> But according to dang, because people on both sides perceive a bias against them, HN must be unbiased.
I've never made that argument.
Edit: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Would you please stop doing that? It's against the rules because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. That means it's an abuse of the site and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what their ideology happens to be.
> > But according to dang, because people on both sides perceive a bias against them, HN must be unbiased.
> I've never made that argument.
You certainly have. It's one you make frequently, with copious citations of your own comments about how you get emails from people on the left saying they feel biased against, and from people on the right saying they feel biased against, therefore HN must be well balanced.
However, you neglect to address the issue that comments from one political perspective are heavily downvoted and flagged by users having the other political perspective, while the inverse doesn't happen, leading to a natural, obvious bias in the comments.
As well, prominent members of the community, like Thomas Ptacek and Don Hopkins, are regularly seen abusing others based on their political and religious beliefs, and I have yet to see you ask them to obey the rules or threaten to ban them. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26663440 Of course, your standard response is, "We can't see everything. Email us if you want us to do something about something." But that rings hollow, considering how long it's been going on--I can't fathom that you've never seen either of those two karma leaders act that way before.
And whether you have or not is beside the point, which is: HN is heavily biased in one direction. Users who make comments like that are not downvoted, flagged, or reported to anywhere near the degree that users on the other side of those issues are--this is obvious to anyone who takes a few minutes to browse submissions on these topics with showdead on (or even with it off, just looking at the gray comments).
If I had posted a comment like Hopkins's, but about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, it would have quickly been flagged, and you would have been summoned, and the account would probably have been instantly banned. There is one set of rules for the haves (high-karma accounts), and another set for the have-nots.
But even if you would personally act on egregious comments from both sides the same way (which is hard to believe, given Ptacek's and Hopkins's regular, unchastised rants), the fact remains that the majority of the user base is biased, and the end result reflects that.
And despite your regular explanations of how you feel HN is well balanced, I have never seen you acknowledge this. Maybe it should be known as HN's open secret, the elephant in the room that no one--not even the curious--is allowed to talk about.
I've certainly said many times that people with strong passions feel that HN is biased against their views, and that this phenomenon is isomorphic under varying political persuasion. What I've not said is that this means that "HN must be unbiased" or "well balanced". That's clearly a non sequitur, and moreover it's one I'm careful never to make. If you can find even one place where I said that, out of 50,000 moderation posts, I'd be impressed.
There's a second non sequitur I encounter a lot too—people often interpret this empirical observation about user behavior as some sort of disagreement with their politics or some sort of endorsement of political centrism. That also is not what I'm saying and does not follow.
I definitely hadn't seen the comment you linked to. You seem to be overestimating how many HN comments I actually read. Had I seen it, I would have posted a reply saying that religious flamewar is not ok on Hacker News. That's a no-brainer—it's bog-standard HN moderation and has nothing to do with which religion is involved, nor which users.
> If I had posted a comment like Hopkins's, but about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc,
You seem to be alleging religious bias in HN moderation. That couldn't be more wrong, as anyone can verify for themselves: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Religious flamewar gets exactly the same response, regardless of which religion (or which variety of irreligion) people are flaming about.
[Note: 9 minutes after posting this comment, deep in a thread that's 9 days old, this comment's been downvoted. What's going on here? I'm guessing some kind of bot, because I can't imagine a human being following this thread or this account so closely. Alternatively, some kind of vindictive user, downvoting a random, low-karma account because it complained about the left's censorious behavior. Seems to further prove my point.]
> I've certainly said many times that people with strong passions feel that HN is biased against their views, and that this phenomenon is isomorphic under varying political persuasion. What I've not said is that this means that "HN must be unbiased" or "well balanced". That's clearly a non sequitur, and moreover it's one I'm careful never to make. If you can find even one place where I said that, out of 50,000 moderation posts, I'd be impressed.
Of course, I don't have time to go through that many of your comments. What I have noted, numerous times, is your saying that, since people on both sides of the political spectrum perceive a bias against them, HN must not be so biased after all. Maybe you meant that HN policy or moderation is not biased in that way, but that isn't what I meant, either. See below.
> There's a second non sequitur I encounter a lot too—people often interpret this empirical observation about user behavior as some sort of disagreement with their politics or some sort of endorsement of political centrism. That also is not what I'm saying and does not follow.
Ok, but that isn't what I meant.
> I definitely hadn't seen the comment you linked to. You seem to be overestimating how many HN comments I actually read. Had I seen it, I would have posted a reply saying that religious flamewar is not ok on Hacker News. That's a no-brainer—it's bog-standard HN moderation and has nothing to do with which religion is involved, nor which users.
> You seem to be alleging religious bias in HN moderation. That couldn't be more wrong, as anyone can verify for themselves: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Religious flamewar gets exactly the same response, regardless of which religion (or which variety of irreligion) people are flaming about.
No, that isn't what I mean. I don't think that you, personally, or any other HN moderators, would tolerate bigotry against one religion while allowing it against others.
What I mean is that--and this is my crucial point about all of HN's bias issues--the users are biased, and this results in a de facto, shall we say, community moderation bias.
As I said: If I had posted a comment like Hopkins's, but about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, it would have quickly been flagged, and you would have been summoned... But no one flagged Hopkins's comment, and no one summoned you for it. And the nasty series of personal attacks I saw tptacek write recently, in a very high-traffic thread, did not result in flags, summonses, or even mere downvotes--because he was attacking a user for espousing a right-leaning political perspective (which would have been considered centrist only a few years ago).
My observations, having followed HN for years now, lead me to conclude that there is a motivated number of HN users who use downvoting and flagging to censor comments that are contrary to popular left-leaning views. I don't see the same kind of downvoting and flagging used against left-leaning comments.
So even though HN's official policies may not be to censor right-leaning comments, and even though you personally may not do so, that doesn't matter--the users who abuse their privileges in this way are numerous enough for them to have the desired effect. This goes back to my original comment, which was flagged, and which you chastised me for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27455349 It seems to prove my point.
(Yes, yes, the Guidelines(TM) disallow speaking of the behavior that shall not be named, of course. I guess someday that guideline will fall out of fashion--after all, public character assassination is permitted on HN (cf. Matthias Felleisen), so it seems absurd to not be able to discuss the use of selective community censorship to facilitate that.)
Alternatively, since downvoting for disagreement is HN policy, maybe that is the desired effect, tacitly, in a kind of, "Oh, that's too bad..." way. Plausible deniability, and all. This isn't intended as a slight against you, but I can only go by what I observe.
I wonder if, being a moderator and dealing with private complaints and egregious examples daily, could, in a way, give you a misleading impression of what is common on HN, similar to how law enforcement sees the worst of society on a regular basis. I don't get to hear from far-leftists and far-rightists complaining in emails about perceived biases--I just look at what gets deaded and flagged. I just look at the end result, which is all that matters in the end.
HN has lots of ways for people to encounter new comments on 9-day-old threads. Someone happened to do so and happened to downvote your post. That's normal.
I think if I were to reply further I would probably just repeat what I said before, so I'll refrain. If there's some specific point you think I didn't address, let me know.
>dissenters are less censorious and more oriented toward discussion
This is a really broad insult and complement to two really broad categories of people. This is frankly almost as over-general as saying "people I agree with are good people and people I disagree with are bad people".
You're entitled to your opinion. Nevertheless, I think it's an obvious conclusion borne out by observation of the political spectrum and conversations on HN. One could even say that your reaction lends it credence ("He must be talking about me!").
BTW, friendly correction: complement vs. compliment.
