..and oppression!
(look -- they hell-bannned me :))
Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
141–150 of 409 posts
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmen…
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral . I would prefer to participat…
This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to do that is word choice.
I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying you'll be as successful as HN. Lobste.rs, which is run carefully by thoughtful people using software which is probably better than HN's, is much less successful. But that's the point.
You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code. And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain. One way to look at…
>I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does.
Forums written in other languages do as well - and any decent framework can just include user management as a dependency. To me it doesn't seem like an unqualified good idea for Arc to bake all of that into the language or the default app.
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#144In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesti…
I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page. Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?
Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is in the same sense censorship when CNN refuses to run one's Youtube show in prime time.
No, I would argue that it's different. CNN has a limited amount of time to fill and doesn't accept user submissions. HN has neither constraint, and gives users voting rights over some of the success of each post.
So, you've decided that one organization's private constraints are important and another's aren't.
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmen…
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral . I would prefer to participat…
> This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship
It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives.
> There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral.
Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion in the community. It is totally fair for participants to criticize the moderation efforts, but just because the site is high profile doesn't mean that the moderators are any more morally obligated to permit comment than you are morally obligated to amend your fine article with my commentary.
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't silly, it's an exact comparison to Newspeak, which is what the OP was doing. I mean, it's clear as day: the OP didn't even attempt to argue that censorship isn't happening. They just wanted to change the word describing it to make it feel less like oppression and more like helpfulness. Don't get caught up in the comparison to a fascist regime. Plenty of left-wing socially conscious movements use this same ta…
It's censorship in the same sense as Rolling Stone not running your fan-fic on the cover is censorship.
That is curation. Censorship is the editor telling a writer they can't trash rap music. HN does both.
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
My comment is prompted by the realization that recently (for the past year or so) a lot of general interest NYTimes articles shoot straight up to HN front page. There are two explanations: either the HN crowd is turning into a general interest one or YC/HN has a deal with NYTimes to help the later increase their memberships. Based on how the (down)votes go, I would give it a fair chance to the HN crowd turning into a…
A better argument against is that the NYTimes consistently produces good journalism .
You will notice that I did not comment on the quality of NYTimes' articles. And it was a convenient example as it is an easy one to spot (at this moment there are 2 articles from NYTimes on HN front page).
The question stands: should cross promotion deals be disclosed?
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#149In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesti…
I've personally found HN to be a lot more censorious than the subreddits I frequent. I really don't like the diverse fuckery the HN board software uses as "anti-spam" measures, like account creation IP bans ("Account creation temporarily disabled"), slowbans, hellbans and defacto bans that discard the content of your post and pretend to be temporary ("Too fast").
Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral . I would prefer to participat…
> This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives . > There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral. Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion…
Morals are relative. I consider it a moral obligation - you may feel differently. Both are valid.