I run with "Would I say this to their face using these exact words if I was introduced to them in a room"
If not, then perhaps I should rephrase it, to convey the same message, but perhaps without it being a personal attack.
If not, then perhaps I should rephrase it, to convey the same message, but perhaps without it being a personal attack.
We're not being introduced to each other by mutual acquaintances who then have to get along with one another for the remainder of an evening. We're not even at a house party in a city we've never been to before meeting people that may become good friends. Nor are we at a press conference asking questions of a PR representative.
Instead we can take up and discard facets of these situations as we see fit.
...I'm not saying it's a bad idea to consider your hypothetical when talking with other people online. It's probably a good idea in almost every discussion.
But this room also allows us to be marvelously direct. The questions that everyone is thinking but don't get asked in a press conference can be addressed.
That's why I back the right to be negative so heavily. Even if it means that we have totally rude, toxic threads that no one likes, I'd rather have that if it means we get to keep our online rooms open. (Partially because we're going to have those toxic threads anyway.)
Everyone's an equal in the comment section, even if that means we're all equally poisoned.
When the threads degenerate, smart people leave. When smart people leave, the threads get less substantive. That vicious cycle leads to the death of the community, not the vital online place where people are free to speak their minds which you're positing.
HN started as [1] and remains an experiment in seeing whether an internet forum can avoid that dynamic. It's more fragile than your comment implies.
I do think we can have the benefits you're talking about, such as people bringing up the questions they're really thinking, as long as the bulk of the community will consciously practice the values of the site. Those values are substantiveness and civility, and there's nothing in the good parts of what you're talking about that contradict them. Unleashing the online id, though, is another matter.
In fact, from a certain point of view poison is a valuable resource, and needs to be harvested. Good criticism is hard to find. Limiting it to that which is polite towards you is a good way to end up in a filter bubble, especially if there is a one-sidedness in how politeness is determined.
This thread divides commenters into roughly two camps. There's the "Yes, sir! Let's all get along!" camp, and there's the "You can't make people get along, why are you trying?" camp. And I suppose it might be a good idea to stoke the enthusiasm of the first camp, so maybe I'm just not the intended audience.
But in that case you're either just stirring the pot, or you're actively driving away those that favor substantive criticism when it's called for. Maybe those people aren't really listening to the specifics of what Altman is saying, but that just means it's being communicated poorly.
Smart people leave for a multitude of reasons. I've been rate-limited, or maybe you've got this topic rate-limited, or whatever, but you responded to me: doesn't that mean you want to hear my point of view? I mean, maybe I'm not smart, maybe I'm just presumptuous and acerbic.
But either way, you've got policies that increase the poison. I'd have been done with this topic by now, but having had another comment written up already I'm not going to discard it. I'm going to wait, and grow irritated that your system is attempting a patronizing herding tactic to 'tame' discourse. A tactic that isn't working, because the poison always leaks through, and this topic is already poisoned, why are you even bothering to stop me from responding to you?
And I think... it's true. You're just another authority, making sure that points of view you agree with are given preferential treatment. You don't want me here. You don't want dissent. I'm not free to speak my mind here, because you don't like the bitterness I want to share earnestly and substantively.
You're poisonous.
Another group of shunners shunning other shunners. And the poison concentrates: if I can never make this comment, I'll still have the poison from having been treated like this, and it will spill over some other way. Maybe in a meaner way.
Or you'll succeed in driving off everyone that stirs up trouble.
I sympathize with you because internet moderation is an unsolved problem because people are an unsolved problem. It sounds like you have some awareness that the current penalties are too much (when you talk about rescuing flagged or downvoted or hellbanned comments).
But there's a difference between moderating the id and amputating it.
This topic doesn't moderate the id because the cheerful collaborative people you're not worried about are the ones theorizing on how to make conversation better.
It does, however, successfully marginalize people that disagree and honor the process of disagreement. (Which is funny, because we're not even talking about practical policy enforcement, we're just socially reinforcing what was already a general guideline. Nothing changes for this site as a result of this discussion, the discussion is the only end result of the discussion.)
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Here is some fragment of the comment I had written, in response to your comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9318451)
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Sometimes the other isn't in good faith, or it's necessary that that good faith be constructed or established in a critical environment.
I sympathize with you, because there's something utopian you're striving for, and I mean that as mostly a compliment.
But I don't want to live in your utopia, because living in a community where people never take their negative feelings out on one another is equivalent to a community where no one has negative feelings.
The answer to "negativity killing the next AirBnB" is that over-policing negativity will give us nothing but AirBnB. That's not a good outcome either.
As for over-policing, we don't have the staff, don't want the staff, and the staff we do have don't like police work.
(from your profile) you seem like an interesting person with a lot of experience and perspective to contribute.
So with that said: why not be specific about the selective over-application you're talking about? I couldn't find it in the comment history.
People probably won't agree with you but it would probably be helpful for them to at least know where you're coming from. It has to be better than just resigning yourself to the idea that the moderators are working in bad faith against you.
For my part, if it helps you to know this: I'm one of several people who have been leaning on the mods for literally years to add something about negativity to the guidelines. They pushed back on suggestions for a long time out of many of the exact same concerns people are voicing on this thread. It's not a sudden decision they've made.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290629
I dispute both parts of "gratuitous negativity" wrt the sentence in question. First, it might have been snarky or disrespectful, but neither is the same as being negative. "Gratuitous" is even harder to justify, because the sentence was only the conclusion to a substantive point about the nature of Dunning-Kruger - one that at least 34 community members had considered solid enough to give an upvote. That sentence isn't going to kill the next AirBnB. At the same time, there were other comments on the same thread that were more clearly negative and more clearly gratuitous. Even though dang had even quoted one, this was the only one that got a direct reply.
To reiterate: I don't really care. I'll gladly accept my ticket for jaywalking, but not while drunk drivers are careening around on the sidewalk. I don't think there was any agenda or vendetta involved here, either. There was simple perceptual bias. This comment was singled out because of its visibility, not its content, and that's enough. It certainly puts the lie to the "no time or inclination" claim. Active policing without equally active attempts to avoid this kind of unintentional bias is effectively the same as deliberate bias.
Let's concentrate on finding and discouraging the truly toxic comments, before we start picking mild ones "at random" - because when visibility is involved it's not really random at all. It means comments that have attracted some attention will get quashed before those that everybody already realized weren't worthwhile.