Unfortunately it is not true in general that the reason accounts are being banned is incivility. Censorship of unwanted opinions is very much real on this site.
Disagree completely, and I am far to the right of what I suspect the average hacker news member would be politically. Certainly opinions on the right get heavily downvoted, but that’s not censorship. Dang has corrected me a number of times for incivility, but he has never touched any of my posts because I happen to lean in the opposite direction of my colleagues here.
There is a flag in your profile called "showdead" that you can turn on to see the comments that have been deleted. There might be some minimum karma requirement for this, I'm not sure.
But I've had it on for a while now and I usually read a few of the dead comments. I see a lot of incivility, inanity, very little in the way of a politely expressed, well-thought out but unpopular opinion.
I didn't claim that incivility does not also exist. And the banned accounts don't show up in showdead anymore, either. What you consider "well-thought out but unpopular opinion" could also be subject to your personal biases.
Its possible that it happens, but from my admittedly limited anecdotal experience from seeing a half dozen or so people claim that they were banned for no reason and then taking a look at their comment history, they were absolutely banned for a reason.
Do you have an example of someone being banned simply because they shared an unpopular opinion?
Also "not true in general" implies that you seem to think that its a widespread problem and banning people simply for having an alternative opinion is one of the more common reasons people are banned. On HN that is something I find hard to believe.
But that's the thing -- I'm a woman in tech. How am I political? I'm just a sack of cells like you. Are you a political topic?
To get back to the parent posters, that's why I keep coming back to HN despite the unfortunately-now-expected friction of, well, comments like the one above me. (And timeeater, to be really clear, I don't care your position on feminism or socialism. The friction is that you label me talking a "political topic".) The conversation here is overall good enough to outweigh that, and I have learned a lot from conservatives/Julia programmers/people who've experienced homelessness/infosec people/homebrewers on HN.
Huh what makes you think that I think you are political because you are a "woman in tech"?
Women in tech is political when it comes along with the unfounded claim that there are so few women in tech because of sexism.
I didn't label you anything, I wasn't even aware of your username appearing in the comment thread. I only answered to comments, not to people.
You as a "woman in tech" could become political if you started claiming special rights or special insights or demand special treatment because of your status as woman in tech.
But this is silly. I was born with what I was born with. Why do I have to think about it? What choice did I have in it? Religion, I can choose. Politics, I can choose. Gender? That's not my choice. To the extent it's my identity, it's forced upon me. Thanks, guys.
In this thread, I'm responding to timeeater's claim that it's censorship, not incivility, that results in banning. As evidence, timeeater says that criticising feminism is 'not allowed' or suppressed. But I would argue that it's not criticism of feminism that gets timeeater in trouble, but instead the tendentious supposition that discussing women at all is "political" (to quote, "But there are political topics on HN all the time (women in tech, worker unions at Amazon, and so on and so on)."). Then timeeater goes on to make some statements about special treatment and special insights. Now that's the rabbithole of wasted pixels that Paul Graham is getting at in his essay -- it's really not germane to the discussion, and it's all bound up in an identity that is indeed chosen.
You misinterpret my statement, that is all. I mentioned "women in tech" as an example, because those articles are usually political. They tend to be about alleged discrimination and demands for special treatment of women in tech. That is politics (special treatment of a specific group of people is a policy).
If you don't do any of those things, your person is not a political issue.
Also I didn't say you shouldn't be allowed to post political things like "women in tech". Hacker News policy says that, and bans people for commenting on such threads under the pretense of the policy.
Stop misinterpreting my comments.
And nobody is forcing you to use your body for politics. You don't have to identify as a feminist, either. Feminism is not synonymous with women.
