I, for one, hope that HN never becomes this unmoderated hellscape many people seem to want it to be.
HN has had moderators from day one. If you want a censorship-free forum those do exist - there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums, and that isn't a coincidence.
The problem with shadow bans and most moderation is they basically all eventually just make the user's account have no voice at all and its not redeemable. Sure this helps with spam, but on a long enough time frame these types of systems would ban even their best users. In fighting spam and other abuse we take approaches that don't mirror real life at all, even the most rigid humans will forgive.
> there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums
Could you link to worst examples? I think that finding these with search engines might be difficult.
HN has had moderators from day one. If you want a censorship-free forum those do exist - there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums, and that isn't a coincidence.