411–420 of 498 posts
Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone. It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it. One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected…
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Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but are mad. That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever, but not because I was mad, but because the comment was just plain beyond the pale. And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got flagged. Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
Nope, sometimes I would have a rebuttal but flagging is the better option (constructive discussion is hard without mutual respect, and/or don't feed the troll). Or, the comment doesn't even have anything to refute, it's just disrespectful or it's spam, or both. I have flagged a few comments but I'm rarely mad. And if one is mad because of a disrespectful comment, the flagging is probably appropriate too.
Yes, indeed.
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I agree that that's not a best practice. It's not what the downvote mechanism was intended for.
Flagging is used by people who have no rebuttal but are mad. That's why I have only flagged one or two posts, ever, but not because I was mad, but because the comment was just plain beyond the pale. And my posts against portaying violent rape in film got flagged. Make it make sense, because I understand the failure of this system because systems are my trade-in-craft.
This is cope, just like "I'm being downvoted for speaking the truth!". Nobody thinks "wow, they said a true statement, I should downvote them".
I suggest you try to steelman the idea of flagging and see that maybe there could be other things at play.
Observation: How lucky are we that our contributions here warrant two fine moderators? I just read Tom's brief story on how he arrived here and what it means and felt... I don't really have a quick word for it. I know I am better for having spent time here. Oh, I got it! A tiny bit spoiled, but in the best of ways. Yeah, that is what I felt. How lucky we are indeed. :)
Do you have showdead enabled to see how many good comments are being unfairly censored? Otherwise this is just survivorship bias talking.
Also, don't forget that it's mainly other users who flag, not moderators.
Also also, it's a bit ironic coming from a 3 months old account with already negative karma. I believe HN has a problem with users who create many new accounts and don't bother to understand "what is a good thoughtful comment" and change their behaviour.
Tom (and Fenn) had rockstar status back when I was involved in university CS+Entrepreneurship clubs in Melbourne around 2009/2010 (mostly led by fine students at UniMelb, but I was helping spread the word at Monash) because they were the first(maybe one of the first?) Aussies to be accepted by YC. They always generously gave their time and advice at these student events, even dropped by the SiliconBeach networking meets to share their experiences and turned out to be exceptionally kind human beings in person. Definitely the right choice for moding this community!
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So you understand how echo chambers are created and are fine with it? The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different. Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
I don’t understand what your response has to do with what I said. Differing opinions are welcome here—particularly if they are eloquently expressed and factually supported—but that doesn’t mean they will be popular. That’s just life. Opinions, like most things, follow a normal distribution.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then you will begin to really understand what life is really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely just continue to think you understand, while asking far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is the most genius question you can ever ask yourself, and is really the only one worth either asking or answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts". Unless your knowledge base is founded upon compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't value it does not mean it is not the most valuable concept in the universe.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
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The person you’re responding to is not Paul Graham. Similar handle but not identical. > The people here are rather anti-compassion and any kind of spirituality. And how I was attacked for calling David Lynch a worthless purveyor of ultraviolence and vapid, wasteful lifestyles was unconscionable. Maybe your problem is not with your opinions but with how you choose to express them. My observation is that disagreement i…
The person you’re responding to is not Paul Graham. We're all Paul Graham! https://youtu.be/FKCmyiljKo0?t=65
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Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.