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. Please don't post off-topic complaints like this, which we may not even see.
Also, would you please stop this ideological rampage? You've been posting about almost nothing else for days now.
HN is a wide-open forum with millions of users all over the world. It's inevitably going to get the full spectrum of posts. Picking a few bad ones and acting like those define either the community or the moderators is a huge non sequitur, even though I know it's emotionally convincing. This is a classic cognitive bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Everyone does it, and the people you disagree with are every bit as convinced that the site is a "hotbed" or (favorite term) "cesspool" of your side.
The truth is that: (1) extreme posts are a tiny portion of what shows up here and we moderate them when we see them (see first paragraph above), and (2) HN has a spectrum of ideological views because the world has a spectrum of ideological views. You can't expect a community as large and as widely distributed as this to differ much from the general population.
I did flag it (I notice you didn’t even threaten that user with a ban btw). That does nothing apparently. It’s not “a few” bad posts. This site is overrun with this garbage. That thread has plenty of other comments that should be modded if you’re serious about running a healthy community.
You’re asking me to sit back and not be pissed that a site that is unfortunately influential in my industry acts as a megaphone to racists. I cannot and will not do that.
If racist comments were as rare as you claim I’d have nothing to respond to no? It’s extremely common.
The comment is flagkilled now. These things take time; there's no way around that.
Literally everyone with strong ideological passions feel that HN is "overrun with garbage" and they all have contradictory definitions of "garbage" - basically whatever they strongly disagree with. This kind of feeling is a mirror of your own passions (I don't mean you personally, but everyone who feels this way, with all their conflicting points of view). It is not a reliable compass for moderating a large international community.
There's no single definition of those terms, and how they should be understood is itself a contentious ideological question, so what you're effectively asking is that HN be moderated according to your particular ideology. This comes up a lot, as you can imagine, and again, in my experience it has mostly to do with the passions of the person making the demand (whatever their particular ideology).
To put it crudely, ideologically passionate people want us to promote what they agree with and ban what they disagree with. That's no basis for moderating a diverse community, and it would be crazy-making to try—one would be walking into a hornet's nest of contradictory demands (because on what basis would we conform to one demand rather than another?), and the demands would only get stronger with every attempt to satisfy them. I don't think this is a good path.
There's nothing specific that you've brought up that isn't addressable by the way we moderate HN today. The fact that we don't see everything and that it takes time to moderate flagged comments are just practical realities of running the site. Demanding that we see and take care of everything instantly is unrealistic.
(I was editing this while you were replying- sorry. I don't think I changed the meaning of the comment.)
> It's like asking your child whether we should buy a bigger house. "Yes! That would be great!"
If my parents were billionaires, I would definitely assume they could buy a bigger house.
The only $ missing are on your end. You’ve not mentioned that nearly all profit is currently being hoarded by executives and investors. People aren’t blind to this and have correctly come to the decision to work as little as possible since all the gains will be captured by those at the top.
Have you considered banning accounts that post racist trash like this instead of banning and censoring people who rightly call it out? You’re currently stewarding a white supremacist community and I have no idea how you sleep at night.
This thread needs a lot more attention on it. Not only does it demonstrate how racist and sexist this community is, it shows nicely how complicit you personally are in allowing this to happen.
Compare your response to this racist comment to this:
People with strong ideological commitments always think the mods are stewarding their enemies, especially when they happen to run across a case of us banning someone who they agree with ideologically. The assumption is that we must have banned that account for secret ideological reasons. Actually I banned it because it broke the site guidelines egregiously, has a pattern of doing so, and has ignored previous requests to stop. I also offered to unban it if the account holder wants to commit to following the rules in the future.
If you think this is evidence of ideological bias, that's a misinterpretation—you're drawing a signal from the data (or rather, from one random observation) that doesn't exist. This is a classic cognitive bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since mods get this sort of attack nearly every day for years, you can understand that after a while we get a little desensitized to it—especially because the attacks are so contradictory. The other side thinks that we're secretly stewarding HN in your favor. Lots of examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 and I could give you hundreds more.
