As I explained to these other users*, I'm not going to ban you right now because this thread is a mob, and mobs derange people and I don't think that any of us (including me) is immune from this. But please don't ever post anything like this, or remotely close to this, ever again to HN.
> he deserved it [...] I'll have a toast the day he croaks
As I said to voidhorse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150), this is obviously the kind of thing we ban people for—as anyone who reads https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html should know; but given that this thread is a mob and mobs derange people, I'm going to cut you some slack and not ban you. Just please don't do anything like this on Hacker News again.
> For a social scientist, you're either a really poor one, a poorly read one or one with a complete inability to read the room.
Personal attacks are also unwelcome here. Lashing out at a fellow community member is mean and shameful, and also undermines whatever argument you were making.
No, people don't have "have rights to have and voice their opinions whatever it may be" on this site. What people have the right to here is use HN as intended. That intended use is described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Mobs foaming at the mouth, triggered by a disturbed person's violence into a mutually foaming frenzy, is not an intended use of this site. I shouldn't have to tell any of you this.
But you are the moderator. Not me, not the person I was responding to. You have different opinion about people having opinions here at the HN. I have different opinion of the matter. This is great! This is what I am actually talking about! I come here and other sites to learn what people think. To discuss! Share ideas! Have an argument! IMHO whole freaking purpose of internet!
WTF? You can't post this viciously to HN, no matter who it is you're being vicious towards.
Normally I would ban any account that posted like this, but this thread is a mob and mobs have a deranging effect on people. So I'm going to cut you some slack and not ban you. Just please don't do anything like this on HN again.
It hasn't been "manually delisted" - it has been rightfully flagged by users, plus set off the flamewar detector, plus downweighted by moderators, the same way we would downweight any other thread that violates the values of this site so shamefully. Hacker News is not a site for mobs.
I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
I imagine you knew Sam personally when he was President of YC. Most people don't, instead going off what they read in the press. Recent press is often less than flattering, given how contentious AI in general is as of late.
Consider for some it's already hit home in the form of job loss, which for most people can easily be catastrophic. Or maybe they've a giant datacenter in their back yard suddenly, and now their air and/or water isn't viable.
That of course isn't justification, but it does partly inform why some people are that mad, and it's much easier for angry people to be callously indifferent.
If you were to break down HN's zeitgeist, it's some percentage site-local, some percentage larger tech scene, and some percentage general public.
Although you have outsized influence on the former, the latter items factor in heavily—sometimes overwhelmingly so. You can't really control that, and I don't feel it represents some sort of failure on behalf of the community nor moderation team.
I see it not as mob mentality so much as as multiple sides personally involved for different reasons. Things tend to get pretty heated when that happens; not a good recipe.
I'm sorry you had to deal with the aftermath. Your flurry of disappointed, exhausted-sounding comments reminded me of a service industry worker getting hit with a huge rush. There's a kind of PTSD that hangs around once the dust settles.
So, thank you for your efforts in trying to keep the site civil. It clearly ain't easy sometimes.
All communities eventually become a reflection of the society they are a part of. Even a willingly insular and sometimes wilfully ignorant one. Did you think this corner of the internet - your beautiful little garden - could survive unscathed while the rest of the world and the rest of your country slowly/quickly goes mad? The visitors to this little garden may spend a lot of time here trying not to let the outside world in - but the reality is we all live in that slowly rotting society, so don’t be surprised when the infection seeps in even here.
For what it’s worth Dan, you’re probably the best moderator I’ve ever encountered, and without you HN likely wouldn’t be worth visiting. As it is it’s one of the best places for online discourse. That’s directly because of you and your efforts.
It’s not easy to be a cop, and that’s basically what you are around here, but thank you for doing it.
Wouldn't it maybe be a great idea to just ban anything that's not actually about science and technology from this board? This will have the indirect effect of people leaving it who are here for political trench fights? Plus the good old flame wars about technology x versus y are pretty harmless in comparison.
(And no, just because Sam Altman is CEO of tech company doesn't make this news tech news.)
I think a proper OpenAI vs Anthropic flame war might actually do this community some good. Let's just have it out. Avoiding violation of the x vs y technology rule seems to have resulted in a lot of pent up energy. I don't see the harm at this point if dang is saying it's over.
forgot that there is even such a policy. the differentiating feature of hn always was that comments and discussions are relatively thoughtful and civil. that's quickly getting lost.
Respectably my opinion is different. As I am reading through these comments the differences seem to be like neighboring Canadian farmers that each think next door is getting more rain than they are.
Politics is indeed toxic to pure curiosity about pure things. I feel that too, viscerally.
