tomhow

> muh illegal aliens and muh christianity and muh identity politics

Please don't post lame tropes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop.

Please don't use HN for ideological battle, and don't call others names or attack anyone on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something very different to that here. We have to ban accounts that do this repeatedly. It's nothing to do with what you believe in, only the way you express it here, and several of your comments clearly crossed the line of what's acceptable on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't ever comment like this to anyone on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure, I incorrectly used the word ”terms” in my comment above when I meant “sentiments”. The pattern I'm referring to is best exemplified by these comments:

Go build and never speak to a human again, if that's what you want. Reject the humanity you despise.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48947427

The culture here is so deeply self-sabotaging because it's so deeply afraid to be human. It really gets depressing sometimes.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167992

And yes many people in tech are on the spectrum. I suspect that much of what's dysfunctional with SV and tech culture is the result of raising a generation of socially awkward neurodivergent kids on 4chan and making them millionaires before their frontal lobes have even fully developed. That necessarily bleeds into HN and becomes normalized within the culture as performative cynicism, misanthropy and toxicity.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47165924

The fact is the ethos of this forum has become antithetical to what hacker culture and tech have become, which is incurious, misanthropic and aggressively pro AI.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621066

I grin a bit whenever someone gets that infantile on what's supposed to be a board of high-minded intellectual sophisticates. But I'm serious. This forum is meant for human beings to satisfy their intellectual curiosity discussing topics of interest which are usually but don't need to be related to tech or programming. The humanity matters, even if it's damned hard to find sometimes because expressing humanity is a negative social signal here.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973059

And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)? Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.

– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459037

That's the pattern I mean. It was particularly the second one – containing the line “The culture here is so deeply self-sabotaging because it's so deeply afraid to be human” – that has stuck with me, because it was so jarring, and indeed so insulting.

We have countless stories where the primary topic, or much of the discussion, is something profoundly human and warm. People building things with or for their kids, partners or other family members. People telling their stories of overcoming or succumbing to severe illness, with comment threads full of profound expressions of compassion. Individuals being victims of bad fortune or corporate dysfunction, and the community rallying to their aid and in many cases, getting their problem solved. And plenty of cases where stories about wars and other atrocities are given front page time here and the community given extensive opportunity to discuss the topic, with Dan and I spending entire work days plus many hours in the evenings and overnights managing the threads, but with the overwhelming sentiment from HN commenters being in favour of civilians and in opposition to the military aggressors.

The Alt-Right and Dark Enlightenment types have never had any foothold here, and I remember vividly when they tried, just how swiftly and efficiently the HN immune system swarmed to keep them out. It's never been a place where hustle-culture or 996 workdays have any support, and stories about corporations demanding more from their employees are always met with resistance and derision in the comments. Corporate excess and abuse is always derided here. In a site that gets over 10,000 comments on most days I can think of fewer than five regular commenters who are staunch economic conservatives, and even then they hold their views because they sincerely believe they are better for humans.

When I read these characterizations you make about HN, I really just shake my head. The community you're describing is not one I recognize. Yes, sure, in a site that gets 300,000 comments per month, you will always be able to find something that fits the narrative you want to perpetuate. Normally, I just put it down to “I guess this is just what he needs to believe” and get on with my day. But your comments above to echelon crossed the line and meant I could no longer just let it slide.

The question of whether your comments are worse than his or not is moot. Your interaction is the perfect example of two people succumbing to the Negativity Bias or the Notice-Dislike Bias and attacking each other as avatars for the forces they so worry about. Neither of you is right and neither of you is better or worse than the other; it doesn't matter if one of you made a specific comment that happens to be a more egregious guidelines breach than the other; both of you are engaging in the same harmful behaviour and it's equally important for both of you to stop the behaviour and let go of these caricature models of HN, because you're both poisoning the place by perpetuating them.

HN is not ”supposed to be a board of high-minded intellectual sophisticates”; HN is a community of reasonably-educated people discussing the pros and cons of things. The deranged techno-utopian dark-enlightenment zealots may lurk in some corners of the tech world, but they’re not on HN or at YC. Anything promoting race science, genetic supremacy or even most mentions of IQ are flagged and killed here, and serial commenters promoting such ideologies are banned.

