Even if all the comments you find problematic are flagged and downvoted so that no one can even see them? Would you make the same argument for all the conspiracy theories regarding Apple's CSAM scanning announcement; that we shouldn't be allowed to talk about it because there's too many bad comments?
That unfortunately opens us up to the heckler's veto[1] it's a fine balance to screen content that will produce interesting discussions while also not excluding content that enrages a portion of the user base.
I do think it's quite fair that this article was flagged since the comment section quickly got mobbed by some pretty rabid commenters and HN doesn't want to deal with that - but it does have a chilling effect.
i’m curious what you think of an alternate approach.
Look up Larry sanger Encyclosphere!
Basically instead of censorship simply classify the content and let the consumer decide.
I tend to browse in ShowDead but I think it's not a healthy approach to the majority of folks - flagging comments as controversial can end up having the opposite effect from desired since we tend to be drawn toward controversy and the spectacle of it all.
HN has an extremely good moderation system. It has very level headed folks like dang that only use the very lightest touch and the fact that it has downvotes is good - but prevents downvoting replies is even better since it trains people to be more conservative about blindly downvoting things they simply disagree with.
There is definitely an issue with downvote brigading on some articles[1] that it hasn't been able to deal with sufficiently but it's relatively organic brigading and tends to be limited to politically charged topics (and vaccination is definitely a politically charged topic in the US). The solution of slicing political topics out of the general discussion pool seems reasonable as a response and while I would like to have a discussion on the topic with all the interesting people that hang out on HN I can accept that this message board isn't oriented to support that kind of a discussion and is only damaged when such political hot topics rise to prominence.
Oh - if this seems counter to my comment above it's because it partially is. I think this is a hard problem to solve and I don't like any of the solutions out there. HN's moderation system is the is the worst moderation system out there... except for all the others we've tried.
>since the comment section quickly got mobbed by some pretty rabid commenters
In my experience, the first few comments of a post are usually pretty low quality, but after a few hours, thoughtful comments are made, and the low quality ones are downvoted. In this case, yes, the initial comments were bad. But doesn't it make more sense to just downvote/flag those comments, and allow more thoughtful responses to bubble up? There's a discussion to be had here, and it's very easy on this site to ignore the people screaming.
reply