That is extremely odd. The previous times I looked at this thread, I skimmed the article once or twice and mostly focused on the comments. Inevitably there was flamewar, trolling, and other dreck, but large parts of the discussion are worthwhile [1], even compared to the throng of threads HN has already had about this. I think that the comments from black software engineers on this issue are particularly worth reading and it makes me happy that HN is a place where they choose to share their perspectives [2] and the rest of us can hear them.
That said, that DS link is weird enough that a user emailed about it. My initial reaction was that we would need more evidence than just one link to make a moderation call about this being trolling. Fortunately the user who emailed questioned that further, which prompted me to read the article closely. Having read it closely, I've changed my mind—I'm not buying it. More precisely: I think the odds are > 50% that there's something false about this piece (and if so, most likely a whole lot false about it), so I'm going to restore the flags on it and put nofollow on the link.
This is one of those shitty situations where all we can do is guess and guessing wrong has bad outcomes either way. If the article is authentic I would want to respect the author. If the article is not authentic, then it's against both the rules and spirit of HN and should not be here. At the moment I'm guessing not. If new information comes up, we can revisit.
The natural thing to do in such a case would be also to kill the submission (i.e. make it [dead] in addition to [flagged], which is the maximal level of moderation we could do). But that would remove context from the discussion, which I don't think would be fair to the many thoughtful commenters who contributed. So at the moment I'm not going to do that.
For the future: if any of you see something like this and are willing to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com, I'd appreciate it. There's no way we can come close to reading everything closely. We can't even read everything loosely, or even see everything (probably not even 10%) of what gets posted here. There's just too much. Fortunately the HN community can see everything, so we rely on community members to be our eyes and ears. If a user hadn't pointed this out to me, I'd have continued to be ignorant about it, and most likely some people somewhere would have drawn some wrong conclusions about HN, the community, and/or the moderation here. I wish I'd known sooner, but better late than never.
[1] Note that this thread has over 2000 comments and you have to click 'More' at the bottom of the thread to get to them. The further you go the worse they'll get, so be warned.
[2] Of course, it's an anonymous forum and we have to take people's word about who they are—but I believe that the good commenters are being truthful. There's a certain type of low-rent troll who does that but the longer that sort of account talks, the more they usually give themselves away.
Update: we received an email from someone claiming to be the author. I've copied it below with their permission.
Of course we can't tell anything for sure, but in my experience, this kind of thing is usually authentic. For me it changes the balance of probability enough to justify guessing differently again, so I'm going to take [flagged] off the thread now.
------
Hey,
I recently wrote an article which was posted on HN and is now flagged for the use of a link to a website called Daily Stormer (article title is, “GitHub, f*ck your name change”). Obvs this is you guys community and I didn’t mean for a post I wrote to seem trolly. I just wanted to clarify the situation.
I had genuinely never heard of Daily Stormer or ever been on the website until the time I was writing the post. I use DuckDuckGo, which evidently doesn’t ban gnarly websites the way that Google does. I was looking for articles written about the misidentification of black people as gorillas in facial recognition systems. The DS article came up as one of the top results, I read the first paragraph and it seemed on topic so I used it. I have since removed the link from the post.
I’m not trying to justify the use of the website, it 100% my fault for not doing better due diligence. I just wanted to say I’m sorry as I didn’t mean for the post to come across as trolling.
For what its worth, I am black, I live (born and raised) in London and work as a SWE. Nothing in the post was a lie.
"It has come to my attention that at the time of writing one of the links used points to a site with views I don’t identify with and has since been removed."
That said, that DS link is weird enough that a user emailed about it. My initial reaction was that we would need more evidence than just one link to make a moderation call about this being trolling. Fortunately the user who emailed questioned that further, which prompted me to read the article closely. Having read it closely, I've changed my mind—I'm not buying it. More precisely: I think the odds are > 50% that there's something false about this piece (and if so, most likely a whole lot false about it), so I'm going to restore the flags on it and put nofollow on the link.
This is one of those shitty situations where all we can do is guess and guessing wrong has bad outcomes either way. If the article is authentic I would want to respect the author. If the article is not authentic, then it's against both the rules and spirit of HN and should not be here. At the moment I'm guessing not. If new information comes up, we can revisit.
The natural thing to do in such a case would be also to kill the submission (i.e. make it [dead] in addition to [flagged], which is the maximal level of moderation we could do). But that would remove context from the discussion, which I don't think would be fair to the many thoughtful commenters who contributed. So at the moment I'm not going to do that.
For the future: if any of you see something like this and are willing to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com, I'd appreciate it. There's no way we can come close to reading everything closely. We can't even read everything loosely, or even see everything (probably not even 10%) of what gets posted here. There's just too much. Fortunately the HN community can see everything, so we rely on community members to be our eyes and ears. If a user hadn't pointed this out to me, I'd have continued to be ignorant about it, and most likely some people somewhere would have drawn some wrong conclusions about HN, the community, and/or the moderation here. I wish I'd known sooner, but better late than never.
[1] Note that this thread has over 2000 comments and you have to click 'More' at the bottom of the thread to get to them. The further you go the worse they'll get, so be warned.
[2] Of course, it's an anonymous forum and we have to take people's word about who they are—but I believe that the good commenters are being truthful. There's a certain type of low-rent troll who does that but the longer that sort of account talks, the more they usually give themselves away.