HN is more tightly controlled than it lets on. User moderation tools are suspended if a user doesn't use them in accordance with a pro-corporate right-wing bias.
Do you have personal experience with this? I was under the impression that abuse of moderation tools was common due to the fact that user moderation tools and open registration do not mix well.
Yes, I asked dang by email, and he told me flags from my account have been disabled because I flagged things he agreed with. I think votes are also disabled.
The buttons are still there, but they don't do anything.
That's false and seriously misleading. Since you've done this repeatedly, even abusing your account profile to do it ("This is because I disagreed with dang. Dang has confirmed this by email."), I've banned the account.
It's fine to disagree with how we run HN. Plenty of users do. In fact, HN users love disagreeing with us and we take it as a sign of their attachment to this place. Complaining about / objecting to mod decisions and admin practices is part of the life of the forum.
How do we respond? By patiently answering questions, explaining how the site works, listening to objections, and addressing them as best we can—over and over and over. Anyone who wants to can verify this. We've done it over 200,000 times, on the site and by email. (I just checked.)
What's not fine is to misleadingly misrepresent what we've told you to other users, thereby poisoning the community. That's seriously over the line and is a reason for banning someone if they do it repeatedly as part of a pattern. (Fortunately, this is rare.) Readers have a right to know how HN is actually administered, and admins have a right not to have their words distorted.
When I explained to you why we removed flagging privileges from your account, the reason was no different than what I've publicly stated in countless comments, e.g.:
You can find 2,700 other past comments I've made about flagging at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... In not one of those, nor in any email I've ever sent, will you find any reference to us disabling flags because someone "flagged things [dang] agreed with".
It's funny, because I had been feeling this in my gut - the idea that they do have oversight over flagging and downvoting, and they just pick and choose who they go after based on biases.
To that end, I've actually been avoiding the downvote and flag button entirely. It's handy to close off an avenue of admin retaliation, but on a deeper level I feel like the reflexive race to downvote people you disagree with is the "game" part of gamified engagement.
Besides, if an HN user says something horrendous, I feel like other HN users deserve to know the kind of company they have on this site, instead of tone-policing it under the rug.
If you read some of those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. What you shouldn't do is take commenters' claims about it un-skeptically, because sometimes (as in this case) they are false.
I do not take their claims un-skeptically. I've been lied to one too many times by users who claim, "Oh I totally didn't do anything to get banned, bro."
But I don't trust you either, and my reasons for being reluctant to flag and downvote are genuine. This is because I've also seen moderation teams who swear up and down that they're not biased, but who later get caught out when they put their finger on the scale through action or deliberate inaction.
But there's another dimension to the unfrustworthiness, because I have also seen moderation teams who don't put their finger on the scale per se, but are so invested in their own rules that they let their community rot beneath their feet from people who have figured out how to manipulate them.
If you can find an instance of me saying we're not biased, I'd love to see it, because I'm pretty sure I've never said that.
What I've said, and believe, is that of course we're biased, because it's impossible not to be and because unconscious bias is a thing, but that we at least try to mitigate the effects of it, and have a lot of practice at doing so. Are those efforts negligible? I doubt it. I think HN would be a different place if we weren't trying to do that.
You don't explain the aspect where a certain political group generates way more flaggable content, and then you flag-ban those who flag it, which promotes that content because it is no longer flagged.
You also don't explain how 2 posts per 3 hours constitutes a "ban".
Re your first statement: certainly I've addressed that issue many times, but I can do it again: I don't believe that claim is true. It merely feels true to people with strong political passions, because everyone always over-weights the contributions of their enemies and under-weights the contributions of their own side. The significant thing—I was going to say "the ironic thing", but it isn't ironic—is that this class of politically passionate users all have the same perception even though they may have entirely opposing beliefs. In this they resemble each other more than they do anyone else.
