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by luffapi 1729 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

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