How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.
And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you are not doing this same thing to every comment trying to remove my freedom, which then will call me some label for disagreeing with COVID policies or whatever then I can't really take any of the guidelines seriously. I was here when it was all about segregating the ones who disagreed from life, even denying healthcare while still forcing them to pay taxes.
We're way past fake politeness when the discourse is always pro war, pro xenophobia for certain acceptable targets (e.g. Russia), pro disparaging certain alleged ideologies/parties (e.g. US republican).
2020-2021 happened and there's been no apology. Till then, the biased moderation rings hollow.
I don't even know what your position or point was. It’s irrelevant. We're don't moderate for/against any side or position. We just don't have time to take that into account. The guidelines apply regardless of what you're trying to say, and we routinely get these kinds of grandiose claims about our covert motivations and biases, when the reality is far more boring: just preventing this site from turning into a flaming hellscape is a big enough task, without trying to complicate things further by promoting any particular ideology or narrative.
For what it's worth I was here behind the scenes in 2020-21, and I know very well that plenty of effort was made to give all perspectives a fair hearing.
What we're asking for is quite simple. The guidelines are a condition of participating here. A sincere effort to observe them is expected from everyone, otherwise it's fine to choose not to participate.
You realize that you're putting your "boring moderating reality" against the very real claims of goverments and people here to
- Remove people who didn't obey the house imprisonment rules during covid from society.
- Removing their jobs and ability to make a living
- Stealing their money
- Denying their ability to healthcare for any procedure
- Be put in camps permanently until they "complied" because "their body, our choice".
Once you factor that type of attack where no human rights nor Nuremberg trial result was respected, the faux civility and non bias rings absolutely hollow.
I'll try to attack their points with more faux civility like you want because staying silent is what got us there, but sometimes it may come up as more raw, since it's very easy to repeat state euphemisms to destroy people's lives but it's harder to counter permeated propaganda.
Edit: Reading my post again, it's absolutely on point. Hard to regret that. How would you write it?
Please don't try to turn this into a debate about pandemic policies. You don't know what any of us personally believed about any of it then or now, and it's nothing to do with the issue at hand.
There's no point having any guidelines or standards for the way this place operates if they change based on the particular issue of the day. The purpose of HN's guidelines is that we should be able discuss any topic, no matter how difficult, as long as we do so in the spirit of curiosity.
Outside HN there's no shortage of places where people can engage in ideological battle and vigorous protest, and I'm fully supportive of your right to do whatever you want to do to fight for the issues you believe in. Indeed, you're welcome to fight for what you believe in here too, but the way it's done on HN is through respectful conversation and persuasion, not aggression.
As for your own history here, the first time I can see moderators having to ask you to follow the guidelines is in 2014, so this pattern goes back years before the pandemic. HN is only a place where people want to come to discuss important topics because other people make the effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down. Please be one of the ones to make this place better, not worse, otherwise you're welcome to choose not to participate here.
- I'll say goodbye for now. You've given me pause and not because I buy into the fake politeness because I think that's BS (If you may grant me that expletive).
- I think bringing 11 year old stuff (2014) without actually even putting the comment shows bad faith and an imbalance of power which tells me all I need to know not to engage further. You win. Point proven. You have power. I don't. Go pretend your world is fair and equitable but, if you have a lot of free time, do analyze how much you stopped calls for denying healthcare and putting people on camps the same way you stop someone telling others to parent their kids instead of removing their freedoms.
Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.