[dang]

I agree that the parent comment was a bad HN comment. But it didn't clear the threshold for a mod reply. If we tried to reply to all bad (for HN) comments, we'd run into impossibilities: (1) we'd have to post an order of magnitude more replies, which we can't do; and (2) we'd run to a buzzsaw of "why do you reply to this bad thing and not that other bad thing over there".

What made the difference between that comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718039) and the one I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718268) was the pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling in "You Zionists are really not even putting any effort into your hasbara anymore." (this line has since been edited out by the GP commenter). That is a dividing line where we can post mod comments because (1) there aren't so many such posts, so it's feasible, and (2) attacks like that have a particularly bad effect on threads.

> Pro-Genocide ? Fine. No swipes and flamebaits tho!

I hear you, but these two things are on different levels. To explain what I mean, let's assume that I completely agree with you on this topic. Ok? We agree that genocide is wrong and bad—far more than somebody being snarky in an internet comment, right? So wtf is wrong with the mods if they penalize one and not the other? Is "pejorative 'you', snark, and name-calling" worse than genocide? Of course not; only a monster would say so.

The answer is that we're not trying to exclude wrongness and badness in the comments here. I know that sounds bad, but suppose I said "the mods' job is to decide what's true and good and then impose it on everyone else". You wouldn't want that, right? what if we disagreed? Certainly the community as a whole would not want that.

Rather it's your job (i.e. the commenters) to work that out through discussion and argument. The mods' job is to try to keep that discussion and argument respectful* between the players. When we see people crossing that line, we respond. Otherwise we don't respond, even when someone says something which we feel is both wrong and bad, because it's not our place to impose that on the community.

(Btw I posted a bit more on this theme here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719138)

* For practical purposes "respectful" means in keeping with the guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[kelthuzad]

>The answer is that we're not trying to exclude wrongness and badness in the comments here. I know that sounds bad, but suppose I said "the mods' job is to decide what's true and good and then impose it on everyone else". You wouldn't want that, right? what if we disagreed? Certainly the community as a whole would not want that.

It has been classified by israeli holocaust scholars as Genocide, by israeli human rights groups as Genocide, by the United Nations as Genocide:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holoc... "I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-g...

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-c...

but one still has to painstakingly debunk Nazi style propaganda every single time? It's much easier to spread lies than it is to debunk them. Often such posts contain some half truths filled with a bunch of lies, the debunking of which requires knowledge and effort while the fabrication of lies requires zero effort. By the time you debunked the obvious lies, the propagandist has already spammed 10 more comments denying or justifying Genocide with the exact same rhetoric and arguments that Nazis use to deny or justify the holocaust. That's a losing game.

Something also tells me that this won't be equally applied as it's claimed to be applied. I just can't imagine that ycombinator would allow the exact same rhetoric from literal Nazis to justify or deny the holocaust ever happened or that jews inflated or made up the number of victims of the holocaust.

Take the exact same scenario for which that comment got nuked:

A: "Some lazy and evident Nazi lies to justify a Genocide/Holocaust - The problem aren't the Nazis, the problem is the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto who refuse to be subjugated by our glorious German Reich"

B: " *Here some evidence with sources that debunks your narrative with quotes from your own people.* You Nazis don't even put any effort into your propaganda anymore"*.

Strangely B is treated as the ultimate sin because of one mild line despite being a small fraction among concrete evidence, but somehow that still justifies the nuking of the comment. And it's not just that interaction, but the overall obvious pattern of quick and dirty lies that are spammed with low effort but don't result in any disciplinary actions, while others report that they have been throttled for arguing against Genocide.

I'm not accusing you personally by the way, I'm sure it's brutal keeping up with all of this, but many people have observed these and similar patterns and it's a terrible look. Some people seem to forget that incitement to Genocide is an actual crime.

"Incitement to genocide is a crime in the USA primarily due to its adherence to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This international treaty, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, defines genocide and related acts, including "direct and public incitement to commit genocide," as punishable crimes. The United States ratified this Convention in 1988 and subsequently enacted the Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 (also known as the Proxmire Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1091). This act incorporates the provisions of the Convention into U.S. federal law, making it a federal crime to commit, attempt to commit, conspire to commit, or directly and publicly incite the commission of genocide. Therefore, under U.S. law, anyone found guilty of direct and public incitement to genocide can face severe penalties, including imprisonment."

