Hacker News: An Apology

Hacker News is a site for posting links and talking about them. The traditional emphasis is on programming, technology, web design, and related subjects, although the site guidelines encourage submissions of anything that “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”.

It is a moderated forum, with an apparently small staff of moderators policing the discussion, ostensibly to enforce the commenting guidelines. These seem well designed to foster interesting conversations and avoid the usual internet devolution.

I’ve recommended HN to various people as a place to find intelligent conversation that generally avoids flamewars and is not saturated with insult. I need to apologise to these people and withdraw my recommendation.

I recently sent this email:

Dear Hacker News Moderators:

A few years ago I received an email from an HN moderator asking me to desist from posting articles that were likely to lead to a political flamewar, and thanking me for other articles I had posted that were more in line with the HN guidelines that encourage intellectual curiosity. I took the request to heart and have resisted posting links to politically contentious articles, even if I thought they were important and contained elements of genuine intellectual interest (something that I believed to be true of the links that the moderators said they disapproved of). I have noticed the moderators taking steps to stop flamewars and to warn commenters trafficking in insult and other violations of the guidelines. All this seemed to be in furtherance of the purported goals of the site.

Given this, it’s hard to understand what’s going on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879645

This article has been attracting comments for three days. It now has 1101 comments. The discussion is the most unhinged flamewar I have ever seen on HN. It is saturated with insult, obscenity, and vile racism. (I do not consider criticism of Israel to be antisemitic, but the comments are replete with slander and racist tropes, such as snide references to the “chosen people”.) Any comment that questions the basis of the prevailing view has a “dead” status. This comment thread is on par with the worst of the worst that can be found on any social media.

The moderators seem to have no interest in interfering with this situation. I see no moderator warnings, and the thread has been allowed to continue to spin out of control. So I must ask: Have the guidelines and the site’s purpose changed? Are political flamewars and orgies of racism now considered desirable? Or it is only when the vitriol is directed toward particular ethnic groups?

Please consider your replies to be on the record.

Sincerely,

Lee Phillips

I have not received a reply.

Since sending that message I’ve looked in on the toxic thread a few times and noticed a small scattering of moderator activity. A warning was issued to a participant who contributed respectful, factual, and quite informative and relevant comments. But these comments raised doubts about the prevailing narrative, which consisted mostly of the usual talking points copied and pasted from DSA, Russian, Qatari, etc. propaganda. Almost none of the racist or otherwise inflammatory commentary attracted any moderator notice.

It should be easy to put a name to this.

The HN moderators reply to frequent accusations of bias by insisting that they are simply enforcing the site guidelines and that any perceived prejudice is obviously a misperception. To me, the pretty obvious political bias, and the reflexive demurrals, were always mildly amusing. I don’t expect people to be free of bias, and even less to be aware of their own biases. It was harmless. And there is always my own confirmation bias to take into account: it could be that they were more objective than it seemed to me.

But this is off-the-scale ridiculous. There is no way to explain this away. I’m through visiting the comment sections on Hacker News. Whatever disingenuous game they’re playing, I don’t want to go anywhere near it.

I say again: I apologise to anyone who looked in on Hacker News based on my recommendation and found themselves mired in this filth.