Howdy! I'm the local undead pirate. Yarr. Thank ye for enablin' showdead!
While it's true in this case that the comment was unsubstantive, I wanted to respond to a subtle but important distinction:
dang might be the decider, but his decision was informed by flags, which speaks to the nature of the discourse desired here.
The situation is as follows: If a mod clicks 'flag', that comment is immediately marked [flagged]. In other words, the most common case when you see a [flagged] comment is that it was a mod acting alone, with no input from the community.
Now, there is one key distinction. If a comment is [flagged] and also [dead], then yes, the community probably killed it with multiple flags. However, the following situation is very common: A comment is marked [flagged], but is still live for a time.
When a comment is in this state, pay attention to how the community sentiment shifts. Note that I am not arguing whether a comment is good or bad -- merely pointing out that if a comment is marked, then there is no hope of positive discussion to follow. Yet often, people will leave replies, as we are doing here.
The inevitable outcome of this situation is that 50 out of 50 times, when a moderator acting alone flags a comment, they will end up seeming correct in their decision. Worse, it will seem like the community supports this decision, even though that these decisions were made with no input from the community!
In fact, it is nearly impossible to influence the decision making process here in any meaningful way, no matter how long you've been with the community or how much you've contributed.
As you can see from my present situation, there are a lot of benefits in not angering the mods. If you attract their ire -- and not necessarily a justified ire, but if they are merely overworked or have other things going on in their life -- they turn out to make decisions which are swift, harsh, ruthless, and final.
I do not believe that my early contributions had a significant effect on the outcome of the site or YC. If I weren't there, HN would still be here. But, community spirit is crucial in a community site. I worked hard to try to inspire and entertain within my means: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65327 (which seemed to at least encourage this person to resubmit to YC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65493). So although I have no illusion of being key in any sense, I worked hard to assist YC through whatever means.
Why? Well, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the US. When Startup News shipped, it felt like "Finally! This is what life is supposed to be like." The early days were, frankly, magical. Everyone was so supportive and encouraging, even of wild ideas. You couldn't help but feel like determination and intelligence alone were enough to carry you forward, if you were committed.
The fact that Startup News was able to exist at all was such an impressive hack that I fell in love from day one. The people, the topics, everything was fascinating. I ended up attending Startup School in 2007 and had the good fortune to help Jessica untangle some nametags for a half hour (long story). It isn't an overstatement to say that this site changed my life.
And my story is not unique. A decade later, it seems hard to believe -- but these were common experiences! If you were to poll the community, you'd find a shocking number of people whose situation in life has been dramatically affected (for better or worse) by fate and fortune on this site.
Which brings us to bans.
When you are banned, you are blacklisted. If you have multiple accounts, those are banned too. If you make new accounts, those are immediately banned, even on Christmas.
It is trivially easy to circumvent this ban. I have been writing under aliases pretty much the entire time I've been banned. A VPN will do the trick.
No, the ban isn't the issue. The issue is that you personally are blacklisted from the site. You are not allowed to maintain an identity here. You are not allowed to contribute projects here. You cannot even speak to others, no matter how substantively or constructively you phrase your words. Your work, your effort, your life -- none of it matters. You are not even allowed to say more than two things every three hours, making any kind of longform discussion impossible. Even my wife found her comment [dead] and shoved to the bottom of the page. When software controls your life, what should one do?
This prison cell has been carefully designed for just such an outcome. The sole remedy to this situation is to go through the mods. And that brings us to Daniel, as he is the final decision maker.
Have you ever read The Tyranny of Structureless? https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm In it, the author lays out a unified theory of insider vs outsider interactions. And that is the heart of the issue here: If you are an outsider, you are nobody and nothing. If you are an insider, or you have the favor of an insider, you are suddenly treated with patience and kindness.
In the same way that my story earlier was not unique, my story now is not unique. It is depressing to observe this sort of abuse of power being carried out on a weekly basis. The problem is that 95% of Dan's decisions are correct, which gives the impression that you must be mistaken to disagree with the other 5%. But that's little comfort to those who find themselves excluded on a whim. https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
And it is whimsical. Over the course of my four month permaban, I have tried -- hard -- to put myself in his shoes and really see things from his perspective. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was harming the site. Maybe one should not express one's opinions publicly.
But HN is not Startup News. And I remember how electrifying the old days were. You could really get to know people here, and people would generally assume good faith. There were even jokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627
Now, the question. What can be done about the situation?
On the flipside, the mechanisms that make the tech world small are also the mechanisms that will exclude you and those around you if you happen to attract someone’s ire. In the limit case, this seems like a return to feudalism rather than an inclusive opportunity for everyone.
I was at startup school in 2007. What struck me was how motivational and inspiring it felt. The tone in the tech world has shifted dramatically since then, at least online.
Most people would not pay for the kind of content that shows up on Facebook and YouTube by so-called “content creators”.
This isn’t really true. I’ve been trying to demonstrate this by curating some interesting and educational YouTube videos in one place: https://www.laarc.io/l/videos
You’re right that there’s a lot of noise to sift through. But there are real gems.