However. Culture war tropes get posted in even the most abstract discussion, so banning top-level posts won't keep it out.
Furthermore, technology is inherently political to the degree that it is transformative. The Facebook algorithm was always political, it just took time for that to become apparent. I'm trying to illustrate another kind of toxicity, that of engineering archetypes refusing to consider the political impact of their engineering decisions. Technologists in transformative fields should not be putting their heads in the sand. I don't want HN to devolve to red/green political rage, but there are political discussions that belong here.
Lastly, social sciences may well be dismal, but they can still illuminate, and politics is a valid subject of study. This site is predicated on curiosity, and areas of politics are on topic for that. Humanity is a system that bears analysis and can even be engineered.
No, ignoring the political consequences of science and technology is what is extremely toxic and psychopathic.
The very American trend to avoid anything political is self-defeating anyway, as it contributes to the social rot and the worsening of politics even further. Do you think the garden will become cleaner if you stop tending it? That your child will become nicer if you stop taking care of it? That your projects will sort themselves out if you don't track them?
You are well on your way to becoming like Russians: more and more detached from political matters because it is not safe or pleasant... until they are sent to the frontlines.
It would be a huge loss and a real shame if you left permanently.
I don't know how often you get to take a real vacation, somewhere away from the Internet and the USA, but this might be a good time to consider taking one?
Maybe it's time to pack it in? I don't just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.
The tech scene isn't the small, tight-knit thing it used to be. This site is now enormous. Discussion quality seems to have sort of "regressed to the mean"... the larger HN gets and the more people join the discussion, it starts to resemble the median social media site more and more. At some point it sorta loses its purpose.
I'm still addicted to HN, but I've gone through times where I've set my password to a UUID and time-lock encrypted it to lock myself out, because posting here has gotten worse and worse and worse for my mental health (and there's no way to delete your account here... I've emailed you about it in the past and never got a response.) On some level I hate HN now. TBH if this site was gone tomorrow, I'd most definitely be better off for it in the long run, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.
Thanks for all the work you've put in over the years though. This site has held out longer than most, and for a time, was one of the best places on the internet for discussion of any kind, let alone tech. It deserves a place in history for that alone.
The event itself is really bad and condemnable, but when threads like this show up they are usually a good thing because people rapidly demonstrate high coupling of tribal affiliation with viewpoint. This causes a lot of them to advertise through unhinged posts which is a good raw test for what they are like to communicate with. I usually go through and killfile a bunch of these commenters. Essentially, you want your bad participants to be easily visible to be so. I don't want them to be subtly sneaking their stuff in normal threads. I want to go look at one place and see all of the people I don't want to listen to.
Therefore, here's a feature request: allow per-user killfiles. I currently have this through a Chrome extension but I'd love it to be native so that I don't have to use my own iOS app and so on.
> Therefore, here's a feature request: allow per-user killfiles.
That would be lovely. It's also an obvious feature which has existed in other contexts for a very long time, and it would be easy to implement. That means its omission was a deliberate design choice. It'd be interesting to understand why.
One of the things I really like is to have a high-ratio of good content to slop content and I think manually curating out slop authors is the way to go for that. You'll see that my lists include things that other people seem to really enjoy.
When violence is considered as an acceptable solution to systemic issues, it is an early sign that things are taking a very bad turn.
I typically take jabs at the community here, but not this time. What you are seeing is a reflection of a wider, much more insidious problem. Trust in society is failing, and people are not seeing a civilized solution through the usual channels - such as politics.
I think things will get a lot worse before they get better. Hopefully I'll be okay in my little corner of the world.
> and people are not seeing a civilized solution through the usual channels - such as politics.
Violence is politics. It's the oldest and most universal form of politics, even found in other species, and even inanimate objects (types of rock subducting each other, we see the rock that floated to the top, that's practically Darwinism).
But humans don't like being killed so they developed systems to avoid violence. Speeches, voting, money, etcetera. It's all ways for people to arrive at a reasonable solution peacefully. It's always been backed by "if we don't do this, people start dying." But people have forgotten this and they're allowing those alternatives to fail. We stopped exposing the new generations to the suffering child of Omelas and they forgot what is necessary for society to exist. People think there is food on the table by magic and there are no wars by magic. And it is magic, these complex intertwined systems. They are amazing. But you must respect them, you cannot destroy them on a whim and still expect civilization to survive.
> Trust in society is failing, and people are not seeing a civilized solution through the usual channels - such as politics.
