puredemo

A moderator just a hair left of your current moderation approach on the authoritarianism scale would "flag and remove" PG's entire recent article about income inequality with a note calling it "tedious ideological posturing."

Censorship is generally the territory of petty proceduralism, not grand political gesture.

"It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is."

That's a direct quote from PG. Take it for what you will.

I grew up in an area like that. One of my goals if I ever get wealthy is to simply open up something cheap and fun to do in small towns to combat this. Like rock climbing gyms for $30 a month. Or small indoor water parks.

I wouldn't even care if that chain of businesses made much money, I'd consider it a public service.

Well, I appreciate the response, but as you might have guessed I disagree with your approach and assumptions.

Flamewar material could basically be any contestable subject people get passionate about. Of course people online will disagree about contentious ideas, that doesn't automatically make it a "flamewar topic" as you seem to think, unless you plan to flag and remove all impassioned speech here.

Typically for forum moderation, flamewars involve a slew of personal attacks, which are simply not present in my quote. I said something ideologically controversial, but I didn't flame or personally attack anyone.

My statement also wasn't casual. Since the BLM movement was founded on the Michael Brown case, I've put a fair amount of time and consideration into an analysis of what happened in the case and how I should feel about it and the ongoing protests -- protests that shut down the freeway here in SF for hours yesterday, I might add.

My overall conclusion is as stated, and that directly relates to the initial post about empathy online -- it's an completely valid example where displaying a lack of empathy on a given subject is very controversial, which you have certainly reaffirmed here. To you, it's such a controversial (read: not politically correct) opinion (to refuse to show empathy towards a perceived victim) that you, as a moderator, felt the need to denigrate the perspective and flag the comment as off-topic (which it wasn't).

>Tedious ideological posturing

I suppose you're entitled to your opinion, and for what it's worth you've labeled this quote more accurately, but it's still extremely subjective (bordering on facile name-calling) to label what I said that way. What you find tedious others might find empowering, in that they don't have to put the world's problems on their shoulders and feel sad about every victim narrative bandied about on the news. Or people could have a slew of other emotions.

I feel like you're 100% okay with ideological posturing when it's politically correct and aligns with your worldview, and 100% not okay with it when is is misaligned with your worldview. That's the definition of bias. You also tend to resort to tone policing to justify acting on your biases when any argument rubs you the wrong way. That's not good moderation, imo.

Removing personal attacks is fine, sure. Calling anything you don't like "tedious" or "acrimonious" and then flagging and removing it -- that's disappointing to see on HN. Especially when PG has written articles specifically about how much he dislikes tone policing.

I don't even like Facebook much, but I still strongly preferred the design of it over Google+.

Not to mention Google+ was truly asinine about forcing users to merge their YT and G+ accounts (and even gmail, iirc), it was all just very confusing and obtuse. I don't want a SSO. I don't want a G+ account for every Gmail account.

I didn't want to have to fuck around with merging my accounts, tethering each YT channel to my social network, etc. I want -- and have business needs for -- a division between the sites I use. I frequently need several different usernames and identities on different sites, even if the sites are owned by the same company, as sometimes I am creating social accounts for clients.

Google was, IMHO, trying to be shady and act like every youtube comment was actually Google+ activity, simply so they could claim, "We have XXX million active G+ users each month!!" They weren't and you don't. I'm glad their shady network and backhanded business practices failed.

I changed the downvote line, thanks.