Reddit isn't Internet infrastructure. It is a startup. The plan from day one was to make a kinder, gentler imageboard, get acquired, and make the founders rich.
You can't make inflammatory assertions about people without evidence here.
Also, please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts on HN. This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
I don't agree that the post in question is "inflammatory"in any way. If hn is going to be so strictly/randomly moderated that you have to think twice before presenting your reasonable views, it can't be good for the website.
That's not a "reasonable view", it's a fantasy that purports to read other people's minds from 10 years ago in order to demean their work.
I'm pretty comfortable saying comments like that don't belong on HN and that we would all do better to think more and inhibit ourselves before posting them. If people want to slag others on the internet, there are plenty of places to do it; here we try for a higher standard.
>Reddit isn't Internet infrastructure. It is a startup. The plan from day one was to make a kinder, gentler imageboard, get acquired, and make the founders rich.
Can you point out the specific words that "demean" the work of others? All I see is the assertion that reddit is a startup (which is factual) and the founders wanted to get rich (which is true for every founder I know, and is not demeaning in any way).
"The plan from day one was to make a kinder, gentler imageboard [and] get acquired".
This superciliously presumes to know what the founders were thinking, makes it sound like they didn't actually care about Reddit since "from day one" they supposedly had something more trivial in mind, and implies that they were merely in it for a quick flip.
In reality they were almost certainly more genuine about it than that; they sold Reddit early, but they also both went back to it years later, which is extraordinary. So the above is uncharitable and trivializing, and seems intended to diminish a.k.a. demean them and their work. Such a low level of discourse is not welcome on HN, whether it's the Reddit founders being demeaned or anybody else.
It's also easily disproven by what's publicly known about the origins of Reddit (pg suggested they make a social news site, not an image board), so the comment is guilty of intellectual laziness too. It's not surprising that these poor qualities show up together.
>makes it sound like they didn't actually care about Reddit
So the inference made by the commenter conflicts with the inference made by you. So what? Maybe they (reddit founders) really didn't care, maybe they did. Cases can be made for both, with varying degrees of conviction.
The whole thing is highly subjective. I don't agree with the conclusion either, but it's not a mindless personal attack. To me it's an opinion, and even the language used to express the opinion was structured in a civil manner.
I am defending the comment because I can see myself making a similar comment in another context without any intent in my mind to offend anybody or poison the discussion.
Honestly, I feel censoring these sort of comments is extremely childish. I am not the moderator, you are. So the final decision rests with you. I hope I have made my case and you will consider my comments in future.
Intent doesn't matter. It does poison the discussion, and that is not what I come here for. I come here for discussion with a somewhat more professional tone than other fora (like reddit!), and am totally okay with content (including my own!) being removed when it conflicts with that, regardless of intent.
(And honestly, "The plan from day one was to make a kinder, gentler imageboard, get acquired, and make the founders rich." does not play with my notions of civility or informed opinion.)
> I am defending the comment because I can see myself making a similar comment in another context
That's legit, but I don't think you're likely to run into a problem. I took a quick look at your comment history and it doesn't seem related to this at all. Perhaps you're just naturally charitable and it's hard for you to see it when someone else isn't.
HN is something of a safe space for the Silicon Valley startup industry in the "forbids discussion" sense - a place protected from ideas that might make them uncomfortable, that question whether they're actually improving the world or actually understand the people they claim to be helping.
That's massively untrue and a good example of the kind of thing people imagine and then project onto HN.
In fact a plurality of this community is critical and skeptical of Silicon Valley (which is fine when the criticism is substantive and not when it isn't, as with anything else). And certainly the vast majority of HN users resides far away from SV.
I'll assume you're not included in that opinion. Because attacking a fair comment was uncalled for; but allowed because you're an admin.
The reason why we use throwaways is precisely because of sporadic and heavy-handed "moderation" by you and your employees.
Not only that, but you engage in hellbanning. It's an absolutely disgusting practice, which only encourages us more honest users to hide behind throwaways... Or toe the line with silicon valley groupthink.
(note: you can delete this username whenever. I plan not to use this again. I don't want my regular accounts hellbanned.)
Of course I'm included. I'm far from perfect, but do work on it every day, which is all we ask of others.
If you want your claims about HN moderation abuse taken seriously, you'll need to supply links to specific cases of alleged abuse. Outraged comments such as this one almost never do so, and on the rare occasions when they have, I have not observed the community agreeing.
Data suggests that these comments are typically posted by a tiny number of users who create multiple accounts to do it. If there were reason to believe that the broader community felt the same way, we'd be a lot more proactive about changing how we moderate HN. But in fact the evidence points to the reverse.
Uh, I think that was the <5 year plan and the exit was selling to Condé Nast ...
Like Google or FB, Reddit could just gradually become unbelievably massive. It already is approaching that level of name recognition. Monetization should be subtle, with an appropriate long-term view.
