this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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That's a bit like saying "I'm not interested in compiler warnings, my program works for me." The issues this article discusses are like compiler warnings, but for the community. You should be free to ignore them, just by scrolling past. But forbidding compiler warnings would not fly in any respectable project.
To clarify, I am alleging that a lot of this "censorship" is just mods deleting posts which have been sufficiently downvoted by people like me who are not particularly interested in the alleged sexual crimes or social justice plights of people, especially when we actually want to read about tech. Give me a way to filter this out a priori or use dedicated channels to discuss it and I won't have to downvote it.
To use your analogy, write your warnings to stderr which I can easily redirect to /dev/null while still consuming the program output, and we're golden.
We're not golden because we are not talking about programs here, we are talking about people.
When you decide to ignore "warnings" and "errors" like this, they do not vanish into thin air. Quite the opposite, they cause real pain to real people, and when not addressed, they will keep doing so.
By tolerating bad actors, you are not taking a neutral stance. You are siding with the agressor over the victim, enabling them to spread their abuse unhindered. Bad actors are fundamentally louder and more aggressive than good actors. Left unchecked, they will cause a slow but steady shift in any community, as is painfully observable in communities like Hackernews.
That's all too bad and obviously I'd rather everyone was well behaved and happy. But I'm sorry to say I still don't care enough to want to constantly read about this stuff in spaces that are supposed to be about technology (in the case of technical mailing lists and Github issues, literally exclusively) instead of people.
I don't know what your exact issue with Hackernews is, I rarely visit it.
Then it's a problem of the platform, if there's no way to either tag content on a particular topic, which people can filter if they wish, or a place for meta discussions, which people can choose not to visit. I still agree with the OP that simply deleting/forbidding this content isn't a good option.
I do agree, filtering would be a better solution for sure.
Ah yes, the old head-in-the-sand strategy.
Can't think of a time completely ignoring huge problems didn't work out well.
I don't have any problems and I don't want to read about others' problems constantly while browsing a fucking tech news aggregator.
Good for you. But others do.
Sucks for them. When I want to read about it I open a newspaper.
Unfortunately for you, the world doesn't revolce around you. And since people who do have these problems and want to solve them outnumber you, they're going to post about it.
Sure, by all means, as I said, in that case I'll just continue downvoting and not being sad when mods take action to keep the discussion on topic.