I understand you're distressed about the dysfunction and injustice in the world. I am too, as is Dan, and most of the people whose comments I read on HN. I can see signs that echelon is too, even though you – and I – may disagree with the way he expresses that.

The worst of this is that by trying to seem like you're the one who cares about humanity, you end up demonising and “othering” many of the people here, most of whom care about the same things you care about and broadly want the same things you want. Most people here have partners and kids and nieces and nephews and friends and communities they care about and want the best for. It's such a mean-spirited mentality to portray such a large community of people as “misanthropic” or “deeply afraid to be human”, when so much of what we see here is the very opposite of that.

So, sure, go and touch grass, if you need to. And of course you're welcome back. I meant it when I said we appreciate you and what you contribute. But no more of that vicious commentary about this community, please.

(And as a final aside: we don't rap people over the knuckles or lecture anyone about cracking a joke! I can hardly think of any instance at all when I or Dan has chided anyone just for an attempted joke. And we wouldn't, geez; when Dan and I are in a room together, much of what we talk about is old comedy sketches. The guidelines ask us to avoid internet tropes and we always discourage anything lame, and sadly, many attempts at humour, everywhere online, are lame tropes (or worse, meanness masquerading as humor). When a good joke lands on HN it’s a great day. I hope that’s not a surprise to anyone.)

We appreciate your contributions here, but can you dial back this kind of sentiment in your comments?

> Go build and never speak to a human again, if that's what you want. Reject the humanity you despise

It's a really unfair stereotype to apply to those you're disagreeing with, and I see you do it repeatedly here; characterizing those you disagree with, or the HN community in general, with terms like anti-humanity and anti-human.

Yes I know there's a transhumanist element and an elitist element in Silicon Valley and among AI zealots. But it's not true of everyone or even many people who have big hopes for AI, and it's not a dominant sentiment on HN, or within YC. Most people I see being hopeful about AI are hopeful that it can make things better for humans – better jobs (more pleasant and better paying in real terms), better health/medicine and education that's more accessible to all, etc.

Sure, it's not a given that this will eventuate, and there are plenty of unknowns and plenty of ways in which things could get worse if the wrong decisions are made. Which is exactly why we need to have ongoing, vigorous discussion, which is what we're always trying to cultivate here on HN.

It's fine to express concerns about the real challenges and negative aspects of AI (and tech in general) and the potential for things to get worse. It's good to have that perspective represented.

But, continuing to name or characterize your debating opponents, or the HN/YC/tech community in general as "anti-human" is unfair often-inaccurate. It's a low-substance slur that serves to poison discussions. Enough, please.

We don't tolerate comments like this. We've banned the account now that we've seen it, just as we always do when we see accounts posting like this. This is a troll account and these kinds of trolls have always existed on HN. As far as we can tell it's a small number of trolls registering accounts over and over, saying the same things over and over. We ban them as soon as we see them. We don't see comments just because you mention dang's name in them (he's not the only moderator here, and even if he was, he doesn't scan for mentions of his username). We see things that are flagged (when we get to them) or (more quickly) when people email us (hn@ycombinator.com).

> HN needs to purge the community of this madness

HN is an open, anonymous site. We can't stop people new accounts signing up and posting troll comments. Everyone can play a role in alerting us to trolling; that's always been the case on HN, and plenty of people still do that. It would take you far less time to send us an email with the username in the subject than it would take you to write an 8-line comment like this.

It's not the case that anti-AI sentiment or anti-building sentiment is dominant on HN; it's just a case of the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

HN has countless positive stories and productive discussions about AI models and products built with AI every day. Please don't let the trolls win by taking their trolling personally.

We've banned this account. Please don't register accounts to break the guidelines with. It's a waste of everyone's time. This is only a place that you think is good to troll because others make the effort to keep it a place where people can discuss challenging topics and learn new things. Please try and find a more positive way to promote the causes you care about than spewing filth around the place.