I think your characterization of this community is wildly inaccurate, for similar reasons. Yes, HN gets comments of all sorts—to expect anything else from an open internet community with millions of members is unrealistic. To act like the worst of the comments, or the ones that you happen to disagree with the most, characterize the community as a whole is a big non sequitur, driven by the same cognitive biases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
I strongly disagree. It’s well known that this is one of the only technology sites that will allow racist and sexist comments. I’m not alone in seeing this. Remember ShitHackerNewsSays and #hnwatch? You need to clean up your house before lecturing anyone who’s rightfully upset that you and the site owners allow this site to be a haven for hate speech.
If anyone doubts this, take a scroll through here:
> It’s we’ll known that this is one of the only technology sites that will allow racist and sexist comments.
Even, for the sake of argument, assuming that that is true it doesn't prove the ideological moderation bias you are claiming, it is consistent with HN being one of the few sites which does not actively suppress such content and those who post it for ideological reasons.
Tangentially, this reminds me that HN needs a dedicated meta-forum and a policy of moving meta-commentary that is off-topic out of other threads and into the meta-forum.
If HN allows racist content, they are responsible for it. It's absolutely within their power to ban people for regularly complaining about BLM or "critical race theory". They just don't. Whether that's because HN mods are racist themselves or for some other reason, it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same. It even flies in the face of their so called reasoning because no intelligent conversation will arise from such a comment, yet they're left up anyway.
People can even predict the racist reactions this "community" will have:
It’s not “shaming”. It’s teaching history. Should they not teach kids about slavery, colonialism…?
This is especially relevant in Canada where they have been uncovering mass graves of indigenous children at Catholic schools designed to convert Natives:
I still haven't seen proposals actually banning the discussion of specific historical events in schools. Even all of the anti-CRT legislation being proposed in the US, puts restrictions on what kinds of judgements you can state about people of specific races living today, not on historical events.
Granted, a lot of the wording of those proposed laws is way too vague, like not causing white kids to feel guilt or anguish or whatever. Maybe certain historical facts will make white kids feel bad, regardless or any editorializing.
But if you have specific proposals or legislation that explicitly bans teaching certain historical facts, I'd like to see it.
It’s not really “leftist”. It’s just “american leftist” if anything.
As far as some traditional leftists go, this whole discussion is a distraction from looking at class problems: “poor white men” can’t be oppressed by being white or men, but can be oppressed by being poor. This seems a strange concept for some on the American side of the pond.
You hit the nail on the head. It is so frustrating that every single social movement has to be exclusively focused around some innate quality that cannot be changed. Sex, race, sexuality, everything except class. We spend all this time arguing amongst ourselves instead of collectively asking the ultra-rich why socialized healthcare is too expensive but spending 20 years destroying a country for no reason isn't.
I just don't get how an american leftist can see every single fortune 500 company paying lip service to every single american leftist cause and not wonder if maybe something else is going on. And sure, I'm well aware that it's all meaningless PR maneuvers to curry favor among the public. But I firmly believe that these companies avoid any sort of class-based issue like the plague because that might lead to questions about why corporations can make so much money and pay so little in tax while the rest of us make peanuts and are forced to give the government 1/3 of it.
You didn’t answer my questions. Are you suggesting we don’t teach those very real historical facts I mentioned because some sensitive racists may take it personally? Since when is that a reason to distort the truth?
Edit: HackerNews has decided to throttle me because I’m not a hivemind reactionary. I’m really close to highlighting what’s really going on in this “community” in a more public forum dang.
Why do you have to make random threats towards website moderators when trying to explain your point of view? Seems like you're being disingenuous and you're not coming to this discussion with the ability to stop yourself and see things from other points of view.
The “other point of view” is white supremacy (aka the only people in the world concerned with “critical race theory”). The mods not only allow white supremacy on this site, they censor those who complain about it!
