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Comment by LexiMax | Hacker News Reader

HN merely tries to keep up the appearance of being a place of civil debate and discussion. The bias comes out when the subject matter becomes in any way controversial.

You can say some pretty horrendous things on here as long as you couch them in mealy-mouthed modest-proposal language, while there's almost no recourse for having a good faith rebuttable flagged or down-voted.

In theory, the site moderators are supposed to be a check valve on this kind of abuse, but it's quite sobering to look at the age of some of the accounts who behave badly on HN and yet have somehow passed notice.

I can only assume that the moderators are okay with the company they allow on the site, and I think it's worth taking a look around and asking yourself "Is this place _really_ worth contributing to?"

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> The bias comes out when the subject matter becomes in any way controversial.

I do not agree on that. I think if you flip the perspective in topics like this to the other political side ("Chicago is finally doing something against illegal foreigners in the city") it would not be any less likely to get flagged.

If I had to give a "best gess" for the aggregate political bias of HN, it would still be democrat/liberal/left, albeit less so than say, Reddit.

> You can say some pretty horrendous things on here

"Couching statements in soft language" is a significant part of keeping a polarizing discussion civil in my view, so that makes sense to me. What are those "horrendous things", and what would you like the moderators to do?

It's so interesting that you automatically became defensive about left vs right wing bias of this site.

The fact of the matter is that depending on the thread, it can swing in either direction. And that's the problem - you end up with unaccountable moderation via populism, which is the worst kind of moderation.

Hacker News is not a functional social space. It can't be, by design, because it has an easily-gamed and incredibly punishing form of user moderation. The incentives for abuse are abundant, and the potential downsides are negligible because the moderators who are supposed to be a check on these abuses are demonstrably hands-off.

> "Couching statements in soft language" is a significant part of keeping a polarizing discussion civil in my view, so that makes sense to me.

A Modest Proposal isn't civil - it's satire. It describes in flowery language how the poor could sell their children to the rich for use as food. The dehumanization is supposed to horrify and anger you, and the satire is contained in the limitations of pretenses of civility.

I always read it as not saying these are the limitations of civility, but that they are the purpose of civility; that civility exists specifically and exclusively as a tool to uphold existing systems of power. Anything that upholds the current power structures is definitionally civil; anything that challenges the existing structures of power is definitionally barbaric. Through that viewpoint, this very comment is polite, but not civil.

So your position is that opinions (from all parts of the political spectrum, depending on topic) get routinely supressed via the flagging system, making HN a "non-functional social space"?

I disagree with that strongly as well. Looking at the main thread on this post, every single flagged comment looks perfectly justified to me, as an example.

If such suppression is common, it should be easy to point out comments that are unjustifiably flagged?

I also disagree that the system is "incredibly punishing"-- at worst, some other people won't be able to see your comment or post, you don't even get banned or anything.

I'm quite happy with how moderation is being done on this forum compared to basically anywhere else.

> So your position is that opinions (from all parts of the political spectrum, depending on topic) get routinely supressed via the flagging system, making HN a "non-functional social space"?

Pretty much. Hacker News is half sockpuppets/throwaways, and half internet handles who smile in your face while holding a knife behind their back, ready to stab you in the darkness.

That's not an environment suitable for conducive connections with other human beings, though it's a mighty fine way to drive engagement by turning any slightly controversial thread into a voting/flagging war zone.

You want my advice, find communities with real people in them, places where people are more than an internet handle. Find communities with accountable moderation. Get to know people, learn about their life outside of whatever the topic of the day is. Heck, even meet them IRL. Touch grass.

HN functions to announce libraries, programming languages, projects, stuff like that. It functions as a thing to find out what's happening in programming and in the tech industry; that's why I continue to check it as I have done for 15 years running now. So it's not useless space; I still get a lot out of visiting HN, but that's in the form of announcements, not in the form of socialization. As a place of discussion I would agree with LexiMax that HN isn't a functioning social space.

Thank you for picking up on that nuance. I actually think that gamified voting systems are pretty decent at content aggregation. I regularly poach stories from HN for discussion in other, less dysfunctional communities.

HN still has a problem with mob censorship of stories, but because there are generally far fewer story submissions than comments, plus the fact that https://news.ycombinator.com/active exists which surfaces flagged stories for users who aren't logged in, this mob censorship tends to be much less effective. It forces the censors to put in the extra leg-work of going into the comments section instead.

indeed, this is a space that "prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"

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