[dang]

> You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.

That is deeply not the case, and if you or anyone finds examples of it, you should let us know at [e-mail]. If people are being cruel and not getting moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Oh and we don't give a fuck about swearing.

The generalization you're making is so false and so mean that I would call it a slur, both of this community and of the people who work on it.

[Tomte]

For what it's worth, I feel similarly.

I've just deleted the longer part of this comment because we've had this discussion in private mail several times, but for the record: I think you're focussing too much on naked words, and ignore evil behaviour (like intentional misrepresentations of the other one's position) too much.

I'll concede that your job is hard and you're doing a mostly good job. I just think it could be better.

[_r0fz]

The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.

Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.

[tptacek]

It took 15 seconds. I just typed "poor" into the search bar, sorted comments by dates, and the first comment that used "poor" in the sense that you did easily qualified:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320284

It is wildly not the case that the median HN commenter who writes on stories related to economic inequality is biased against marginalized people.

This is a pretty clear instance of what Dan refers to as the "notice-dislike fallacy"; you've noticed people writing callous comments, because they rub you the wrong way (as they do me), but haven't noticed the countervailing comments, because they're boring (to you).

[rantwasp]

i think we may be moving the goalposts a little here. we were talking about joy, humor, whimsical and we shifted to a straight-up utopia where everyone is kind to everyone and no bad comment is ever made.

Philosophically, I would say HM is like a wealthy suburb. You don't see trash in the street. People mostly follow the law and are good neighbors. Everyone wants their neighborhood to be okay and are okay sharing/learning about gardening and home improvement from each other. Now: are some people disconnected from the what other people experience as the harsh reality somewhere else? Absolutely. This is the case everywhere. What you do when you see or hear someone with a completely different perspective is listen and try to understand what they are talking about. We all need to get better at this no matter where we are (work, store, hn, twitter, etc)

[samatman]

You do a great job, dang. Frankly I'm baffled at how you do it, and I can see why this comment would upset you.

But all you can do is push the nastiness below a certain threshold of passive aggression. It's literally impossible to do more than that.

I've found it just a bit more unpleasant to post here with every few months which pass. Insults still get moderated and downvoted, sure, but bad-faith dismissals and pugnacious pedantry become incrementally more common, not to mention drive-by downvotes on neutral and factual posts which maybe signal some kind of tribal affiliation, no matter how weakly.

I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

[dtx1]

> I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.

[eitland]

> Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum.

Here is an important observation I think I've made over the years:

All else being equal, the HN model (full names voluntary, IRL connection voluntary i.e only username and password, long lived profiles encouraged) has been better for interesting civil discussions.

Why?

Full name policies only encourage this explosive mix:

- People who don't realize the foolishness of commenting publicly using their full name on a controversial case.

- People with fake but real-looking accounts.

- People who realize it is stupid but does it anyway sometimes because even newspaper comments sections deserve some adult voices.

Very many of the people you'd want to hear from are silent because they don't want your name mixed in with the regulars in the comments there.