I care deeply about the hacker news community, but engaging a conspiracy theorist on a standard discussion is destructive and dangerous to the overall community because such a conversation is a grounds to express more "facts" and reach a broader market. My response quickly points out the connection to existing dangerous communities and reinforces our reality as people casually browsing an internet forum and preempts further discussion and replies of ("I'm just saying")
Since you care deeply about the HN community, you should refrain from posting low-quality comments and breaking the site guidelines. As they point out, the way to deal with egregious comments is to not reply, to downvote/flag, and possibly email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. Otherwise we just end up in a tedious, offtopic spiral.
The discussion here focused on a single spam account being banned from Twitter, flagging comments and suspecting accounts promoting conspiracy theories validates that disgusting worldview (that big tech has a nefarious connection to underaged trafficking). But as the other comment said I do appreciate your civility. I would like to point out this tedious off topic spiral has the benefit of refusing the engage the dangerous ideas we were originally responding too, and instead pivoting the topic.
Ok, but the cost of tedious downward spirals greatly exceeds the benefit. Much better is not to feed them. We all need to just accept wrongness on the internet as a cost of doing internet on the internet. Fighting it amplifies it.
I think that's the fundamental disagreement. I think fighting it through dressing down is most effective. Conspiracy theories thrive on politeness, and masking harmful leaps of faith as innocent conversation. Mockery quickly points out the inherent bad faith of the premise. I don't think open platforms have to cater to such extremism.
HN is one kind of site (the kind where that's not ok) and not the other. I get that not everyone agrees with the guidelines or would design a community to be this way, and that's fine—there's room for many different kinds of community, including many that haven't been created yet. We're going to enforce the rules of this one, though.
That's a valid perspective and I find this community to be a place of interesting content and discussion the majority of the time. Obviously my comment was flagged, and looking at the original parent I replies reveals a vast array of discussion circling around dangerous speculation and paranoia, so whatever goals I aimed to accomplish failed.
Oh well, it's ultimately just the internet, I have to believe people are good enough not to become radicalized. Worrying about these issues is more likely to get me banned then to generate anything productive.
