Comment by dkjaudyeqooe 8 days ago
Shouldn't that be directed to those with an agenda who and are flagging certain posts?
Those of us who complain about this highly targeted flagging just want to avoid censorship. I can't see how we need to reflect on this.
I agree, but when that is abused because of a minorities' preference, then it's bad.
That's what's happening here.
I think we need to get specific -- what preferences are you referring to, and who is the minority?
EcommerceFlow mentioned opinions that are "very normal nationally." I don't want to assume the worst so I'm trying not to read in to that.
I mean, I don’t generally like to go over somebody’s posting history because it feels like stupid very-online silliness, but they brought it up.
I see some unflagged center-right political opinions sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged because any political opinions here have a chance of getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to work, if we as a community decided that mainstream political opinions were ok, the site would become a place to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.
All illegal speech should be hidden from public discussion.
However, it would be disconcerting if stating biological facts led to censorship on a forum that focusses on science and technology.
The definition of "hate" has been stretched a lot over the last few years, and if that restricts discussion of facts and ideas, then it is harmful.
One major problem is when people presume that their simplistic understanding of a subject is factual, and that everyone else is going off emotion. For example, some people will erroneously claim that the 2 genetic human options are "XX = woman, XY = man". Those seem to be the most likely combinations, partly because we don't collect DNA from 100% of the population and compare it to the observed anatomy, but they're clearly and documentedly not the only options.
Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
Yes and some people will also make scientifically inaccurate claims like "sex is a spectrum" and "there are more than two sexes" and "it is possible for humans to change sex".
There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.
If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our democratically-elected representatives) then by all means HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own self-preservation.
But until then, we should be free to state facts.
> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.
> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.
> -- John Deighan https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banning-those-w...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
"Agendas" are often ideological battlegrounds. I flag comments, even those I agree with, that I recognize from experience are going to lead to the same tired, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Lately, I've also been maintaining a personal uBlock Origin filter list to hide certain prolific rule breakers. I would love if HN had an equivalent built-in "killfile"[0] functionality for auto-hiding submissions and comments. (This has been suggested to the admins, and was seemingly received favorably, but I'm sure it's a matter of resources.)
I draw a distinction between posts and comments here.
Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's going on.
Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also usually be active in the discussion about the article, and their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that, then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda as well.
Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that you often don’t get to really know anybody. Realistically most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3 or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting hidden after a point, right?
I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.
Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.
So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.
All right, here's an example. X makes a post on one side of a position. Y makes a thought-provoking reply on the other side. X replies with "So what's your point?" X either fails at reading comprehension, or X is trying to make it look like Y didn't have a point, because X doesn't have a good reply to Y's point, and X wants everybody else to not notice that Y actually had a good point.
I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.
No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN.
Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.
That would be very positive IMO. It would expose bad actors.
However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629
Forums like this are "censored" and that's a really good thing. We don't need a steady stream of (for example) hate for women, minorities, and trans people that you see on truly uncensored forums.