I literally got downvoted and throttled for saying slavery was real and talking about the very real genocide of Native children in Canada. What’s next, Holocaust denial?
You're no doubt getting downvoted because you're posting tons of flamewar comments, which is not what this site is for, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of your views.
Your account is getting throttled because it's rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars. I haven't checked the logs to see when your account got rate-limited but it certainly wasn't today, and it has zero to do with your ideology or your views.
You're likely being throttled because of the number of posts you're making, as well as some sort of auto-moderator system where if someone gets downvoted a lot in a short time, the system thinks you're a spammer and throttles you.
As to why you're being downvoted I can only hazard a guess - You're likely being downvoted because you're making accusations using words that have very strong meaning and implication behind their use, and don't fit well with this discussion.
Saying the mods only allow white supremacy on this website is laughable. There's no way for you to prove this - I'd like to see you try. If there was actually white supremacy in this group, we wouldn't have such a diverse group of people (intellectually, physically, culturally, geographically, etc) to come here to discuss (in most cases) tech news related to readers' fields - it's part of why the internet is as popular as it is.
People who are regular contributors and commenters to the Hacker News forum usually bring more to the table than simple name-calling and insult-hurling. There's also wonderful ideas you can try yourself like critical thinking, opening your mind to other opinions, stopping yourself before making baseless accusations, etc.! It's fun.
There’s nothing “fun” about this site. It’s the embodiment of the worst of our industry. It’s literally spewing AM radio quality right wing propaganda. I don’t think the people here are as intellectually curious as you claim.
No personal attacks, please, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You crossed that line not only with this comment, but also upthread ("you can try yourself like critical thinking").
Edit: it looks like your account has been using this site primarily for ideological battle. That's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and when an account is using HN primarily for that, that's the line at which we ban them (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I'm not going to ban you for this right now because we haven't warned you before, but please review the guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit going forward.
We're trying to avoid having this site be engulfed by the hell of ideological flames and burning itself to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting, and it's the default outcome on the internet. We're trying to stave it off here.
All parent talked about was teaching facts and you're the one equating that with some form of shaming and oppression, for which you have demonstrated no evidence other than that said facts are indeed taught.
It looks like your account has been using this site primarily for ideological battle. That's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and when an account is using HN primarily for that, that's the line at which we ban them (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I'm not going to ban you for this right now because we haven't warned you before, but please review the guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit going forward.
I legitimately am not sure how my posts in this have been "flamewar comments", so I guess out of an abundance of caution I will just refrain from ever discussing this topic here.
I wasn't just talking about your posts to this thread, but to HN in general. That's why I wrote "
you've done it a lot and we've asked you many times not to".
That kind of pattern is clearly a problem, especially since we only see a sample of the things any regular user posts. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful. I know it's not easy, but if we're to have the sort of forum we're trying for here, all of us need to work on our habits of how we engage with other commenters.
As for this thread, your comment that I replied to was obviously a snarky battle comment, not genuinely interested in what the other person had to say or why they might hold the view they do. That's not curious conversation.
One sign of curious conversation as opposed to internet battle is that people remain able to relate to each other across their differences. If the only way you're able to relate to the other commenter is as an enemy to be defeated, you're not really engaging out of curiosity. We're looking for curiosity-driven conversation here. There are other places to do battle.
These points hardly apply to just you, of course - the problems are all over the place, especially in threads like this. But as the guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Ok, fair enough. I don't contend I didn't deserve admonishment in any other instances. It would seem I should just stay out of any thread that appears to be descending into flamewar territory. I will try to be more cognizant of that.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments and unsubstantive comments to HN. It's not what this site is for. Using the site primarily for ideological battle is also not allowed, regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against.
I agree with you on that note. We do need to know which people perpetrated the horrific acts and for what justifications they had at the time - if only to ensure it doesn't happen again, no matter what race.
This is absolutely an ethical issue (yes I’m American). Google knowingly violated labor laws to underpay workers. Hopefully the PR from this causes Google to lose billions (and for ethical people to stop working/applying at Google, which honestly probably happened about 10 years ago).
