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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

While I can't speak for zedshaw, I think the problem with HN is that while it, as you say, shuns and bans anyone who speaks in an aggressive tone or who directly vituperates others, it also allows (and often supports, with upvotes) one to completely slander someone as long as they do it in a calm and reasonable tone.

As an example, specifically regarding anonymous accounts and zedshaw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9276436

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If that is an example of the "slander" Zed speaks of, his response is way overboard. It has that "more hacker than thou" tone that I find annoying in anyone (and most annoying when I catch myself using it, which is often), but I can't imagine anyone would consider it slanderous. And, it is by a no-name account, which, I suspect, makes everyone somewhat less likely to pay it any mind. The idea that something like that constitutes a years-long campaign of defamation against Zed is worryingly like paranoia.

From what I can tell, I do believe that Zed Shaw has experienced abuse from a larger community over a few years, I think starting with members of the Ruby community. Some might say that Zed fans the flames of controversy by reciprocating with insults.

Perhaps he sounds paranoid because he has nobody concrete to point a finger at, which is part of the nature of being famous on the internet.

Well, it's an example I came up with, don't hold it against him :)

I spent a little time browsing Zed's comment history (after seeing his reply to the comment you linked). It does seem to be representative of the kind of comment Zed calls "slanderous", at least in the past year or so. Perhaps there's something else, or perhaps there are comments that Zed did not respond to, that are actually problematic in some way. But, what I see is a polite but somewhat negative review of one of Zed's books. If that is "slander", then I have slandered Steve Jobs so many times it's not funny.

Anon1385 has been here 1500 days and has over 8000 karma.

Algolia has removed the comment scores from search so I don't know if that comment got any upvotes, but it's not grey.

We don't remove the comment scores actually :) For the first 10 days of a comment's life, HN's API always returns 0: so we index 0. After 10 days, comment scores are visible and should be updated in the index.

The API stopped returning scores ~ 10 months ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:redox_&sort=byDate&prefix&p...

ETA: Perhaps incident to this incident:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604586

Actually, it probably happened when Algolia transitioned from a custom feed (or whatever was going on) to the official api.

http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api

Yes indeed, I think so.

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