I didn't call anyone a Nazi because I don't like the inflationary use of that term. But the "Nazi bar problem" is, unfortunately, an established metaphor. It doesn't have to be about literal Nazis, it could be about tankies for all I care. The problem is the same.
I'm going to keep calling people right-wing authoritarian and possibly fascist not for supporting more policing, but for supporting a person who has shown repeatedly that they want to rule as an authoritarian leader and is now implementing another step of that policy.
It literally doesn't matter how bad crime in DC is, because the danger of allowing a person who has denied losing an election for 4 years to single-handedly take over the capital of the most powerful country on earth is so high, in the same way as it didn't matter whether communists actually did or didn't set fire to the Reichstag.
This is what this is about. Not reasonable disagreement about policing, or immigration.
But of course, your only response to opposing authoritarianism is that one has to be some sort of anarchist.
Rest assured that I would react exactly the same if I was talking to a Tankie who was supporting some sort of Stalinist dictatorship.
The “problem” you keep referring to can be boiled down to: extremes exist. HN, like any large population sample, is a bell curve of opinion, which, by definition has tails of extreme opinion at each end. However the most extreme and toxic opinions rarely get seen because they are taken care of by community flags and moderator bans.
They are covered by the first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines: “be kind”, which apply to all of us, including you, in the way you are engaging with others in this thread.
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread
The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.
I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.
Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.
Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.
If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.
I've suspected that Rayiner's posts were held to a different standard of moderation than others for _quite_ some time. Thank you for explicitly confirming this.
That's false. Any comment that breaks the guidelines should be flagged and killed, whether it's by rayiner or DonHopkins or anyone else. What we see with rayiner is that many of his comments are flagged because people object to his ideology, not because the comment is clearly in breach of the guidelines.
We don't give rayiner any special treatment; many of his comments get killed by flags and are left that way after we review them. But, whatever you think of his politics, he is an intelligent [1] and thoughtful person who has contributed to HN for over 15 years, and is deserving of the same kind of fair, respectful treatment by moderators and fellow community members that we'd extend to anyone else in that category. I don't see how discussions on HN would be improved if the number of notable conservatives/libertarians was much lower than it already is.
That's a very unrepresentative link. Someone interested in moderation bias should filter on flagged comments instead, if some search engine supports it. Let's just say that it doesn't require a sociology degree to see it.
We can learn much about someone from the best of what they post, and it can help us to put their worst into context. I feel like your comment is more cryptic than it would need to be if you had a clear point to make or a clear idea of what we should do differently.
If you keep calling people Nazis for views on policing that are to the left of Nixon and Lee Kuan Yew then they’ll start assuming you’re an anarchist.