Hacker News

points by techteach00 1 day ago | 0 comments

My comment should not have been flagged.

You will fail to achieve anything if you mentally approach these things from a partisan view (like all the comments, general public). ICE should not be running surveillance Ops on Left activists or immigrants and the FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters.

The tools violate all of our rights full stop. Please don't support this garbage again when Dems sweep into power, trying to debank ppl for X tweets etc.

[–] JuniperMesos 1 day ago

ICE should absolutely be running surveillance ops on immigrants that is their job. That is necessary to do in order to find and deport illegal immigrants, many of whom have been going out of their way to evade deportation for decades.

[–] craftkiller 1 day ago

> FBI should not run surveillance Ops on Right activists, J6 rioters

I think an important distinction here ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so they have no reason to be spying on US citizens unless we're harboring illegal immigrants.

The FBI's *is* the domestic intelligence and security service. So an angry armed mob smashing the Capitol building, threatening to hang the vice president, interfering with the lawful transfer of power, and attempting to gouge the eyes out of a police officer are absolutely something the FBI should be investigating and surveilling. If I merely posted online that I *wanted* to do any of those things, I would expect to be surveilled by the FBI. Actually doing those things is a guarantee.

Neither agency should be doing it for political affiliation reasons, but J6 was a lot more than people just "being conservatives".

[–] hagbard_c 1 day ago

Mine was as well, there seems to be an aggressive flag brigade watching this thread. I only pointed out that left spies on right while right spies on left which was too much for the trigger-happy flaggers. It doesn't bode well for the future of this site, there's plenty of censor-happy sites and services out there for those who can not abide to see anything outside of their desired narrative so it is sad to see how these narrow-minded hacks have invaded the hacker news.

[–] Executor 1 day ago

IMO the moderators here are biased leftwingers/anti-rightists. Your opinion is sensible but naive - politics is subject to darwinian pressure and if you want to win then it is an absolute war. Both parties should go to the extreme in increasing their power. Technologists should be aware of the hard nature of politics.

[–] bigyabai 1 day ago

Moderators don't flag these comments, nor do they comb through flagged comments to vouch for them. This website is funded by Y Combinator, so if anything the ownership is steered by centrist/pro-right rules and decisionmaking.

Looking at your comment history, it looks like your comments were flagged for Holocaust denial, white supremacist sentiments and uncouth conduct in general. The parent comment was flagged for being low-effort and factually incorrect. If HN didn't flag these comments, the website would be indistinct from /pol/.

[–] hagbard_c 1 day ago

I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of and it is actually hard to know what it actually takes to be accused of white supremacist sentiments [1] nowadays since that term has been bandied around by the usual suspects so much. The problem I see is that this site has started to look like /pol/ more or less since Trump 1 when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk. Either bring the ban hammer down on all posts political or keep it only for those few occasions where someone really goes over the line. The mentioned holocaust denial would be one as far as I'm concerned, same for the denial or glorification of other atrocities like the Holodomor/killing fields/Chinese cultural revolution/etc. Political dissent should never be a reason for flagging but unfortunately I've seen this too many times. The Athenians used to debate politics (among other things) on the 'agora' or 'meeting place'. They generally did not do this by kicking anyone who dissented off the square, they debated them. Sites like HN are the modern versions of that meeting place and kicking people off them because they happen to voice dissent does not do anyone any good.

[1] Here's a nice read-up on the subject: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-white-supremacy/ ... and please don't tell me that James Lindsay is a white supremacist to avoid ending up in an endless loop. He isn't, not even when he says something you don't agree with, see https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/07/maybe-we-sh...

[–] bigyabai 1 day ago

> I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of

It takes 15 seconds to check. HN isn't an anonymous messageboard.

> when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk.

That "seemingly" is doing all your heavy lifting, there. Read my last comment again; users are the ones who enforce flags on those posts, in the vast majority of cases.

It can lead to scenarios where apolitical submissions are flagged, or where flamebait slips through. There is almost never a moderator with their finger on the button waiting to flag something on /new, much less in the comment section. The only exception is banned users and banned domains, both of which prevent repeat offenders and disingenuous content from reaching the front page.

Just about every social media site is privately-owned, and protected by Section 230 from most political blowback. If you want to discuss white supremacy and Holocaust denial, you'll have to do it on federal honeypot sites like /pol/, not here. The OP thread is on-topic, intellectually gratifying, high-quality and relevant to HN as it mentions a YC 2020 batch company (Fly.io).

[–] hagbard_c 17 hours ago

> It takes 15 seconds to check. HN isn't an anonymous messageboard.

t is not the time it takes which is relevant, it is the interpretation of what is white supremacy and similar labels which I'm talking about. I checked his history and noticed a number of what I interpret as trollish comments from a number of years ago. That's not white supremacy but trolling - not something I prefer to see on this site but also not something I'm too upset about since those comments are easily ignored.

https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/07/maybe-we-sh...

Did you read that page? If not, do so, I think you'll learn something.

[–] bigyabai 12 hours ago

"White supremacist sentiment" and "trollish comment" are not mutually exclusive in any way. Many online influencers promote white supremacy with facetious trolling (see: Elon Musk).

In any case, that type of trolling has no place on HN, white supremacist or otherwise. It's direspectful and a net-negative contribution to the discussion, not just a freedom-of-speech annoyance. It's flag-on-sight for these comments, and for a good reason.

> Did you read that page?

Yes, did you read his "trollish comments" at all?

  "It's's about time White people realize that the holocaust is used as a mind fuck"

  "Archive link to not give anti-white Vice ad money"

  "[...] against the best interest of White rightists."

Even HN's mods agree that this is ideologically motivated and unsuitable in any way for HN discussion. We are not mistakenly lumping him in with anyone.