Hacker News Guidelines

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

This is one of the more serious pain points I notice (thankfully only occasionally).

Obviously getting some visibility is important for people launching new projects. Sometimes adversarial comments seem to be motivated by commercial rather than technical reasons.

A shallow article written in bad faith only deserves a shallow dismissal.

Don't force me to fight an asymmetric warfare battle against malicious authors to participate.

The issue isn't justice, it's thread quality.

I'm coming to appreciate this view increasingly, why HN chooses to align itself this way, and the difficulty and precariousness with which that balance is attained.

I'll still say that the instances of HN moderation with which I have the greatest reservations tend to resemble what antisthenes describes above: poorly-conceived articles which would themselves be legitimately flagged and admonished if posted as HN comments to which the rather understandably heated or snippy response instead draws moderator action.

And yes, HN mods can't read everything or be everywhere,[1] so moderation is inconsistent, though I know what it strives toward.

And I can often identify how a response might have been improved or what elements run aground on HN's policies. I'm not convinced that the occasional exception or leniency would utterly wreck the ship (though having seen what, in dang's words things that strongly encourage that a "thread will lose its mind"[2] there's some reason for caution). But in a world where, to borrow from Tim Minchin, there's frequently a contingent which "keeps firing off clichés with startling precision like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition", diplomacy dikes do on occasion break.[3]

And tone-policing that, particularly unilaterally, strikes me as a greater wrong.

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Notes:

1. Which you've noted, 2 days ago <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37225175> and eight years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9979719>. Another HN perennial...

2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176686> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689715>.

3. Tim Minchin, "Storm" (2009), <https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Tim-Minchin/Storm>. Animated video: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U> and live performance: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk>.