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0 pointsoutis7y ago0 comments

I will obey your decisions as a mod.

However, I disagree with the assertion that my comment was about ideology or politics. My comment was about the very concrete conditions of life of someone working in the tech industry in California, which is why I thought it may be of interest to the readers of HN.

The situation I mentioned is not about following this or that political faction. It is a threat to free discourse, to the ability to have an intellectual life, and to folks' actual livelihood. And it is certainly relevant to many people who visit this site or comment on this article.

The only connection to a particular political side was the work "against" in the first sentence. I regret that, and I have replaced it with "about". If, with that change, you feel that it is still possible to identify a particular political or ideological faction which is responsible for the danger I mentioned, that is not something I can control. I can only say that the boot may be on the other shoe someday, and I would still be speaking up against it.

As for the rule against using HN primarily for ideological battles, I was not aware of it, and I apologize. Would it be better if I started posting more technical comments as well?

Also, how does your interpretation of the rules affect users that use "throwaway" accounts? If a user makes a throwaway to talk about a controversial issue, that account may only have one post, meaning that 100% of its posts are controversial. Would that not prevent people from discussing controversial issues at all? Which, in the end, is the same as the advice I was offering.

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dang7y ago

It seemed to me an ideological rant like countless others—but I don't read them so closely, for the same reason a competitive hot dog eater doesn't savor each morsel: far too much quantity.

Your account's history seems clearly to be that of a single-purpose political account, and we ban those. HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, not the prosecution of political battles. Those two things are incompatible, so we have to be proactive about this.

Throwaway comments don't change the equation much. The test is this: if someone is using HN primarily for political battle, we ban them (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). If they're occasionally commenting on a political topic as part of a range of intellectually curious interests, that's ok. In practice, these are two different classes of user: one is here for flamewar while the other isn't. There are always exceptions, but it's relatively clear where the line is. We don't want users who are here for flamewar.

Most users who create throwaway accounts to post political comments are just doing it so they can flame without restriction. We ban those. Earnest throwaway accounts are quite a bit rarer.

outisOP7y ago

The guidelines say: "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it."

"Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to."

I honestly think there's a good chance your decision in this case goes against the spirit of the rules, dang.

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