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by cloudfifty 1586 days ago
What a sad state of affairs when pushing back against the bullshit spread by the very prolific reactionaries, albeit polite (which is all that matters here), of this site sooner or later gets one banned. To add insult to injury most of them have been posting on HN for many years.
1 comments
dang 1586 days ago
I don't know what you're referring to, but if there are accounts breaking the HN guidelines the way you were doing, which we haven't banned yet, I'd like to know which ones they are.

Everyone thinks that we're secretly siding with their opponents when we do this kind of moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but that feeling is not based in fact. It's just an inversion of your own sympathies. The other side thinks we're ruining the site by secretly siding with you.

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cloudfifty 1586 days ago
You alone can't do anything about the demographics and their biases here. Buy if you honestly believe that HN is somehow politically neutral you're deluded.

It does't require a sociologist to realise that when certain topics degenerates into 500-1000 comments of bullshit and others doesn't even register that this user base has a certain bias.

Finally, what is seen as ideological warfare naturally follows the overton window. I could directly translate liberal/conservative folks posts here into a equivalent socialist narrative instead and it would be seen as ideological warfare because it's simply out of the ordinary.

You can just look through my comment history and the users I've replied to if you're genuinely interested.

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dang 1585 days ago
Actually I'm not making any argument or claim about political neutrality, and I don't think I've ever made such a claim. That would be a difficult thing to study, if it's even possible.

I'm making an empirical observation about how people with strong political passions react when they get moderated, and the rather obvious root of those reactions. The fact that people of all ideologies and political types react with exactly the same reflex is relevant because it clarifies that root so vividly.

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