LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator • Hacker News Board

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#531

Post by hutrdvnj » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:15 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #524

garmaine wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just say “As there is a conflict of interest, I will not comment on the substance of this tweet.”

But that's not the reason and wouldn't be true. There's another aspect too: I try to avoid being a bloodless ghoul in communicating with this community. People here don't want stiff corporate pantomimes, and that suits me fine, because I would hate to do that; or rather I can't because my body would reject it. That's an old Willie Brown line btw.

I would like to hear the other side of the story. I understand that dang is not the best person to tell us, but maybe there's someone else?

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#532

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:16 AM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #436

dang wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that alternative formulation as so different really? I'm sure you have a good point, I'm just not sure how to do it better. I needed to give enough of an explanation to satisfy people's curiosity at least a little bit even though I can't satisfy it for real. I also needed to make sure that my comment had enough information in it to answer (let's say) the top 10 obvious objections, or it would have brought…

I think you are unwittingly coloring your words, likely because you are frustrated by this post (it's petty drama you want to downvote but policy says you can't, and you have inside information you can't share). This is like subtle apophasis, where you're implying that the tweeter (wow that sounds so weird) is on the wrong side. I'm not taking sides here, despite being a YC alum (alternate account) I stopped looking…

Unwittingly? That's fightin words.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#533

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:19 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #470

dang wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would depend on the specific circumstances, but I can imagine doing that, or perhaps there would be something else we could do that was better; it's hard to say in general, because cases like that are always very specific. We'd want to explain as much to the community as we could without harmful side-effects, but if someone's safety or privacy is at risk, I'm comfortable telling the community so, and I'm confident…

This is a really disappointing answer. I know, I know discussing moderation here is frowned upon... but come on. You’re basically saying there’s a secondary set of rules that are decided and disclosed arbitrarily. It’s your choice how to moderate, I don’t have any expectation or illusion of a right to use this platform. But can you understand how this creates ambiguity for people who don’t know what the rules ultimat…

If you think that moderating a system as complex as HN can be reduced to a single set of unambiguous formal rules, you're profoundly mistaken. I can understand how that could be disappointing, but what's disappointing you is reality, because that's impossible.

Also: discussing moderation is frowned upon? Where'd you get that idea? I've posted 50,000 comments discussing moderation with HN users (not to mention...checking...24,000 emails, apparently). I'm not saying it's my favorite thing to do, but nobody's frowning upon it. Perhaps you were thinking of the guideline asking people not to go on about getting downvoted?

There's simply no way to avoid judgment calls, interpretation, and general messes, and I'm not into pretending otherwise. The best we can offer is to answer any questions people have, and that I'm pretty diligent about.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#534

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:27 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #529

Firehawke wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any kind of working moderation system is going to have a certain level of "we have to play it by ear" or else it gets overrun by rules lawyers playing to the word and not the spirit of imposed rules.

I wasn’t objecting to playing it by ear. I was objecting to committing to doing so and keeping it arbitrary. Edit so I can hopefully make the spirit of my own complaint more clear: my puppy is defiant and stubborn and clever and a big doofus. Rules are a living document and they get revised all the time. If I communicate them and my expectations we grow together and move on to the next misunderstanding with some grac…

In that case I don't think we're so far apart. I wasn't "just deciding" to arbitrarily change things. Someone asked me how we'd handle a particular kind of rare situation and I answered based on established practice.

