A truly revolutionary idea in this era of authoritarian social justice causes.
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The insistence on punishment (firing, public shaming) for minor offences (wrongthink) withouth due process is worrying though.
Tell historically disadvantaged communities--the ones with decades or centuries of societal biases working against them--they can't shame people they think are behaving shamefully, and what do you leave them with?
The critique of shaming just seems like another way to prop up a status quo that isn't a very good one for a lot of people.
Can you explain a bit more?
To me it seems it is more used by resourceful people.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010185 and marked it off-topic.
People who feel strongly one way or the other typically want to see the articles they agree with stay on the front page and the ones they disagree with get flagged. But from a systemic point of view, it isn't in HN's interest to have the front page dominated by repetitive arguments (and certainly not repetitive flamewars) about the same thing. That's not what the site is for and not why the majority of HN users come here.
The only way shaming hurts me is if the group doing the shaming is powerful among people I care about. Thus shaming is an expression of power, and a use of social force which must come from groups which have power.
So people can flag "bad" stuff and don't remove topics based on their political/social views instead? Currently the system seems to be broken if this happens. This way you could easly penalize the users who try to manipulate by flagging "valid" topics.
Plenty of articles arguing both sides of this hurricane have spent time on HN's front page, and there have been many thousands of comments for and against. At this point nothing new is emerging. If significant new information appears in the developing news story, that's fine, but until that happens, these threads are effectively dupes and it's not unfair for users to flag them. Repetitive rehashing of the same scorched earth is not why most people come here.
Re HN moderation, the phenomenon behind your perception is that both sides of each ideological divide believe, quite fervently, that we're secretly moderating HN to favor the opposing agenda. I'd love to figure out something we could do about this, but alas there doesn't seem much hope of it. For sure these accusations can't all be right since they say opposite things, and what's remarkable is how similar they are except for the one flipped ideological bit.
More on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14994960 and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... if anyone is interested.