I agree. I think the lack of seeing a way out is a big component of this turn. You bring up politics and that's a good example. Who do I vote for, campaign for, etc. that actually wants me (an American citizen making around the median wage for my area) to be able to buy a home? To have affordable, accessible healthcare? I'm aging out of my childbearing years and am wrangling with the sorrow of not being able to afford a child. There are some promising local candidates and I do vote for them, but so many of these issues need to be tackled at a higher level due to their complex, interdependent nature.
There's nobody. There's red and blue with different culture war paint. I can choose whether trans women play in sports or if we pray at work, but I have no choice in the fundamental material reality of my life.
We're seeing this chaotic violence in part because there's no alternative. We know the old world is dying, but our leaders won't let anything else be born.
I was talking to my father a few days ago. He's a 67 year old man who's voted Republican my entire life - we'd have political sparring matches in the car when he forced me to listen to Rush Limbaugh as a teenager. Of his own accord, he started talking about the necessary end/change of our economic system. A man who'd banged on about the free market and considered himself a Libertarian for decades, and who still, when he does engage with the news, does so with right wing sources.
He's brighter than average, but not to an extreme amount. The understanding of the situation has trickled down to the point where every workplace has at least 1 or 2 people who understand how fucked everyday people are. My team at work is 6 people doing basic white collar work and we talk openly about how things are going to get worse, and there are nods to it cross-functionally all the way up to the top when our execs talk in an all hands. This is at a very apolitical giant mega corp.
None of these discussions would have happened 20 years ago. We still shy away from the specifics (candidates, policies, etc.) due to professionalism, but the broader picture (things will get worse for the average person and our troubling trends aren't going to be reversed anytime soon due to inaction at the top) is agreed upon regardless of voting record.
It kind of reminds me of being in an abusive household as a child. There is no escape and, once you've exhausted the 'official' channels, you start contemplating other options. I reported my mother to CPS once when I was about 7 and they didn't do anything (except piss her off obviously). On the other hand, the first time I smacked her back, the physical abuse stopped, and I've heard similar stories from men with abusive fathers - that there's a moment they realize they can actually go toe to toe and don't have to put up with it.
If all your abusers will listen to is violence and you're not allowed to escape/get out, it's reasonable to come to the conclusion that in this case violence is the answer. I see a similar dynamic/thought process emerging in the American public.
Something that I've observed happening throughout history is that in some sense "too much civilisation" can be a bad thing long-term.
I knew someone in the army talk about how some officers wouldn't survive the first week of a real war. Not because of enemy fire, but because given the opportunity, the men under their command would almost certainly take advantage of the "less civilised nature" of the battlefield to take out someone they despise enough to murder, but not quite enough to risk it in a civilian setting where the tolerance for unsanctioned lethal force is essentially zero.
Something similar happens outside of militaries too, where truly horrible human beings[1] can cynically utilise the enforced peace of civilized countries to do incredibly evil but legal things. The Sacklers come to mind as a prime example. They knowingly and deliberately sold highly addictive drugs marketed with brazen lies and killed about a hundred thousand Americans by some estimates. They are above the law and totally immune to all consequence, personal or otherwise. No violence will ever be done to them! Anyone that tries will be severely punished, because that upsets the "order" of civilised society where the rich and powerful can massacre millions, but the plebs can't ever lift a finger against even one of their cartoonishly evil oppressors without severe personal consequence.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." -- Francis M. Wilhoit [2]
Sociopaths loooove civilised societies! They can mercilessly exploit people while basking in the protection of the law. As long as what they're doing is technically legal, they can get away with almost any amount of evil acts. This does take a while to build up! Norms, expectations, and the like keep the worst of the worst initially at bay, but these things slowly erode as more and more sociopaths take greater and greater advantage. (Cough-Trump-Cough)
This, taken far enough, where the common people are stepped on hard enough by those they can't ever bring to justice can result in entire societies just... snapping in their rage. They just need the opportunity, a "push", or some enabling event. In the case of the "friendly fire incidents" taking out bad officers, its a war. In most societies it is starvation or total economic hopelessness. We all know what this leads to: the French revolution is the prime example, but many others exist throughout history.
The failure of the United States is that its reigns of power have been completely and utterly captured by the increasingly corrupt elite, and there is nothing the common people can do about it. Frustration is growing, slowly, but surely.
It's not quite at the boiling over point, not yet, and may take a century to get there, but given the direction things have been heading, it's just a matter of time until the people take their anger out in some direct manner.
Trump might have started the first pebble rolling by causing an oil shock. And gas shock. And fertilizer shock. I'm sure a lot of hungry, cold people who can't even get a job because the AIs have replaced them -- and used their cooking gas for energy -- will be perfectly fine with this and won't ever do anything about it! That would be uncivilized!
