[brimble]

I think what's twisting people up is that I'm advocating a position that might (maybe) threaten this site if it became more popular, but I'm not advocating that position because I don't like using HN. I'm not even advocating the position because I don't like Facebook's site or functionality. The two things are hardly connected, except that the harmful part of it may be (as advocates of these services typically claim) necessary for them to operate as they currently do.

I object to the idea that we have to psychologically wreck some workers. No, Facebook (and Twitter, et c.) do, to stay in business, evidently. We don't have to. We could say they aren't allowed to do that anymore, as we have with other worker safety issues in the past. We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm operations and cases in which that kind of work really is something resembling necessary (police work, say). There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that similar worker protection regulations deal with those sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a problem any other time), I'd personally be OK losing HN over that, sure.

[mannerheim]

> I'm advocating a position that might (maybe) threaten this site

You seem to be advocating a position that content moderation, and services that rely upon it, should not exist. I'm not sure why Hacker News would somehow be an exception to this, so you seem to be advocating this site should not exist. If you're not advocating this, perhaps you should explain how this site, which consists entirely and exclusively of user-generated content, would get around without content moderation, or why that content moderation would be acceptable.

> I'm not advocating that position because I don't like using HN.

I'm not sure what that has to do with it. If I heard someone advocating that, for instance, meat should be abolished because it's murder (or something along those lines), I would be perplexed if the person advocating that continued to eat meat. It wouldn't do anything to lessen my confusion if they told me they're not advocating that because they don't enjoy eating meat; that part makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is both having that point of view, and continuing to to engage in that behaviour.

Now, if this individual instead had the position that meat should be taxed, or that people should cut back on their meat consumption because of its impact on the environment, I don't see an incongruence there. But if they hold the position that it should be banned entirely, that doesn't strike me as a deeply-held conviction if they continue to eat meat.

Likewise, for our NYT op-ed writer, if they, e.g., once read newspapers and then decided they were garbage that needed to be abolished, then perhaps there's no incongruence there. If I see him next week with the Sunday Times in hand, I would then gather that perhaps the position he advocated he wasn't serious about.

[brimble]

> You seem to be advocating a position that content moderation, and services that rely upon it, should not exist. I'm not sure why Hacker News would somehow be an exception to this, so you seem to be advocating this site should not exist. If you're not advocating this, perhaps you should explain how this site, which consists entirely and exclusively of user-generated content, would get around without content moderation, or why that content moderation would be acceptable.

This is covered in the post you're responding to, directly. And others in this thread. I don't think it's particularly important or helpful that HN be outlawed, but I might be willing to accept that for fixing worker abuse in social media companies generally. I doubt, however, that'd be necessary, for reasons that are, again, covered plenty well in other posts of mine here. The TL;DR is that it's totally normal to have regulations, including for worker protection, that kick in only at a certain scale (say, employee head count) and that could probably work here.

I'm not set on or advocating outlawing HN. My entire original point was that harmful social media moderation jobs do not have to be done. Facebook (among others) choose to operate in a way that makes them necessary for their bottom line. Further, we implicitly choose to allow these jobs to exist by not making jobs that are psychologically abusive illegal without an excellent justification, as we do with jobs that are physically abusive or dangerous without a great reason to be so. This is close enough to regulations we already have for worker safety, that I don't think it's wildly outside the bounds of behavior we (at least in the US) already regulate.

I doubt HN in particular is harming moderators very much, for a bunch of reasons including its size and the form it takes. Probably not a ton worse than your average customer service job. And maybe better, since no-one's yelling abuse at them on the phone.

There is no "gotcha" here, for multiple reasons.

[mannerheim]

> The TL;DR is that it's totally normal to have regulations, including for worker protection, that kick in only at a certain scale (say, employee head count) and that could probably work here.

OK, then that's at least a substantial comment on why you feel that HN is different, rather than the evasive ones you've been giving throughout the thread; you could have just led with that instead.

[brimble]

> We could even do that while exempting very small low-harm operations and cases in which that kind of work really is something resembling necessary (police work, say). There's no "gotcha" in "but what about police investigators?" or "but what about HN?" (the two I've seen in this thread) unless one ignores the reality that similar worker protection regulations deal with those sorts of edge cases, routinely. Even if the regulations couldn't have any nuance (why not? It's not been a problem any other time), I'd personally be OK losing HN over that, sure.

Couple posts up. Cut the passive aggression and read.