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by xiaoma
4352 days ago
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>I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours. I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't. Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not. Similarly I don't have a lot of respect for you downvoting all my comments in this thread and on the previous one we were both on. It's the same principle, just on a lesser scale. I made a valid point in the GP post and was answering Dang's question. |
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> I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't.
If HN were decided purely by votes, the front page would consist of outrage, gossip, and fashion, and the site would be unrecognizable. HN has never been decided purely by votes. It has always been a blend of community and moderation—and I do mean always, from day one. If you believed otherwise, you were mistaken; if you thought HN was good, consider why. All that has changed in this area is that we're being more transparent.
You've repeated several times the false claim that we buried that article because we "personally disagree" with it. Obviously, we don't "personally disagree" with a factual article. That would make zero sense unless the facts reported are wrong, and I have no idea whether they were in that case.
The article was two years old. It was posted by a serial political troll whose sole interest (to judge by the account history) is in using HN for ideological provocation. Predictably, that worked. The thread brought us such jewels as "Oh, do fuck off and take your strawman with you". Is that the civil, substantive discussion that HN calls for?
Weighting that thread off the front page was an obvious call. What we did not do was kill the story—the discussion could and did continue [1]. Such is the balance we try to strike. This has exactly nothing to do with our personal politics, though that of course is the first thing, and the cheapest, that we're accused of. Not to penalize such stories would put HN at the mercy of arsonists. You seem to imply that online communities, or at least this one, are robust enough not to be damaged by such provocation. That, sadly, is wrong.
The user in question has a bunch of accounts. One they are careful to use for legitimate purposes; the others just push an agenda. Many have been banned. Of course, when we ban them, they make new ones and accuse us of censorship [2].
Many if not most of the ideological throwaway accounts you see on HN are the work of the same few users. I don't think it's unfair to call them trolls. They've shown up in this thread, too, of course, even posting the same link. I wonder why it's necessary to repeatedly push a two-year-old article. It must be quite a classic.
1. But that didn't stop a second serial political troll from accusing us of doing exactly that, presumably because what we actually did wasn't spicy enough to justify cries of repression.
2. The irony is left as an exercise to the reader.