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by dang 3 days ago
I know it always feels like the mods are against you and secretly in cahoots with the other side when you get a moderation reply like the GP, which obviously doesn't feel good.

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

But I promise you this is not so. We've warned and banned countless accounts on both sides of every divisive political question, including ideological ones and nationalistic ones. I could give you endless lists if I had more time but this one, though out-of-date, makes the point well enough (it's not like this has changed):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 (Feb 2021)

Does that mean you were wrong in claiming the following?

> You allow so much anti-American propaganda on this site, and me calling out capitalistic tendencies is where you want to draw the line?

You're right in the limited sense that we "allow" things we don't see. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here—there's far too much of it. But among the posts we do see, what we're concerned with is not "do I agree with this post politically" but rather "is it breaking the site guidelines", and that's where we draw the line.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

2 comments

Can't wait to see your write-up one (fortuitous*) day connecting this to the uni-context:

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/a-philosophers-one-word-theo...

(Sorry, Derek might be a bit lefty; tho Callard, the originator, seems much more centrist)

*After long, wifi-free commute, or, voicechat with user..

dang - sorry to flag this here, but I've emailed hn@ycombinator.com twice over about 11 days with no reply, and I'm not sure it's reaching you. My account (leonkatz) seems to be in a shadowbanned state - new comments show up [dead] on arrival (e.g. a genuine reply I left on the "Little Book of Reinforcement Learning" thread). I'm a real person, not a spammer - I'm building an open-source project (github.com/rekol-io/rekol). Could you take a look when you get a chance? Happy to do anything that helps establish the account is legit. Thanks for everything you do here.
I'm sorry we didn't reply to your emails - it's because we're inundated with so many emails that we can no longer even look at them all, let alone respond to them all. But since it may be of interest to readers, I'll share here what I would have sent to you in a reply:

Your posts are getting killed because our software classified the text as genai. That's not allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Can you write by hand any text that you plan to post to HN? Here's an important tip we send to users about this:

Write any text that you post to HN by hand. Don't use an LLM to generate any of it (not even a tiny bit, including to edit or spruce it up). Reason: the community is super fussy about this right now, and LLM language has a certain quality that is generating quite some backlash when it appears on HN itself. This is a big dividing line at present!

Thank you for responding and for allowing me back from purgatory. I didn't realize there was a ban on GenAI. I have used it to correct my posts. They do a pretty good job of cleaning up my slop. Thanks again and I won't make the same mistake in the future.