I want to point out that it's long been HN filter policy to "kill" posts that use a word beginning with m for self stimulation they is very relevant to this discussion. If you turn on showdead you'll see a few dead posts by people that aren't otherwise shadowbanned, because they used that word. Seems like a good argument against censorship, especially as it relates to normal activity.
True, but HN also has "showdead" and "vouch" which can overcome both automatic filters and user flags.
If that's not enough or you're seeing an especially egregious case, you can also email mods. I'll do that occasionally, though usually simply vouch dead comments if I feel that's warranted. It apparently takes a few vouches to overcome a kill.
I’m all for pushing back against the mods. Lord knows I’ve done it more than I probably should have. But one thing I came to understand after my long slugging match with them is that they have a lot of concerns that are very hard to balance. In this case, here’s the calculus: how many valuable comments do you think were lost as a result of killing that word? The kinds of comments you’d read and think “I really want to come back here.”
I agree it’s more than zero. But it’s likely several orders of magnitude fewer than the number of comments that were filtered by it — which is to say, if those comments had no effect on readers, or didn’t make them want to come back, then by definition it was a net positive for the site, and thus the community.
Their duty is to the community. The decisions they make are for that goal alone: to collect as many smart people together under one virtual roof as possible, without us tearing each other to shreds. This is as hard as it sounds. The grim reality is that no other community has ever pulled that off.
I believe HN will hit the 100 year mark in longevity. It’s already been around for something like 17. But to get there requires manual intervention at a scale not previously seen. Reddit is on autopilot compared to HN, and although it’s popular, few of us want to stay there.
So when you rally people to fight them for censoring a word, what you’re really doing is claiming to know how to do their jobs more effectively than they do. And they’ve been doing it for many, many years. I once tried to launch an HN clone that for a time achieved small-scale popularity, and it took everything I had in me — all day, every day, mostly curating stories. I could do it, but it’s not fun (though it’s fascinating).
So, try to cut them a little slack and look at the big picture. Are you sure that this is worth rousing everyone up in arms about? Then think it over for awhile, and ask yourself a few more times. If you really try to put yourself in their shoes, as if it was your full time job, then I think you’ll be forced to conclude “It’s complicated.” Or at least that’s the reality that I eventually accepted.
There’s another word that was banned long ago, involving a circle of men. But as pg himself once said (paraphrasing), “I doubt we lost many valuable comments from it.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825942
The coolest part of HN is that you can have an effect. If you see a dead comment that you think will make readers want to return to the site tomorrow, click on its timestamp and then click “vouch.” It only takes one to unkill a comment. But use it sparingly, since it’s a privilege. It was a feature designed for just this sort of situation.
Still seems odd to me. M___ is a comparatively formal term, and it appears a lot of slang is still allowed (in any event, that term is trivially easy to make up new words for).
And even the circle word you mentioned, especially in the VC tech world is a pretty legit metaphor for a lot of stuff.
Throwing out comments because they use a specific word is really low effort imo, on the same level as banning the f-word. I'd be surprised if it isn't mostly generating false positives.
You're right that it probably is. My main frustration was with the "Posting too fast; please slow down" throwing away comments that you spent a half hour writing. I felt strongly that the user should get an override button, similar to vouch, which lets you post your comment anyway. Obviously, it'd be revokable if abused.
But it's so easy for us to sit here and say all that when they're the ones in the field doing the work. If they added masterbation to the list, it's likely because they saw a lot of comments correlated with it -- comments that, again, would drive the average user away from HN over time, rather than keeping us together as a community. The false positives are "for the greater good" in that sense, i.e. the cost of doing business.
It took me a long time to accept this, but there's honestly nothing wrong with that. I used to feel strongly that they were treating users immorally by taking such a callous attitude with them.
What changed my mind was seeing how moderation is done on all the other websites. It made me appreciate that Dan is consistent – and especially that he's consistently clear with his expectations.
The mod team has undoubtedly grown beyond himself by now (he's said as much), so it's also impressive that he's trained his team so well. All of the other mods enforce his same rules, which is no small feat. Just look at how hard it is for Facebook or Twitter or (heaven forbid) Twitch to get their mod team to be consistent. Dan's crew is so good that the moderation is almost invisible, which is as it should be.
I guess all I'm saying is, similar to a canary in a coal mine, I'm highly sensitive to whether the mods seem to be overstepping and suppressing people or ideas. And if I had to point to a specific case of that happening since 2018, I don't think I'd be able to.
Offtopic from moderation, but Dan's a talented hacker too. https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el seems to be his only public-facing work, and it wasn't till I studied it that I saw just how capable he is at designing large systems. There are very few unnecessary parts in that codebase.
Anyway, it just makes me feel a bit sad to see people saying he's low-effort. His efforts are concentrated in specific high-impact areas, which is as it should be. And most of it tends to be mostly invisible -- when he writes code to fight upvote rings or fend off DoS attacks, we don't see it at all, because he was successful.
Time spent reconsidering whether "masterbation" should be banned is time not spent doing those other things. Or spent with his family, and having a life outside of work.
My main frustration was with the "Posting too fast; please slow down" throwing away comments that you spent a half hour writing.
It's somewhat expected when you're commenting a lot and your recent comments have been being downvoted or flagged. It's rather infuriating, however, when neither of those are the case but one of your comments happened to trod on a mod's personal fixation.
Pragmatically if it stops a spam burden, I don't much care. Beaver college sports and The UK town of Scunthorpe are well used to this kind of regex filter, and neither have ceased to exist online.
I don't think this is a good argument against censorship at all.
There are porn bots in the comments section of my personal website that like 5 people have ever read. HN is a big website, I'm sure spam is a major problem.
I browse with showdead turned on. I never see porn spam. You could say maybe those comments are completely removed, but then that wouldn’t explain the graying out of comments with “masturbation” in them.
If an option to see something exists and is published I don't personally think you can call it censorship. This is a curated space. Dang and others get to make choices, it's part of the implicit social contract here.
I'm not a free speech reductionist, it should be clear. I think pragmatically speaking that if the filters were made, there was a reason and if the filters can be turned off, there's very little of substance here to comment on.
