[dang]

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [e-mail]. Please don't post off-topic complaints like this, which we may not even see.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Also, would you please stop this ideological rampage? You've been posting about almost nothing else for days now.

HN is a wide-open forum with millions of users all over the world. It's inevitably going to get the full spectrum of posts. Picking a few bad ones and acting like those define either the community or the moderators is a huge non sequitur, even though I know it's emotionally convincing. This is a classic cognitive bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Everyone does it, and the people you disagree with are every bit as convinced that the site is a "hotbed" or (favorite term) "cesspool" of your side.

The truth is that: (1) extreme posts are a tiny portion of what shows up here and we moderate them when we see them (see first paragraph above), and (2) HN has a spectrum of ideological views because the world has a spectrum of ideological views. You can't expect a community as large and as widely distributed as this to differ much from the general population.

[luffapi]

I did flag it (I notice you didn’t even threaten that user with a ban btw). That does nothing apparently. It’s not “a few” bad posts. This site is overrun with this garbage. That thread has plenty of other comments that should be modded if you’re serious about running a healthy community.

You’re asking me to sit back and not be pissed that a site that is unfortunately influential in my industry acts as a megaphone to racists. I cannot and will not do that.

If racist comments were as rare as you claim I’d have nothing to respond to no? It’s extremely common.

[dang]

> I did flag it. That does nothing apparently.

The comment is flagkilled now. These things take time; there's no way around that.

Literally everyone with strong ideological passions feel that HN is "overrun with garbage" and they all have contradictory definitions of "garbage" - basically whatever they strongly disagree with. This kind of feeling is a mirror of your own passions (I don't mean you personally, but everyone who feels this way, with all their conflicting points of view). It is not a reliable compass for moderating a large international community.

[luffapi]

Literally overrun with racists then. I would think most people in their right mind would consider racism garbage.

[dang]

There's no single definition of those terms, and how they should be understood is itself a contentious ideological question, so what you're effectively asking is that HN be moderated according to your particular ideology. This comes up a lot, as you can imagine, and again, in my experience it has mostly to do with the passions of the person making the demand (whatever their particular ideology).

To put it crudely, ideologically passionate people want us to promote what they agree with and ban what they disagree with. That's no basis for moderating a diverse community, and it would be crazy-making to try—one would be walking into a hornet's nest of contradictory demands (because on what basis would we conform to one demand rather than another?), and the demands would only get stronger with every attempt to satisfy them. I don't think this is a good path.

There's nothing specific that you've brought up that isn't addressable by the way we moderate HN today. The fact that we don't see everything and that it takes time to moderate flagged comments are just practical realities of running the site. Demanding that we see and take care of everything instantly is unrealistic.

(I was editing this while you were replying- sorry. I don't think I changed the meaning of the comment.)

[luffapi]

This is racist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592947