[dang]

> FYI the law enforcement, legal system is a complete joke in India

Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. It leads to much lower-quality discussion. Edit: I'm sure you didn't mean it as a swipe and were just talking the way one does in normal conversation, but unfortunately these throwaway phrases act like bombs in threads, so it's necessary to edit them out of one's comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[pmiller2]

This is in no way nationalistic flamebait. On the contrary, it is well known:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India

https://qz.com/india/1826387/indias-coronavirus-lockdown-bri...

[dang]

It can easily be both. No doubt Wikipedia includes information, but it's a non sequitur to go from that to name-calling ("complete joke").

Come on you guys - this is not hard to see. I chided https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053698 for taking the thread further into flamewar, but then I saw the provocation in the GP. If I hadn't posted a symmetrical scolding, there would be a different set of complaints saying "why do you moderate this and not that?" "I'm sick of you punishing users just because you disagree with them", "It's been clear for years that the HN mods hate India", etc.

I'm sure the GP didn't mean to include a bomb-throwing swipe and was just talking the way people do in normal conversation, but unfortunately these things have degrading effects on discussion. In addition to flamewars, we get off-topic generic tangents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23050724), Jeffrey Epstein and Jimmy Saville (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23051067), Gandhi's teenage nieces (you'll find them) and god knows what else. Discussion quality is extremely sensitive to initial conditions and also to which subthread is sitting at the top.

[pmiller2]

Then, try leaving both alone. They are both legitimate comments. Let the community downvote or flag if they believe otherwise.

[dang]

Since I'm just doing what I'd do anywhere else, that amounts to asking us not to moderate. If you think this place would be ok without that, I can't agree. From my perspective such a view is a bit of a luxury that is only possible because the janitors work hard every day. But that is what a janitor would say.

[tinus_hn]

Perhaps some setting where you can make it impossible to reply to a comment or thread would help. Some people will never accept that in the end the only right they have on a forum owned by someone else is to leave.

[dang]

We have such settings, but I'm not sure what you have in mind - how would they have applied here, for example?

[pmiller2]

I see you get my point. This site was better when there was no (visible) moderation beyond upvotes, downvotes, and flags from users.

[eropple]

It really was not. 'dang and 'sctb have done yeoman's work in establishing a tone for what's acceptable--and they have put a lot of thought into things; I occasionally email [e-mail] with a "hey is this actually cool?" and while I don't always agree with their conclusions I'm always struck by how well-considered the results are.

HN is full-stop better than it was.

[dang]

I don't know if the site was better, but let's say it was; it was also smaller. The same tactics don't keep working as a forum grows, so your argument is actually for letting it destroy itself, be garbage-collected by the big VM in the sky, and get replaced by newer forums which spring up, thrive for a while, and become scorched earth in turn. That's the cycle of life on the internet, but the idea of HN has always been to try to stave that fate off for longer. In 2013-14, the last year before we started moderating the site in the current style, the system was under so much pressure that there were signs of it being about to break—and in fact it did break, because the person who created it couldn't take it any more. It was an awful experience.

I definitely want to find ways to become less visible if possible. I don't much enjoy writing tedious and stupefying moderation comments, getting swarmed by wasps, accused of every bigotry, and reliving the same thing the next day. To be visible in such a role is to be the receptacle for a lot of people's anger about completely unrelated things, and you cannot expect them to treat you with scruples. That's only a tiny minority of the community, of course, but the community is large enough that it's still a lot of people—more, say, than one knows personally in life. On the plus side, one gains appreciation for Samuel Beckett as a spiritual teacher.

[lzma20]

It seems to me that one could find 10 similar quotes about the U.S. or European states here any day. They often have an element of truth.

Why would Indians need special protection? For all we know the poster is Indian.

I rely on this site to hear unfiltered opinions. I'm from Europe, until today I did not know about the BJP IT cells, which seem to be a thing.

[dang]

Flamebait about any country is off topic. Flamebait often does have an element of truth. We don't treat Indians specially. The poster may have been Indian but that is immaterial. Factual comments are indeed helpful, and become more helpful when flamebait is edited out.

[monadic2]

Perhaps I'm wrong but this would be contrary to the nationalistic policies of the state.

Personally, primary sources are what I come to the forum for—I understand the resulting discussion might be toxic, but the post itself is certainly valuable.

[dang]

Fortunately these things are easily separable. If you have a slug in your spinach, the solution is to take out the slug and keep the spinach.

[shard972]

Ah so censorship of political opinions? Even the minor side comments, got it.

[dang]

That's not the clearest of way of framing it if you want to understand what we do. I've explained this in detail in past comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396.

If you or anyone takes a look at those past discussions and has a question that's not answered there, I'd like to know what it is; and if anyone knows a better solution, I'd really like to know what it is. Just make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just leave the threads alone", I've answered many times already why it won't work.

[harisund]

I don't know if you are an admin or an admin wannabe, but this is absolutely not nationalistic flamebait. Anyone who knows anything remotely about India will agree with this statement. And no, it does not lead to lower quality discussion. It looks like hacker news admins are about as a power abusive as Indians in power

[dang]

Yes, I'm a moderator here. I'm sure you have good reasons for holding your view, but I can tell you for a fact that HN has many Indian users who disagree with you and the GP, feel just as strongly as you do, and will respond to that sort of provocation by lashing back and making the thread worse. If you don't believe me, look down the thread. If you don't think we moderate those responses as well, look down the thread again.

Provocations that are likely to lead to flamewar are called flamebait, so that's exactly what that was. Since the topic was national, I referred to it as nationalistic flamebait. Some of you seem to be reacting as if I had called the statement untrue, or sided against it. Of course I didn't. I know nothing about how the Indian justice system compares to that in other countries. You know about India; I know about Hacker News.

It's extremely common for people to assume that the mods must be taking the other side when they moderate a comment. The irony is that both sides think this. It's an illusion, but a strong one, and it makes people feel angry and justified in accusing us of abusing them. Since all sides do this, we get fired on from all angles. We become a sort of proxy for everyone's enemies in all the deep conflicts that exist in the worlds of HN users [1, 2]. Actually, we're simply trying to persuade users here to follow the site guidelines regardless of how right they are on a topic or how wrong someone else is, and regardless of how strongly they feel. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make a point of practicing these rules in the future? They're designed to prevent this place from destroying itself, the way past internet forums have tended to do. Note this one, for example:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Had the GP followed that when raising the topic of the Indian justice system, we could not only have avoided a flamewar and a crash into offtopicness, but their own point would have been stronger.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect