Comment by kccqzy 2 days ago
For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.
Let us not use the word "thrive" or "quash" to avoid misunderstandings. To rephrase, I hope that on HN even minority opinions have reasonable rebuttals. Unfortunately what currently happens is people flag minority opinions with no discussion.
"flag" and "downvote" are two different tools with two different purposes.
"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not interesting and should be less prominent".
"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here at all".
By way of an example, on a political story, if you say something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get flagged.
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.
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.
In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.
I’m a fairly steadfast holder of the “I like apples walled garden, it’s my choice to be there” argument, and I think as a dissenting opinion on this forum I get a lot of flak for it. But that’s not a moderation problem, it’s the fact that my opinion is different and I have 10x the number of people disagreeing with me than agreeing with me.
Upvoted, but your opinion is wrong and I didn't want to leave without telling you I hate your opinion.
> having the opinion
What I see a lot of is this:
User posts "$opinion $generalization $snark $dismissal $adhominem".
User gets down voted or flagged. User complains that downvotes are for expressing $opinion and that $opinion is not allowed on this site!
But we can all see the other things in their post that probably brought on most of the downvotes.
> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.
That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless it's also violating site policy in other ways.
A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.
Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.
> A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.
Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.
If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.
Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.
Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.
> If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes...
Sure, I imagine the grandparent poster means arguing something like "limiting access for extensons is good because they're often used to steal financial assets". Old extensions are sold, or cracked and updated to inclue malware.
Flagging does seem to primarily be a tool for moderation. But for comments, at least, I've mostly not observed flagging being used to hide things that shouldn't be; if anything, I think flagging is underused on comments.
(It's still regularly abused on stories as a downvote, perhaps in part because stories don't have downvotes. HN sometimes "rescues" stories that get over-flagged, but it's still a problem.)
"Not thriv[ing]" is not the same as being quashed. Minority opinions don't always rise to the popularity or acceptance level of majority opinions, and that's OK.