[1] Disclaimer: Sam Altman is no saint, but I don't think he's anywhere near the level that he'd deserve mob violence.
[2] At some level the people commenting here that it's shocking and horrifying that anything violent ever happens to a billionaire CEO are betraying their right-wing leanings. Conversely, the people arguing that the elite shouldn't be above personal repercussions for their actions are strongly left leaning.
Trying to help your perspective: It might be Gell-Mann? or something similar that you sometimes mention. We assume that users who have proficiencies in one area should have proficiencies in another, or we notice more when something we know and care about is deeply wrong. The reaction we feel to deep untruths is a sign of our care and passion in Truth.
As you encourage, I would also like to be a little bit charitable and say that some users might be clever at programming or know about certain technology subjects but when it comes to real life and morality they are stuck in early edgy teenager mode, so we can still work and communicate with them on other topics. I try to flag these submissions because I know that many users are completely unable to discuss them in fruitful ways. Many of us are immature.
At a societal level, the simplistic and edgy teenager morality is mostly expressed online so we being terminally online tend to notice it more. The morality might be most publicly seen in "silence is violence" which is a thought terminating cliche. Thinking is hard and changing one's mind is hard too, especially when people have these thoughts which literally stop them thinking.
Psychologically, for many, expressing these juvenile, half baked, sloppy thoughts do not require much thought. They are cheap psychologically. It's like how being in a herd is actually comfortable and saves energy. It costs brain effort and potential hurt to ones self identity to change one's brain patterns. Most people choose to avoid even the thoughts that change is possible and not only wish to remain in Platos cave but to then keep their eyes closed to the shadows on the wall.
Another charitable thought: these worrying ideas are not actually ideas but emotions. For some users they try to argue with these people with logic but they should really connect emotionally - try to help the people feel for others, the good and the moral. Easiest to do with personal first hand real stories and not abstract ideas. To break down otherness through charity.
The comments you've linked are gross, but I take exception with what you wrote here.
> or saying they "don't condone violence" as a pretext to do exactly that
Maybe I just don't know what comments you're referring to, but you seem to be lumping every other post critical of Sam in with the worst comments, saying they are condoning violence, and that is disingenuous. I mostly see people expressing they aren't surprised this happened given how Sam openly markets his tech as a dangerous and unpredictable product that only he can steward, and maybe even finding his response to be a bit opportunistic in a tone deaf way, which hardly rises to the level of condoning violence.
I am willing to hear you out on this, but you're going to have to explain how this is different from any other thread on HN that you've moderated. Political violence, on a much bigger scale than this I may add, hits front page news, and you have more than normalized that as a discussion topic. Whether it's drone strikes, wars, or people being openly executed in the street, it seems the tragedy of human life is an open debate on HN, and you can bet a good 50% of this site will be writing comments exactly like the ones in this thread. And hell, I can't say one way or the other if threads like this are even worth allowing.
But now a tech CEO with lots of security gets a Molotov thrown at his metal gate, and people make the same comments, and suddenly a line has been crossed? How are the comments in this thread any different than comments like this, which involved people who were actually killed [1][2]. I have seen hundreds of comments on this site dictate to me how I should feel about the lives of others. I am often sickened by them. That's before we talk about Sam's actual role in how he shapes our society. It's not "sickening" to feel the need to footnote a condemnation of what happened, it's completely expected.
Again, maybe you're talking about worse comments than I'm seeing, but I feel frustrated as people have regularly brought you examples of escalating violent rhetoric on this site and been dismissed. Outside of people explicitly saying Sam deserved it, which I don't agree with, every other comment here reads like regular HN to me. If that saddens you, maybe there needs to be a different approach to moderation altogether.
The difference is that the victim is one of ours. When we kill millions of poor innocent babies in the Middle East, that's not violence, that's not political, that's just technology helping improve society. But when one single member of our political elite is physically threatened (not even killed, like those millions of children, not even suffering any injury himself, just some minor property damage with an implied threat), now that's something we have to rally against or we're violent uncivilized monkeys deserving of life in a jail cell.
As I see it the underlying issue for many ITT is the hypocrisy of condemning violence against Altman while while looking the other way from his role as an oligarch and as a Defense contractor. This is a human being with an awful destructive effect on the world he shares with us. Such people don't deserve violence but expropriation.
>The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get.
There are like 20 rules for commenting on this site. Pretty much all of them are versions of “have decorum”, and none of them are “do not advocate for violence”. It is not just tolerated but encouraged to post insane stuff here so long as it sounds highbrow enough (eg the “most charitable interpretation” rule. It is against the rules to call out stuff like advocating for violence if it’s written like Niles Crane wrote it).