People may not pay for it directly, but they pay for it with their time and attention. In most cases that can be translated to dollars for popular items. You can get a sense of estimated value by looking at socialblade. Here’s a content creator that recently rose to fame: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC5_do3JQAPHA1rIlM-2...
(If anyone knows how this guy got ~300k subscribers almost overnight, I’d love to hear from you. It’s a mystery, but it doesn’t seem like foul play. Just lucky social exposure with some good timing.)
I tried “yay!” “Woot!” “cyka blyat” and “fuck you” but these were all classified as neutral.
I think it’s aimed more towards classification of news articles rather than short social comments. It definitely needs an “I don’t know” response though.
Edit: after playing around with it a bit more, this is quite accurate for longer sentences. “This is good,” “this is not good,” “this is pretty alright,” and “this is pretty not very alright” all were classified reasonably, which is rather hard to do.
Edit2: it has a bit of trouble with contractions, like “this isn’t good” vs “this is not good.” But impressively it maintains a correct analysis if you move the word “not” around, so it’s not merely the presence of “not” that triggers the negativity.
I’m not sure how accurate it is yet, but it seems better than random chance.
It’s impossible to separate censorship from moderation / curation, though. In many cases they are different names for the same thing.
Is there a forum that doesn’t ban people, or remove and reshuffle content, or use algorithms to figure out what to show people? For better or worse, most people are attracted to places that do these things.
False positives are regrettable, but only if you feel that we are each inherently special and deserve to each be treated with the same standards. When there are 100 million people to serve, how can a few thousand moderators hope to do an excellent job in all cases?
Many of these questions are still open. We’re at the dawn of the internet, and it’ll be around for the rest of humanity in some form.
A lot of the reason for creating something new, besides money, is to do something because it’s fun. It’s regrettable that the rise of programming in business has transformed most of programming into business. Nowadays it seems hard to present a new project as done-for-fun without being bucketed into the category of “not serious.”
HN was arguably created because it was fun to design programming languages.
You are confusing me with someone else. I posted none of those things.
> We've warned you about this before.
I don't think so, but maybe a long time ago. Again, I think you're confusing me with another user.
He does that, yes. It’s not just you.
If you’re looking for a platform where the inner workings are transparent, check my comment history. I think you raise some important points and that it’s a matter of time before it comes to a head.
Most people here are talking about the dystopian aspects of this. But for a graphics programmer, this is astounding news. We're probably looking at the future of cinema.
You are no janitor. You banned my new account on Christmas when I was trying to help someone who is committing suicide on your website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758099
Hey. I won’t try to convince you of changing your mind. But before you do this, please consider that (a) there is nothing inherently wrong with you, and (b) Prozac might be able to help. I speak from experience, for what it’s worth.
We run https://laarc.io off a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet using FreeBSD. 30ms average page render time. It’s behind nginx + cloudflare, and I haven’t been able to DoS it yet. Very snappy, quite happy.
It’s not Dragonfly, but it’s pretty neat running a BSD in the cloud.
Yes, a certain mod occasionally vouches comments I make. You can tell this is true because the comment is marked [flagged] immediately. If a comment is flagged by the community, it becomes [flagged][dead], not merely [flagged].
The consistent theme here is to do whatever it takes to make me seem unreasonable or mistaken. In this case, I say “none of my comments are able to be resurrected from the dead,” and presto! Almost instantly, that same comment is ressurected. Whereas my comments about bcrypt or tech related matters stay firmly dead. And before my account was (apparently) marked unvouchable, a mod manually killed a substantive comment I made that happened to be vouched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564850 I don’t mind though.
The hard part is the loneliness. I genuinely miss talking with you guys and discussing the news of the day. But again, I chose this life as public protest.
This is my last comment for the next three hours, as I am limited to two comments every three. But I wish all the HN readers a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.
No, they attribute to me the most extreme bad views imaginable
Yes. It’s partly why I’m banned, and why people call my behavior monstrous even though all I’ve done is point out inconsistencies in HN’s moderation.
I’ve built a 12 year reputation on this site, and it was destroyed overnight at the whims of a moderator. I haven’t broken any rules.
Ultimately, no one cares about the fate of those who fall to authority. And why would they? If Dan is willing to utterly ruin a 12 year member of HN for merely asking “why was I penalized?” then imagine what he’ll do to you.
As far as I can tell, he penalized me for some opinions I expressed (even though they were expressed thoughtfully and non inflammatorily). When I pressed the issue publicly, I was Game of Throne’d.
He dressed it up as a “90 day probation,” but of course it morphed into a permanent ban.
At this point it seems like my account has been marked unvouchable, meaning none of my comments even have a fair shot of being resurrected regardless of how many people vouch them.
Pretty interesting to see all of this stem from me expressing a few opinions. But, I chose this life partly to highlight the absurdity.
The irony of you complaining about a ban while calling me deranged for doing so is almost too much.
Maybe you should take a break from the internet for awhile and focus on yourself and your cats. Doing that helped me after dealing with your nastygram.
