I appreciate the reply. My reaction, like most moderation comments, was shallow and limited in scope to what I know about forum dynamics. If you come out swinging with Nazi references, you're turning the knobs to 11 from the start. That's not compatible with the kind of discussion HN is going for. It's particularly troublesome when the thread is new, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Also it's not as if that was the only such reference in the comment.
Reading it the next morning, though, I think I misread what mindslight meant by "getting your family out of the concentration camp". Now that I'm reading it differently, I can see how my reply came across as too heavy-handed. Sorry all!
Hey, we appreciate you, dang. More than you probably will ever know. That this community is still what it is... it blows me away, and it is in large part due to your vigilance. Thank you.
I'm afraid that's sample bias. We've done exactly the same kind of moderation countless times on all wings of commenters for many years.
You're right that not every comment which should be moderated actually gets moderated, but this is not because we're secretly on one side or the other. It's because we don't see most of what gets posted here. There's far too much of it to read, and we can't moderate what we don't see. If you see a post like that going unmoderated, the most likely explanation is that we just didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
To politically passionate users, it always feels like the mods are against them and secretly in cahoots with the other side, but this is an illusion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If it helps at all, the other side has exactly the same complaint, just with the political bit flipped. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26368875 for a plethora of quotes; they're years old now, but the phenomenon is perennial. Here are a few more recent cases:
> We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do.
This is in response to someone who is violating the rules on extremist/flame bait/trolling with a right wing bent. It appears that you were pointed out this comment based on the inclusion of the word “rabid”.
Now instead of coming in as a mod enforcing impartial rules, you’ve added words that give the tone that you are only admonishing this person because they got snitched on.
If I believed you were impartial then even if you were pointed out this instance of rule breaking by an impartial observer, I would still expect you to treat it in a neutral manner.
I understand after reading your links that I am probably falling to some sort of bias when I called you out on this particular, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone these days
Would it help you build some trust if I, as the original commenter in this thread and long time HN user with showdead=yes, said I have not noticed an overriding left/right bent to moderation? There are definitely topics and periods where there is more frenetic energy from the "left" or the "right" causing more heated comments, but this is not a moderation bias.
And I agree that my original comment was treading the line in a few places! I think some of that is necessary these days, as I said in a follow up. Honestly I'm still reeling a bit from dang's response of effectively 'oh, you were talking about the current concentration camp? carry on then'. Because yes - I wish that term were still unnecessarily inflammatory.
(also FWIW the other "right wing" comment you're talking about is actually coming from a "left" perspective. I don't think it's an appropriate response to this topic, and I'm personally past that kind of self-flagellation because the time to focus on fighting the "rabid progressivism" is when it has power. But we're all processing this in our own ways)