As far as I can tell this thread is not really exceptional in any way other than some of the ire is directed at somebody that used to work for YC.
Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years...
HN (and ycombinator) has implicitly enabled, dogwhistled, or pretended to ignore all sorts of hateful and violent rhetoric. Sometimes it hides behind a veneer of "curious conversation" but other times its disgustingly blatant - last article I saw about sama was filled with horrific racism.
I come here because there are sometimes good posts, but this stuff has been here the entire time. Now its your guy getting the hate you are acting like its the worst thing in the world?
Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful.
> Not sure what world you have lived in for the past at least 10 years
The world I have lived in for a lot longer than 10 years is HN. I'm gut-wrenchingly familiar with the worst things that people post here—probably more than anyone, simply because it's my job.
If you can dig up a single example of a thread this bad that we knew about and didn't do anything about, I'd be shocked, because it would go against everything I believe and feel. Perhaps you can, nonetheless? If so, let's see it.
Here's what I mean by "this bad", if you want to calibrate:
The number of people who feel that anything at all is justified if it reinforces their feelings—particularly their angriest and most vicious feelings—is so large that it's clear that it is human nature in action, and that makes me yearn for a cool and heavy rock to crawl under, with moist earth to sink into.
There was horrific racism on display right here. Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you .. but at the time, some of those posts felt just as bad as calls to violence or worse.
But to compose something more substantial .. its probably all to much to neatly tie up in a single reply to a thread.
> Well I'm not saying they don't get moderated eventually
I'm going to interpret that as meaning that we do our job ok, just not instantenously—which would make sense, given that we're human and that would be humanly impossible.
> There was horrific racism on display right here
If there were any cases of that which we didn't do anything about, it would be because we didn't see them. I can't read everything that gets posted to Hacker News any more than you can; see "humanly impossible" above. But I'd like to see specific links.
> Perhaps it just seems part of the background noise to you
It does not "seem like part of the background noise" to me. What it "seems like" is wrenching my intenstines into an agonizing state on a regular basis and then driving a spike through them.
But you are doing things about the bad comments in this thread too.
Why is "well we removed that stuff" a defense in other contexts but not here? In both cases the issue is this community writing stuff you deem objectionable.
Consider some more examples: trump or that other conservative figure getting shot. Or the ceo of the health company getting shot.
Both of those people condone(d), support, amplify and drive horrific violence.
A common liberal reaction to those incidents - "oh no violence isn't okay!!" - well where were you for all the other horrific things they did and said? Yes in some ideal world there perhaps wouldn't be violence - but I can understand people feeling like they had it coming. It's the boy who cried wolf. It's the bully getting their comeuppance. It can be hard to feel bad.
Sama also talks about wanting ai to be the future, its pushed everywhere and the feeling is its going to take peoples jobs and disrupt everything. But there's no discussion about how we are going to look after everyone in that future. Current capitalistic (american) society doesn't seem built for that ... that lack of care already exists for a lot of people too who are homeless, poor etc.
Being upset about samas front gate getting firebombed while they probably also had plenty of security .. well idk.
> Both of those people condone(d), support, amplify and drive horrific violence.
This seems to be the point of contention. What constitutes "violence"?
A lot of people seem to define violence as a purely physical act: a missile strike during a war, a fist hitting a face, a molotov cocktail thrown over a property line.
What has become clear to me, especially when I saw the discourse around Luigi Mangione and the public opinion polling on it, is that a lot – a lot – of people define it much more broadly: a health insurance denial, a job lost as a result of some CEO's careless ambition, or mere words.
The problem with a very broad definition of violence is that it permits a pretty barbaric worldview. If I cut someone off in traffic, or if a careless administrative action on my part costs someone money that then puts them in a financial pickle that month, is that violence? Do I then deserve to be tracked and assaulted? What about the doctor who is complicit in the refused treatment because the insurance company won't pay a bill?
"I understand the insurance company isn't paying the bill but you are still going to treat me, and to not do so is a violent act."
The list goes on. Can society function if the default action at real or perceived injustice is to just kill?
I wouldn't hold it against anyone wishing my great grandfather shouldn't have existed for playing a minor role in Nazi Germany. Altman is in cahoots with a government that just a few days ago threatened to end a whole civilization. So no, I don't understand where you are coming from or why you're disgusted at the comments you linked.
Let's see this sort of criticism from Garry about social murder. He has no problem with mass death, just through immiseration of the people rather than guns.
As I explained to these other users*, I'm not going to ban you right now because this thread is a mob, and mobs derange people and I don't think that any of us (including me) is immune from this. But please don't ever post anything like this, or remotely close to this, ever again to HN.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728362 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150
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