Now I've been able to look into those comments, I agree it's not what we want on HN, and I've acted on more of their comments. If that kind of thing continued we'd ban them.
The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.
They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.
The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.
And what I am saying is that this is far too focused on the how the displeasure with racist garbage is voiced instead of the racist garbage itself. You can't just ignore what was said and brush it off with "I'm not choosing a side".
The core problem here wasn't @almostgotcaught, it was @typeofhuman. Maybe they could have handled it better, but it really wasn't that bad, and their sharp response really isn't the main problem here.
This is also why flagged comments should just disable replies to the entire thread by the way, instead of just the flagged comment.
The way this started was when almostgotcaught made a comment that said "jesus christ you people are so thick", in a reply to a different commenter. That commenter had written an inflammatory comment attacking America's "barbaric cultural history". I chided them first and flagged their comment so it was killed, and only after that responded to almostgotcaught, because "jesus christ you people are so thick" is well towards the worst end of the spectrum of inflammatory comments we see here. I hadn't seen any of the stuff from typeofhuman at that point, and nothing about dog-whistle comments had come onto the radar. I was just focused on dealing with a user who seemed to be waging war against HN and going off on a tear, which they've done before. They (almostgotcaught) are a user who has a history of posting inflammatory comments, about things that have nothing to do with racism; the first comments they were called out for by dang were about programming languages.
I've been doing this work in various forms for a long time, and we've had cases before where dog-whistle comments have been posted, and, in the best instances the way they've been handled by the community has been anti-inflammatory and mature. That is, others reply with sober explanations about what's going on, and send emails to the moderators so we can know about them and take appropriate action (killing comments and banning users). In such cases, the issue was dealt with very effectively and without it turning into a huge meta-drama that gives it much more visibility than it needs to have.
This is ultimately the point I keep trying to make. HN's guidelines and feedback mechanisms are designed to deal with this stuff, and have a track record of dealing with this stuff very effectively when people use them properly, which most people do, most of the time. That could have happened in this case too. When people take matters into their own hands and wage war, everything breaks down.
The problem in this thread was that almostgotcaught posted multiple escalatory comments, then when I replied to them asking them to stop, which is just routine moderation here, they continued escalating and making swipes against HN's whole approach to moderation and assuming bad faith on our part, rather than doing what many others do and working constructively with us to help HN function better.
They've said elsewhere that they were very upset by the comments and I can understand that. It's a topic that's sensitive and is prone to get people upset. I could have been more considerate of that. It's hard to be considerate when your character is under attack for just doing the job that is expected of you and that you do the same way every day.
The biggest takeaway is that HN can't discuss topics like this without them descending into hellish flamewars, which is disappointing.