts in that thread are not and are visible to search engines. For example: if you go to this post [1] from the prior thread while in private/incognito/whatever mode you can see the posts underneath a flagged comment even though you can't see the comment itself. And there are some comments there by other users that, despite being flagged, are still indexable and visible

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972571

That's true, but those comments would be flagged too if they're bad enough. Just because a flagged comment exists does not mean the entire subthread is bad.

Right, but that gets into the exact argument that the team is making. When a thread is flagged, that means fewer users are going to open that thread and flag subsequent content or flamebait. It creates a lower moderation environment where those kinds of comments can thrive, which is evident in the same link I posted where you can see what I'm referring to.

As a general point I agree that it would be better that a flag disables replies to the entire subthread (although it shouldn't [dead] it), just because 99% of the time they're just not good discussions. However, the claim that this is somehow "destroying lives" is rather unserious. Whatever may or may not be going on on Kiwifarms has little to do with HN, and the occasional idiotic comment on HN is ... just the occasional idiotic comment on HN. There are also not really that many of them.

Also, I'll add that whenever I've seen an unflagged hateful comment I've emailed hn@ycombinator.com, and the success rate in getting the comment killed and people told off (or banned) is thus far exactly 100%. This usually happens if someone leaves a comment a few days after the discussion dies down, so few see (and flag) it.

I mean, I'm not sure how _occasional_ it is; seems to show up in nearly all threads about Asahi.

If they are flagged, how would they thrive? Fewer people are seeing them as you mention (and even then, many people do have showdead turned on and flag those comments). None of the non-flagged comments on that thread to me (at first glance on a quick skim, anyway) seem like they are "abusive" or "toxic" or whatever other word wants to be used by Asahi it seems like. Indeed, people are pointing out that you can't censor opinions on a forum that you don't control such as HN.

No, IMO that point is wrong and stupid: I surf HN with Showdead on, so I've seen that the overwhelming majority of responses to dead comments are pushback on whatever got the parent comment flagged in the first place. So if any content here gets "unduly emphasised" this way, it's anti-"evil" content.

HN is pretty low moderation across the axis of personal attacks. If you politely say a ad hominem or racist or *-phobic thing here, it's unlikely you'll be moderated for it, for instance.

I can dig up many such examples, but I suspect the response would be, "of course that's not moderated" because this community has a different set of values than some others.

Moderation is always an editorial action, and as such we tend to view it as strong when it aligns with our own values and weak when it doesn't.

That doesn't match my experience of what we do, so I'd like to see those "many such examples".

IMO, if you're going to make charges like this, which would be serious if they were true, you should include links so readers can make up their own minds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461200

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907076

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42783776

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780835

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42718838

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42708579

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42700319

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43034231

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43031405

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42959625

My methodology: Search for any of the following terms: woman, biological, Black, Latino, gay, trans, woke, dei, or virtue signal

Set to "Comments" and "30 days". You'll find plenty of people saying things that are pretty awful. Yes, they are not the majority of posts, this place isn't a cesspool, it's just a place that permits "just asking questions" or "it's up for debate" as a defense for behavior

I could find many, MANY more examples.

Thanks! I appreciate your taking the time to do this.

Of the 10 links you listed, 7 seem to me obviously to break the site guidelines and I've flagkilled them. One, incidentally, was from an account that we banned earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43042278), and another was from an account that we banned a couple days later (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483610).

Of the remaining 3 of the 10, I disagree with you about saagarjha's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907076. That one seems thoughtful and in keeping with the site guidelines. It does use a lot of sort-of trigger words (I counted "trans", "vegan", "left wing", "Democrat", "progressive", "conservatism", "Republican"), but surely we're not going to punish people just for using words like that.

The other two seemed borderline to me, although I confess that one was so long that I couldn't read it before becoming le tired.

> I could find many, MANY more examples.

I'd be interested in seeing them, and I hope it's clear that I mean that. I don't want to argue about this—I want to see what you're seeing.

I think saagarjhas comment is probably a transcription error on my part, copying the wrong link out of a thread that had questionable stuff in it.

I'll dig up some more. They tend to be a bit stochastic, and on various topics. (There was an article that made the front page awhile back written about pg that was written by a trans woman that was an absolute lightning rod for this, iirc.)

I don't think HN has high moderation at all. High moderation would imply stricter and quicker punishment for making rancid remarks.

There were a number of remarks on the prior thread by people making conspiracy claims, harassment, insults etc. Some of them get flag-killed, some just down voted but ultimately the users on the site still remain.

Of course I'm not one to be above such a thing in terms of insulting people occasionally but HN is really quite permissive in terms of what you can post and get away with. It takes consistent and repeated bad behavior to get a warning, and even more to get banned. And if you're an expert in being politely venomous you can get away with even more. That's why the outside perception of HN tends to be a lot worse than the inward one.

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