The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)

Again, I fundamentally disagree. You are being vague and overly general on the sort of moderation pressure. The actual banned content on most social media platforms, if we bring it out of context, ends up things like CP and Nazis. If those are the "disruptive ideas" we need to explore truth, then I'm pretty ok never finding it.

On almost every social media site (except, ironically, "free speech" platforms) there is a space to discuss everything from communism to anarchy. Crystal healing to quantum physics. Ghosts to exoplanets. Nihilism to Scientology.

The actual set of banned discussion is pretty much all centered around speech that directly leads to harm.

The reason I keep bringing it back to "what is actually banned" is because when you get right down the actual banned conversations, they are both few and not really worth discussing for "truth".

Name a banned "golden nugget" conversation. You say there is censorship, so list it. Tell me what sort of deep conversation or truth we can't know because we stop Nazis from using the N word.

I can tell you ‘about’ something that would. For instance, I would get banned for doxing you. The reason why I would get banned is that the information would be very valuable to someone that the forum is not interested in helping. Some banned conversation includes realities that explain what is going on in the world in a way that can greatly benefit a potential investor, or equivalently, greatly misguide them. Given that there is no way to discern between the two, both are banned.

I have one personal example that I am willing to share. I learned a tremendous amount of helpful information about birth practices and infant care from one of these ‘extreme free speech’ platforms. An example is cord clamping. The debate of this topic was extremely irreverent and ad-hominem, but it was easy to see that logic and objective results clearly favored one side, regardless of the civility with which this information was presented. Sadly, I don’t believe the information would have been effectively communicated in its most polite form, because it was clearly out there for all to see for a very long time without any improvement to common practice. The problem is that a reasonable person must ask why experts would ignore such information before accepting alternative possibilities, and this necessarily leads to a very dark rabbit-hole showing politically-incorrect evidence of extreme dysfunction within their profession. This became broadly applicable to me personally. My OB/GYN was objectively harmful to my baby, my pediatrician and nurses were wonderful, and this was all much less confusing given that understanding.

Ok, and how would doxing me be something that would further finding truth? That's not an example of a productive conversation limited because of anti-free speech.

> An example is cord clamping.

Nothing in your example is a conversation that couldn't be had on "anti-free speech" platforms.

What you've failed to give me is an example or description of communication that cannot be had on non-free speech platforms that isn't itself a turd.

Unless your doxxing example was to say "Hey, this researcher that lives on 123 maple street is where clamping came from and we clearly can't trust people from maple street because that's were bad people are from".

That, in and of itself, doesn't seem like a good way to go about discovering truth.

> it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side sees HN accurately, while the other side sees HN completely the wrong way"

The reason it isn't plausible is that the claims the various sides make (specifically about the ideological bias they perceive in HN, and in the mods) are so interchangeable—they resemble each other perfectly, except for one bit (the ideological polarity) flipped. It's possible that radically different mechanisms could be producing these isomorphic comments—wildly distorted perception in one case, accurate perception of reality in the other—but it's not plausible.

Suppose I come out of my house in the morning and the street is wet. Most likely it rained last night. Now what are the odds that most of the street is wet because it rained, but the stretch right in front of my house is wet because someone came out with a hose and watered it? That is possible, but not plausible. It's more likely that a common mechanism explains both, especially because there's a simple explanation for what that might be (that it rained).

I'm sure that's not the best analogy, but it's the first one that occurred to me (well, the second), and I can modify it to make it even more analogous to the situation on HN.

Consider that two neighbors are each convinced that while it rained on their neighbor's stretch of street, their own stretch is wet because someone came out in the night and watered it. It's possible that one neighbor is assessing reality accurately while the other is totally wrong. But it's not plausible. It's more likely that some common underlying mechanism is producing these perceptions, which are identical except for the obvious you/me bit flip, and which can't both be true because each claims the other is false.

> However, you seem to either deny holding it or deny that you are appealing to it as part of your argument.

It's the latter. The reason this is not an argument in favor of political centrism is that it's not an argument about the underlying politics in the first place. It's an empirical argument about the comments people post. These comments are so identical that it is not plausible that one mechanism produces half of them (or whatever the portion is) while a radically different mechanism is producing the other half. It is far more likely that a common mechanism is producing them—especially because there's a simple explanation for what that might be.