You joked about something illegal and got the book thrown at you. “My services were in jeopardy as a direct result of what I said.” Well yes, that’s what happens when you joke about illegal activity.
“This company does not deserve our business.” What happened to you was due to your actions, not theirs. You should be grateful they will even unban you. Some services will simply tell you to take your business elsewhere.
While it's true in this case that the comment was unsubstantive, I wanted to respond to a subtle but important distinction:
dang might be the decider, but his decision was informed by flags, which speaks to the nature of the discourse desired here.
The situation is as follows: If a mod clicks 'flag', that comment is immediately marked [flagged]. In other words, the most common case when you see a [flagged] comment is that it was a mod acting alone, with no input from the community.
Now, there is one key distinction. If a comment is [flagged] and also [dead], then yes, the community probably killed it with multiple flags. However, the following situation is very common: A comment is marked [flagged], but is still live for a time.
When a comment is in this state, pay attention to how the community sentiment shifts. Note that I am not arguing whether a comment is good or bad -- merely pointing out that if a comment is marked, then there is no hope of positive discussion to follow. Yet often, people will leave replies, as we are doing here.
The inevitable outcome of this situation is that 50 out of 50 times, when a moderator acting alone flags a comment, they will end up seeming correct in their decision. Worse, it will seem like the community supports this decision, even though that these decisions were made with no input from the community!
In fact, it is nearly impossible to influence the decision making process here in any meaningful way, no matter how long you've been with the community or how much you've contributed.
As you can see from my present situation, there are a lot of benefits in not angering the mods. If you attract their ire -- and not necessarily a justified ire, but if they are merely overworked or have other things going on in their life -- they turn out to make decisions which are swift, harsh, ruthless, and final.
I speak now as someone who has been here since day 1 of Startup News: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-02-20&birth=pali...
I do not believe that my early contributions had a significant effect on the outcome of the site or YC. If I weren't there, HN would still be here. But, community spirit is crucial in a community site. I worked hard to try to inspire and entertain within my means: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65327 (which seemed to at least encourage this person to resubmit to YC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65493). So although I have no illusion of being key in any sense, I worked hard to assist YC through whatever means.
Why? Well, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the US. When Startup News shipped, it felt like "Finally! This is what life is supposed to be like." The early days were, frankly, magical. Everyone was so supportive and encouraging, even of wild ideas. You couldn't help but feel like determination and intelligence alone were enough to carry you forward, if you were committed.
The fact that Startup News was able to exist at all was such an impressive hack that I fell in love from day one. The people, the topics, everything was fascinating. I ended up attending Startup School in 2007 and had the good fortune to help Jessica untangle some nametags for a half hour (long story). It isn't an overstatement to say that this site changed my life.
And my story is not unique. A decade later, it seems hard to believe -- but these were common experiences! If you were to poll the community, you'd find a shocking number of people whose situation in life has been dramatically affected (for better or worse) by fate and fortune on this site.
Which brings us to bans.
When you are banned, you are blacklisted. If you have multiple accounts, those are banned too. If you make new accounts, those are immediately banned, even on Christmas.
It is trivially easy to circumvent this ban. I have been writing under aliases pretty much the entire time I've been banned. A VPN will do the trick.
No, the ban isn't the issue. The issue is that you personally are blacklisted from the site. You are not allowed to maintain an identity here. You are not allowed to contribute projects here. You cannot even speak to others, no matter how substantively or constructively you phrase your words. Your work, your effort, your life -- none of it matters. You are not even allowed to say more than two things every three hours, making any kind of longform discussion impossible. Even my wife found her comment [dead] and shoved to the bottom of the page. When software controls your life, what should one do?
This prison cell has been carefully designed for just such an outcome. The sole remedy to this situation is to go through the mods. And that brings us to Daniel, as he is the final decision maker.
Have you ever read The Tyranny of Structureless? https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm In it, the author lays out a unified theory of insider vs outsider interactions. And that is the heart of the issue here: If you are an outsider, you are nobody and nothing. If you are an insider, or you have the favor of an insider, you are suddenly treated with patience and kindness.
In the same way that my story earlier was not unique, my story now is not unique. It is depressing to observe this sort of abuse of power being carried out on a weekly basis. The problem is that 95% of Dan's decisions are correct, which gives the impression that you must be mistaken to disagree with the other 5%. But that's little comfort to those who find themselves excluded on a whim. https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
And it is whimsical. Over the course of my four month permaban, I have tried -- hard -- to put myself in his shoes and really see things from his perspective. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was harming the site. Maybe one should not express one's opinions publicly.
But HN is not Startup News. And I remember how electrifying the old days were. You could really get to know people here, and people would generally assume good faith. There were even jokes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627
Now, the question. What can be done about the situation?
https://imgur.com/gov5NGs
https://www.laarc.io/
I propose we retrace pg's steps and rekindle HN's early spirit: https://www.laarc.io/item?id=230
Hundreds of people are waiting to listen. Come say hello. https://imgur.com/a/QYsGngO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076631