Please don't act like a jerk on HN. We can disagree without belittling and jeering, and this style of comment doesn't make your position seem strong, at all. You've been here long enough to know that this is not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've banned this account. Enough is enough. We don't care what your opinion is, and we work hard to make this a space where everyone's opinion can be expressed and heard, but it can't work when people think they have license to go around abusing other community members like this.

This comment was detected by our software as AI generated. It could always be a false positive, but if you're using AI at all to write your comments, please stop. It's against the guidelines and only harms your reputation in the eyes of the community.

We always consolidate multiple threads about a topic into one thread, to avoid fragmenting the discussion and taking front page slots away from other articles.

I've changed the URL of the primary thread to this one, and added the product link to the header of that thread.

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

(I've added this URL to the header of the main discussion. We always consolidate multiple threads about a topic into one thread, to avoid fragmenting the discussion and taking front page slots away from other articles.)

Can you not post vile dreck like this to HN? It doesn't matter what you think of the target of your abuse and how deserving they are. They're not going to see it, but your fellow community members are, and some of us have to read this filth whether we want to or not. WTF?

(If you weren't a longtime user who has posted good comments in the past, this comment would be insta-ban worthy. I'd recommend deleting the comment, and if you want us to do that you can email us – hn@ycombinator.com.)

> the usual workarounds aren't working for me

Thanks for pointing this out. Unfortunately we'll have to take this off the HN front page, as we can only include articles that are publicly accessible or easily accessed via a paywall workaround.

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

[stub for offtopicness]

Thanks for understanding! Appreciate the reply.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48929037 and marked it off topic.

Thanks for understanding. I had un-killed the original comment but it was re-killed by later flags. I've made it un-killable now.

The rest of your comment all sounds like great material for a curious conversation about how/whether you could check what the software is doing with the code :)

It's fine, indeed great, to express a less common point of view on HN. But could you please not fulminate like this? The guidelines specifically ask us to avoid that, and make it clear we're hoping for something better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand reading it as benign and sincere if you're sympathetic to the sentiment. As someone whose job it is to read the comments all day every day, and whose objective is to keep discussions here as intellectually gratifying as possible, it just comes across as unsubstantive at best, and jeering at worst.

The project is open source; if the commenter was sincerely curious about what the software does with a user's code, they could have checked themselves or phrased the question in a way that made it clear they were genuinely interested in finding out.

My reply wasn’t hostile or threatening; just a polite reminder to use HN in a way that’s consistent with its intended spirit.

One more comment like this and we'll have to ban the account. You've been warned before, and have continued posting vile, abusive comments. When activity like this continues, we have to assume that you have no interest in being held to the site's standards, and that really you want to be banned. If you want to keep participating here, please read the guidelines and demonstrate an intention to be a positive contributor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People post critical things about the most powerful people and companies all the time here and we have zero problem with it.

What I'm asking for is for people to not post the most obvious, snarky comment, regardless of the topic/target, not because of who it may “offend” (as if the most powerful people in the world would have any awareness or care about a comment like that on HN), but because it makes HN seem repetitive, miserable and lame.

Critique away, just make discussions thoughtful and substantive, which is what HN is for.

Please don't just post the most obvious snarky comment about a given topic. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

Ok, but you need to wait more than a week before asking for the attention of the HN audience again (it really needs at least a couple of months at least, to allow time for a the memory caches to clear), and if friends/related accounts upvote and comment, it only does harm to your credibility and reputation. You need to stop treating HN as a game to hack, and instead treat the community with respect.

I wasn’t even considering banning you, and I agree it’s awful to wish harm on people like that.

But this site can only work if we have guidelines and uphold them evenly, and it only makes it harder to help and defend you if you act with contempt towards us and the guidelines.

> Had I not been so raw in my response to the poster, garnering flags and downvotes, I doubt that they would even have been addressed at all.

This is false, and offensive. We work hard to make this a place where everyone can express their point of view and where people are not vilified for having different points of view. We would absolutely ban someone who demonstrated a pattern of initiating such attacks on you.

The right way to deal with such attacks is to flag them and to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to alert us to the attack, and we will always take action.

It was an awful comment and I've detached the subthread and warned them. But you can't comment like this on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to.

Please take a moment to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make an efort to take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908115 and marked it off topic.