“Actually, I’m very close to going with this new offer. I really clicked with the team. If Google wants to counter, I can wait till tomorrow to make my decision”.
Why would it matter if the offer was “real”? Google should pay what the employee is worth to them. I say “FB offered me 400k, what’s your offer?”, what’s the point of Google asking for proof? My value to them hasn’t changed. I’d withdraw my application with that as it demonstrates a lack of trust.
The better question is: "Does it actually bring better long-term value to the company?" For those who think it does not, then the strategy seems in conflict with achieving the best results.
What does it mean for a civilization to be “successful”? The vast majority of our progress has been made off of exploration, slavery and war. The latter fueling the entire tech industry starting with the code cracking computers of WWII and the nuclear holocaust survivable internet. Who is working the mines for the materials in our iPhones, and under what conditions?
It’s worthwhile to teach children the true history of progress and ask if perhaps there isn’t a better way.
It’s almost as if history and humanity is messy, and doesn’t fit into a tidy little box. There has never been a system that was built from the ground up on flawless, utopian principles. The success of our system can be argued in a myriad ways; likewise the failures. I want my kids to understand the greatness of our civilization while doing their part to correct it’s shortcomings. It’s one of my goals, and I hope they take up the mantle.
Wouldn’t wfh decrease the cost of living in the city, since currently most high paying jobs make living within commuting distance a requirement? To make an extreme example, cost of living on the Bay Area should go down if wfh becomes widespread. There are other reasons to want to live in SF aside from getting paid a high salary in tech, so housing prices should “fallback” to whatever people value the culture/scenery… at. What you would probably see is a more even (and healthy) distribution of growth in all metro areas instead of being centered in a few with all of the cost of living increases associated with that.
I'm not sure SF is a great example. For most tech workers, they're giving themselves a worse commute by living in the city rather than somewhere else in the South Bay closer, in many/most cases, to where their office is. So, yes, their jobs may be a major reason they're in the Bay Area overall, but mostly not in SF itself.
This is of course much less true in industries like finance.
It’s bad management to drop by people’s desk every day to check in with them, then “nudge” them. I’d say that’s a failure of product vision, strategy, communication and leadership.
> my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".
What you’re really seeing here is people grasping at any life preserver they can grab in an incredibly poorly run organization. In a well run organization management is extremely hands off, because the machine runs smoothly and scales.
If you've worked on both sides of engineering and management, you'll discover it's a lot more nuanced than that. Many engineers don't need managing. Many more do. Many need micromanaging.
> It’s also indicative of poor process, communication and documentation.
I recall one engineer in a team of 20 or so that, whenever he ran into a problem, he'd stop, fold his hands, and sit back in his chair. And wait until the manager noticed this, would come by, ask what the problem was, fix it for him, and he'd then proceed.
You could say this was all the manager's fault, but the rest of the team did not behave this way.
Another time, I recall one who needed micromanaging. Eventually it turned out he was on drugs.
> whenever he ran into a problem, he'd stop, fold his hands, and sit back in his chair. And wait until the manager noticed this, would come by, ask what the problem was, fix it for him, and he'd then proceed.
Certainly there are better ways to communicate than looking to see if someone is sitting back in their chair. Either they are delivering or they are not. If not, a good manager will ask what the problem is, then fix it. Not delivering should be a temporary state, if it’s not, that employee may not be a good fit for the org.
I mean I would totally agree with this but sometimes you end up in a situation with someone like the described engineer; obviously you should get rid of them - but getting rid of people quickly and efficiently is not possible in every organization and country therefore managers sometimes need to manage someone that should be gotten rid of because it is not the propitious time to get rid of them.
Of course not, but micromanagement is never the answer. I will say there are a lot more decent programmers out there than there are managers. Many programmers are motivated by curiosity, 90% of managers are motivated by ego. Wfh is going to decimate the latter as egoless orgs become the norm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592947
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=skocznymroczny