My studies show that you must have a community of adult children who throw a tantrum when they encounter something they don't like, combined with a group of exhausted parent moderators who let them have their way, against better judgement.
I'm glad to hear that the system indeed at least works equally badly for "both sides". It wasn't clear to me at all.
I refuse your attempt at categorizing me. This isn't a battle. I don't want any "pro-SJW" content hidden from the front page either, just because a few people don't like it. That's not what user flagging is good for.
My point stands: As moderators, why do you accept these bad-faith flags that have a huge impact on visibility? With this policy, you are supporting the extremists on both ends.
Again, the moderation does not deny being involved.
I will concede though, I technically can't tell. However, if "a few flags" really can push an article from the front page down to page 10 within the course of five minutes I still have the following to say:
1. This system is easily abused
2. Accepting these flags on an article like this is accepting abuse, which is the purview of moderation
In other words, the system is laid out to hide anything that a few users don't like to be seen and the moderation supports that tacitly.
Fair enough, I don't understand the technical details.
The posts were hidden from the frontpage, by moderators, through whatever mechanism. Why? Not as technical question, but why was decision made to hide it? What's the argument behind doing something like that?
If any users can explain why they are flagging this post, I'd be interested in knowing too. To what end, exactly?
You have entirely sidestepped the question: Why did you flag the original post? It "got attention", but so do a lot of front page articles and they don't get flagged.
> What arguments does moderation have to moderate HN?
That wasn't the question, what's the argument for moderation to flag the original article? No arguments have been brought forth, not before and not now. Thank you for your reply, but it just doesn't address the point.
> We get accused of supporting white supremacism and misogyny...
That's the whole problem. I have never ever seen an actual white supremacist or a bona-fide woman-hater on HN (or most anywhere tech related). What I do see all the time is people of the "social justice" persuasion labeling most any criticism in such defamatory terms. Then, if somebody jumps in to defend someone's right to hold a different viewpoint, they too get attacked as "enablers" (or similar). It's dishonest and disgraceful and it needs to stop. The first step is to not ever pander to those people.
> ... just as much as the kind of things you guys are saying here.
What's wrong with what we're "saying here"?
> It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle.
I disagree with that.
> This is in the site guidelines, which we'd appreciate it if you'd read and follow
Let me cite:
"On Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
There is a strong need for this kind of open debate in the tech sector and it would be great if you didn't make an effort to push it under the rug, or even suppress it.
Wait, so it got the "mild penalty" (which resulted in its immediate disappearance from the frontpage) because it was a follow-up?
The post to which it was a follow-up also got flagged. Why? Because "users" flagged that as well? Who cares? Your reasoning is entirely unconvincing.
> How can a site be both a Church of SJWs and an alt-right shithole?
Disregard that, what arguments does the moderation have to hide this post? I see neither a flamewar, nor alt-right or SJW run amok in here, but I see that the moderation is hiding this post. That's the issue at hand.
I'm disappointed with their race-based criteria, in my perception Arabs/Middle-Easterners ("looks like a Muslim") rank far higher on the oppression scale than Hispanics.
> But how common is it actually to pretend to be a gender you are not for something like this?
Who says it's a problem? It's not up to anyone else to judge my motivation for changing my gender. If I want to change my gender for 10% discount on a pair of sneakers, that should be my right.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line and how do you verify it?
Just put your preferred pronoun on your twitter page, and as long as it's not male and the gender you were assigned at birth, you should be good to go.
As soon as that internship is over, you can just change back. That's what genderfluidity is about, right?
I was making a general point, but even then you shouldn't need to have a "verifiable track record" just to say something mildly controversial without getting fired.
That some person calls for the firing isn't the problem, but it's the faculties following through with it.
It's the infantilized "student customer" along with a long-standing infiltration of sectors of Academia with ideologically motivated staff that is enabling all that.
The majority of staff/students do not a agree with this, but there's a system of fear where you can ruin your career by being labeled racist/sexist (etc.) by one of these ignorant loudmouths.
We can't change this by calling for individuals to not act in a certain way, we need to dismantle this power structure inside (parts of) Academia. It starts with speaking up.
Kids don't always do what they're told, but they're inclined to believe what they're told. Acting out on a false belief nevertheless can be done willingly.
Similarly, the parent telling their child to do such a thing also believes that their child is getting a ticket to paradise, along with themselves and the whole family. Isn't an eternity in paradise worth it? From that perspective, there's nothing sick or evil about it, it's just a very different perception of how the world works. If you were born in a different time and place, you may share those same beliefs.
> Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
I don't disagree that these things are abhorrent, but that's because we happen to share a different system of beliefs. I don't agree with your simplistic explanation that these people are just "sick fucks".
First of all, people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, all the time. Secondly, people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a perceived greater good. Martyrs are revered in many cultures around the world, including Christian culture.
The fact that some martyrs use modern explosives is just an "implementation detail".
It can easily be "worth it" if by sacrificing half a million children you get to save half a million and one child. Despite what you might want to believe, Mrs. Albright is neither stupid nor evil.
It's also really an unfair question because you don't get to see the result of your policy before enacting it.
Moreover, those deaths probably never happened, at least not in those numbers, and they were used as an argument for war:
Like the supposed 1 million deaths from the Second Iraq War, those numbers are based on surveys which are highly flawed.
Further, the poor perception of the Second Iraq War supported the lack of action in Syria under the Obama administration. Nobody knows how many lives could've saved (and how many sacrificed) if there had been an early intervention in Syria.
I'm not sure I get your point. When I research human sacrifice, I must tacitly condemn it, because that's the civilized thing to do?
Human sacrifice is really just obsolete technology. It just doesn't really work, as the Aztecs had to figure out. It's not like they did it for fun, that would be far more objectionable.
We "civilized" people use different technology, but we still sacrifice people to it - just think of how many people die in traffic.
You presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't.
We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now.
Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to sacrifice the unwilling, it kinda ruins the show.
I recommend family therapy.