"Whoever directly and publicly incites another to violate subsection (a) [the genocide offense] shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

[ivape]

Here’s a live video version of exactly what you described. The Sky News anchor is exhausted:

https://youtu.be/28B07vqKinI

It’s Rumsfeld level of denialism.

”I just can't imagine that ycombinator would allow the exact same rhetoric from literal Nazis to justify or deny the holocaust ever happened or that jews inflated or made up the number of victims of the holocaust.”

They allow it because they are human. Not everyone can actually believe a genocide is happening whilst also being defended by what many would consider educated professional peers. See, it’s unbelievable, so have to forgive people who are truly bewildered (”this can’t really be happening, can it?”). It’s really happening , and HN is suffering from the fog of war that an ongoing atrocity creates. If I punch you hard enough, you may not actually perceive what just happened in the contemporaneous. It’s intellectual and moral shell-shock.

Reality check:

Your world is not just software and a first world country with a nice economy, and neighbors and countrymen that would neeever do anything wrong. Your world is full of a lot more sin, believe it.

When they allow the journalists to finally enter Gaza, where reporters will fly a simple $500 drone over Gaza, we’ll see all of our world.

HN calls outa lot of bullshit, and there’s no way that virtue should be put aside for this obvious genocide.

[dang]

Those are good arguments. I'm not sure what to tell you that won't repeat what I already said. (Btw, I'm confused by your A and B examples because I couldn't find any language like A in this thread.)

I've been trying to describe how we (try to) operate this community. I think the lesson I'm drawing from exchanges like this (not just this one, but many others) is that this can't work and is therefore a mistake in this context. All that hits the reader is the ghastly discrepancy between the two layers (moderation minutiae vs. starvation and slaughter). It comes across as dissociative, like responding to tragedy with trivia. This is so built in to the situation that communication becomes impossible. That's why people respond by repeating claims about the much more important topic, as if I had been arguing with them about that.

> It's much easier to spread lies than it is to debunk them. Often such posts contain some half truths filled with a bunch of lies, the debunking of which requires knowledge and effort while the fabrication of lies requires zero effort. By the time you debunked the obvious lies, the propagandist has already spammed 10 more comments denying or justifying Genocide with the exact same rhetoric and arguments that Nazis use to deny or justify the holocaust. That's a losing game

Yes, I know. A lot of what we do here is to try to maintain a space where something other than that becomes possible. Unfortunately, what most people want is for the mods to enforce their view and ban the opposing side. This is related to the certainty that the opposing view is so wrong and bad that it could only be held in bad faith by bad people.

No one seems to notice—or rather, everyone is under so much pressure that there's no room to care—that to actually do this would be to stop all discussion. A corollary is that, when we don't do it, people feel like we are complicit in the crimes of the other side.

> Something also tells me [...] the overall obvious pattern [...] many people have observed [...] others report

Phrases like this come up often. I can tell you from long experience that they invariably describe an image of HN and/or HN moderation that is profoundly inaccurate. They don't match how the community really functions nor how we really moderate it, nor what we're trying to achieve. What they do match is a subset of datapoints (often a rather small subset) that happen to match the image. (I don't mean this in any way personally either btw! It's super common, from every side of every topic.)

These images seem impervious to change. It makes no difference to show someone datapoints that contradict their image; and I'm pretty sure that any statistical study of the entire dataset, however it turned out, wouldn't change anyone's mind either. This makes me think that these images come from people's pre-existing beliefs about the world (society, power, one's group, oneself, etc.), such that we notice the datapoints which confirm and reconstitute our image. I'm sure that no one does this consciously, but it's a strikingly consistent phenomenon.

To pick just one example from what you listed, there's no way that we would throttle anyone for "arguing against genocide". That's absurd. We might moderate them for breaking HN's rules while they were doing it, but you won't ever find that interpretation circulating in any of these claims.