[dang]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Obviously this is a project at an early stage and the title expresses what they're working on, not a claim to 100% feature parity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[alexpadula]

It's pretty honest, some times you have to be.

[dang]

There are many ways to be honest, and some of them are within the site guidelines. Commenters should be honest in those ways.

[keyle]

Thanks for reminding me, I appreciate it.

However there is justice for commenting poorly, there doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit, which is borderline a serial case here(?).

[dang]

That question does comes up quite a bit, so I try to occasionally post an in-depth explanation. Maybe I'll do that here.

We can answer the question by rephrasing it. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong".

People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just plain being-wrong requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1].

Worse, readers are far too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—we are all too inclined to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side.

Once the question has been rephrased in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are mostly wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be creative.

Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2].

As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about things. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3].

That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't!

What about the truth, then - do we care about it at all? Of course we do. It's critical! But working out what's true vs. what's false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory.

The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field fair. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...