[haberman]

> It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior.

It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial. It is toxic to the civil exchange of ideas. It's even mentioned in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Assume good faith."

The other antisocial behaviors mentioned in this article (animal cruelty, r/jailbait, etc) are certainly worse. But they are also committed by people who know that what they are doing is socially unacceptable. They know this but don't care.

When people presume bad faith, they often do so completely convinced that they are the good guys. I am sure I have fallen prey to this myself plenty of times.

But this is why the attitude is so dangerous: "Antisocial behavior is bad, and I know it when I see it. I can be trusted to identify what is acceptable, and who deserves a platform." Well, probably you notice it when you see it in other people. But we as humans are really good at rationalizing our own actions.

For the record, I completely agree that moderation is necessary to keep communities healthy. But I think it's harder than people think to apply moderation in a way that isn't just reinforcing the beliefs and taboos of whoever is in charge. For example, I see too many greyed-out comments on HN whose tone is the same as other highly-moderated comments. The only difference is the opinion being expressed.

[projektir]

> It is my genuine belief that presuming bad faith (as you have done here) is one of the most common antisocial behaviors that people don't even admit is antisocial.

The bad faith is on the person responding. The post literally starts with "The comments here have this mentality", how is that not bad faith? Then they construct a strawman.

You want to give that power by acknowledging it with a response? It's the same problem as "it was about ethics in journalism".

Someone implying ignorance on a topic they should not have any ignorance on is acting in bad faith. There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.

The issue is that some people think that language IS valid and SHOULD be included but can't straight up say that because nobody would support them in that case.

But this has never been about free speech, nobody prevents you from starting up your own website and promoting your agenda on there, if anything, that has gotten easier, as has already been obvious from the proliferation of problematic fringe communities (in case I need to define these think Stormfront or flat earthers).

[haberman]

"Bad faith" doesn't mean "I think this person is being unfair." It means "I think this person is being intentionally deceitful."

If a person genuinely believes what they are saying, it is not bad faith, no matter how wrong or misguided you think they are. You may disagree with the way this person characterized the other comments. But that's not the same as your accusation, which is that the poster is making an argument that they know is wrong.

> There's no way people do not realize, at this point, in such large numbers, who is being kept out, or meant to be kept out. It was never unique, special opinions. It was always trolls, sexist and homophobic language, etc.

I think this statement is at least as unfair as the one that originally offended you ("The comments here have this mentality...."). But I can tell that you genuinely believe this so I wouldn't accuse you of bad faith for saying this.

[jochung]

Man, where to begin.

The presumption of bad faith is both a lack of imagination and a lack of information. The person cannot imagine how a reasonable person might believe something, and why they might believe it.

The accusation of sexism is a perfectly good example, with James Damore as the case study. His words were twisted into things he didn't say, because his uncharitable opponents couldn't imagine that he was simply saying what he was saying. No, no, he must be dogwhistling something far worse, it cannot simply be that their own premises are too narrow, that their own value judgements are coloring their reading.

As for ethics in journalism, I'm one of those "deplorables" too, and you know why? Because there were 100x more people talking and emailing about that then were causing amok on Twitter. If the black bloc shows up at a protest, you don't suddenly dismiss everyone else as car torchers and bus stop smashers. But that's exactly what the press did to gamers, and that's why they were so pissed off. And the more they wanted to be heard, the more fringe behavior there was to point to to support the foregone conclusion. When the police does it at the G20 and calls it kettling, the progressives don't like it, but when they do it, it's just fine.

What's particularly galling is that none of this was new: the online harassment, the doxing, the stalking, that was pioneered on Something Awful's leftie forums like Helldump and LF. And lo and behold, those people ended up in media cliques like Weird Twitter. Pots calling kettles black is not a new concept, it's just amazing they fooled so many into defending their incestuous little circle. History has been rewritten, and now apparently online trolls never existed until 2014, when the fire nation attacked, and everyone of import got amnesia.

Here is what I saw. To change my mind, you'd have to prove that there was a massive invisible shadow campaign that could somehow eclipse hundreds of thousands of views, posts and tweets:

https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/gamergate-august-2014-revi...