https://xcancel.com/i/status/2025334681047015791
Personally I find his attack on HN to be a bad-faith generalization. In a reply to his own post, Peter shared an example of a personal attack that originated from Twitter/X (https://xcancel.com/steipete/status/2025354408700113274) and not HN. It seems purposely inflammatory to associate HN with the type of attack he gets elsewhere.
I also saw Andrej Karpathy reply to this post from Peter and he supported Peter’s take on HN (https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2025352414648566071). Weirdly, he doesn’t care about the toxicity problems on Twitter/X either, or that he is a close associate of Elon Musk, who regularly calls for remigration, AKA ethnic cleansing. Yet he has the nerve to call HN toxic.
These people are propagandists, spreading a false take about the HN community. What’s actually happening is that they don’t care about the much larger toxicity on the platforms they use like Twitter/X, because it does not affect them personally. They don’t care about THAT toxicity. But if a couple users on HN attack them, suddenly this is a problematic platform. In other words, they’re willing to overlook all the harm suffered by millions of people (mostly minorities) due to Twitter/X but they will not tolerate a single harm to themselves. To me, that’s the behavior of selfish propagandists.
The main reason sites avoid this approach is institutional rather than technical. Adding algorithmic mediation invites accusations of algorithmic bias whenever results are unpopular.[0] Simple manual interventions are often sufficient to nudge community behaviour so that majority outcomes broadly align with the moderators’ priors, without the visibility or accountability costs of a more complex system.
[0] Case in point being X. People routinely accuse the new management of "juicing" the algorithm to favour their politics, when outcomes are adequately explained by the exodus of contributors on the other side. Isolating innate community bias from algorithms is a philosophically impossible problem.