PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

>> dominic @casiotone · 13h >> unless his job is "maintaining a worryingly high level of white supremacist comments" no he does not

I remember, when I was in high school, I read a book about arithmomancy, an occult practice that basically consists of adding up, dividing etc numbers until you get to a result that has some esoteric significance.

For example, if you divide 300, the number of the Spartans in Thermopylae, by 100, the number of years in a century, you find 3, 3 is the number of the holy trinity, therefore the sacrifice of the Spartans at Thermopylae heralds the Lamb of God, who sacrificed himself to bring on the glory of the Trinity in a new aeon of the human spirit. Something along those lines- you basically do some base arithmetic and jump around meanings and symbols like a little frog from lillipad to lillipad.

Anyway, after I read that book, I started experimenting with my date of birth, specifically the day of the month, let's say it was made from the digits in XY. After spending a whole week obsessively (but how else) deriving all sorts of deeply meaningful, mystical insights about the relation of XY to the month and year of my birth, the births of my parents, my friends, Jesus Christ, Olaf Palme and Gina Lolobrigita, of all people, I started seeing "XY" e v e r y w h e r e. Like, I'd go to the loo and my eyes would idly scan the surroundings and find the two digits, XY, on the back of a shampoo bottle, or I'd see them aaalmost forming in the foam at the bottom of the bathtub, or the steam on the mirror, or wherever really. It took me a while to get over it. XY everywhere!

What does this tell us? That if you look for something hard enough, you will notice it to the exclusion of every other detail around it, even if every other detail appears with the same frequencey as that one thing you're seeing - and you're seeing it because your entire mind is actively looking for it.

Aye, you got it: confirmation bias.

So with "white supermacist" (or sexist, classist, genderist, whateverist) comments on HN. There's always someone who thinks HN leans one way in whatever polarised debate. Then there's always someone else who thinks it leans the other way. Because HN doesn't lean either way. It's just, people come on here wanting to find a certain opinion that they absolutely want to do battle with. So they lower their visor and through its cross-shaped slit they see what they want to see. And notice nothing else.

So, "HN is white supremacist". Honestly.

And there are plenty more of openly racist, misogynistic comments on HN that get flagged to death. Plus, the accounts that post only such comments get shadowbanned and their throwaways get shadobanned. Then those that get their comments treated liek that complain that their freedom of speech is impinged upon or whatever and they post comments that they preface with "let the downvotes begin" and they get downvoted not because of what they say, that nobody reads, but because of the preface, that everybody knows is a sign of an unworthy comment.

Clearly, some escape. There's one moderator and a community of users who can't always be vigilant or always have time to read through every polarised screed at the bottom of a ten-comment thread. So yeah, some stuff that should really be buried, stays in the open.

So, what?