In fact, if you read my comment closely, it's not hard to discern what the principles are: (1) being transparent with the community, (2) protecting people's safety and privacy, (3) if there's a conflict between (1) and (2), then (2) wins.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#535

Post by tdeck » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

dfabulich wrote: post #300

mbgerring wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just so everyone has the full context: Oakland opened up its vaccination sites to more people on a shorter timeline than the rest of the state, in certain ZIP codes with disproportionately poor residents, in order to get vaccines to those disproportionately poor residents. I know this because this is how several of my friends who live in West Oakland got vaccinated ahead of the eligibility opening up in the rest o…

I got vaccinated at one of these West Oakland "first come, first serve" vaccination sites back in March. They were administering J&J vaccines (which do not thaw) with no residency check, and not even a poster saying "please don't line up unless you live in this neighborhood." No statement of intent at all. Others standing in line asked coordinators walking the line, "Am I eligible here?" and the coordinators responde…

I'm not making a judgment on this situation, but as someone who lives in Alameda County (where Oakland is) and tried hard to get a vaccine as early as I ethically could, I can definitely confirm that this rollout was very confusing. The county and my city (Berkeley) kept on saying it wouldn't be available to the general public until the 15th. Then they changed the eligibility on the 10th, but with zero fanfare and without all of the websites being updated. I believe MyTurn wasn't even updated for a while. I was checking periodically and only happened to notice on the 11th. I also heard about these "certain ZIP code" vaccination centers and assumed that they probably weren't "for" me (not my ZIP code), but there wasn't much clarity.

I understand why the county probably did some of these things: they want to make the vaccine available to underserved communities without asking for documents that are typically a barrier for members of those same communities. They want to make it easy to get a vaccine, but not talk about it too much so people don't flood in from other areas. But it does leave you in a weird quandry when you want to do your part and line up when the time comes to get vaccinated, and the question of "is it time yet" isn't exactly clear.

In my case I didn't get the shot until the 16th, but I'm so glad I got it at all.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#536

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:30 AM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #179

nine_k wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are adults in the US using Twitter/GIF memes instead of finding thoughtful and mature ways This way they evoke more emotion, so, more of the unthinking (feeling-based) approval: retweets, reposts, just being remembered. When it's funny, it makes people happier along the way, when it's angry, it may make people also feel anger, but a righteous, just anger. It's a potent drug which is very hard to stop taking rec…

Memes pack more information and context into less content. We're basically going through a mini printing press style communications revolution right now. Before (say 1999) you had print which was cheap and audiovisual which was expensive/time consuming. Now thanks to tech audiovisual content is something the masses can use to communicate and it's affecting culture greatly.

I almost agree. I think it's not information and context that's being packed, it's emotional load.

As any writer or poet knows, words are handles to emotions. Choose a slightly different word, and your readers will tend to feel very differently after reading a line containing, otherwise, the same information. It's a wetware equivalent of RPC API.

Memes are this, but taken up to 11. They transmit a much more complex and powerful emotional payload, in readily digestible form.

Like in this case, I could write a whole paragraph listing the kind of emotions that little GIF communicated. Calm distancing, depreciation, disrespect, feeling safe, ... Written out as words, it wouldn't fit in a Tweet, and wouldn't be as powerful a message.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#537

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:34 AM UTC

dqpb wrote: post #457

dang wrote: post #210

The submitted title was "Y Combinator kicks out Paul Biggar over a tweet". That is inaccurate, so in keeping with the HN guidelines (" Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ), I've replaced the title with the tweet text. That's the standard thing we do with titles, when people post Twitter links. Much as I'd love to,…

Getting kicked out of ycombinator is petty drama?

That twitter fest is, as is telegraphed by the "LOL" in the title. Also, to be fair, the puerile GIF that the other side responded with, and ought not to have.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#538

Post by dang » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

choppaface wrote: post #492

dang wrote: post #210

The submitted title was "Y Combinator kicks out Paul Biggar over a tweet". That is inaccurate, so in keeping with the HN guidelines (" Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ), I've replaced the title with the tweet text. That's the standard thing we do with titles, when people post Twitter links. Much as I'd love to,…

What?!! There are many, many posts with “inaccurate” titles. Would you like to change the John Carmack post to include his entire tweet as the title? YC moderation here on a YC-related post is not fair. It’s also unfair that this reply is placed above substantive discussion.

If there are many posts with inaccurate titles, that's because we didn't see them. If you skim these 500 comments you'll see that we make a habit of editing inaccurate titles: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - and that's just a small fraction of the cases. Also these 250: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... HN users are pretty adamant about title accuracy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

> Would you like to change the John Carmack post to include his entire tweet as the title?

No, "John Carmack on JPEG" strikes me as an accurate title for that post, and in any case the entire tweet wouldn't fit HN's 80 char limit. When users think there's an inaccuracy or come up with a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we're usually happy to make a change.

> YC moderation here on a YC-related post is not fair

The principle, as I explained above, is that we moderate HN less when YC or a YC startup is involved (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Less, however, does not mean not at all - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... That would be a huge loophole. In this case I did the minimum to correct a false statement in the title and was hands off after that.

> It’s also unfair that this reply is placed above substantive discussion

That would be true if we had placed it there, but users upvoted it there.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#539

Post by eyelidlessness » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #533

eyelidlessness wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really disappointing answer. I know, I know discussing moderation here is frowned upon... but come on. You’re basically saying there’s a secondary set of rules that are decided and disclosed arbitrarily. It’s your choice how to moderate, I don’t have any expectation or illusion of a right to use this platform. But can you understand how this creates ambiguity for people who don’t know what the rules ultimat…

If you think that moderating a system as complex as HN can be reduced to a single set of unambiguous formal rules, you're profoundly mistaken. I can understand how that could be disappointing, but what's disappointing you is reality, because that's impossible. Also: discussing moderation is frowned upon? Where'd you get that idea? I've posted 50,000 comments discussing moderation with HN users (not to mention...check…

> If you think that moderating a system as complex as HN can be reduced to a single set of unambiguous formal rules, you're profoundly mistaken.

I’m not saying it can be reduced to that. I’m saying it’s disappointing that the resolution to that is a side channel where decisions are made privately and have no way to resolve generally. This is especially a problem for you, as you field tens of thousands of things that may be similar but might not be equally convincing in private. It’s also a problem for you as people are understandably going to wonder what those private decisions entail.

> Also: discussing moderation is frowned upon? Where'd you get that idea? I've posted 50,000 comments discussing moderation with HN users (not to mention...checking...24,000 emails, apparently). I'm not saying it's my favorite thing to do, but nobody's frowning upon it. Perhaps you were thinking of the guideline asking people not to go on about getting downvoted?

I’m thinking of several instances seeing people who were concerned about moderation decisions being directed to email rather than the discussion in public.

> There's simply no way to avoid judgment calls, interpretation, and general messes, and I'm not into pretending otherwise. The best we can offer is to answer any questions people have, and that I'm pretty diligent about.

You are! You’re beyond diligent and I don’t know you but sometimes I see your attention to HN threads and hope you’re not burning out. My disappointment isn’t about you making a judgment call. My disappointment is that you made a side channel available for private judgment calls that might not be disclosed, both because that creates separate rules for people who do or don’t have access to it, and because it creates an opportunity for people to imagine things that might be private and create alternative narratives.

Re: LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator

#540

Post by tdeck » Sat, Jun 05, 2021, 7:43 AM UTC

throwaaskjdfh wrote: post #357

dfabulich wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got vaccinated at one of these West Oakland "first come, first serve" vaccination sites back in March. They were administering J&J vaccines (which do not thaw) with no residency check, and not even a poster saying "please don't line up unless you live in this neighborhood." No statement of intent at all. Others standing in line asked coordinators walking the line, "Am I eligible here?" and the coordinators responde…

EDIT: I was mistaken here, corrected by a response below. - I don't think there was a way for the public health authorities to create an explicit rule about neighborhood residency without inviting lawsuits. The best they could do is place vaccination centers in more convenient locations for underserved communities, and hope that it could raise the rate of vaccination in the vicinity. I think there were people assumin…

To be fair, this is a reasonable assumption based on past experience. The government normally has no shortage of rules - it literally governs us. It's not unreasonable for some people to assume that this is a disorganized or inconsistent rollout rather than a form of social engineering meant to narrow the eligibility guidelines.