I spent my entire day moderating those threads—to the detriment of the rest of HN actually. That happens sometimes when one story takes all the moderation oxygen. See the links below. (Edit: I'm going to move them to a child comment and collapse it so as not to overload this thread with 40 links. They're there if anyone wants them.) The reason I didn't post the comment I mentioned in the GP was not lack of moderation, but the opposite: I was moderating so much that I didn't want to be accused of over-intervening.
If anyone cares - in the end the decisions I made were (1) to factor out the comments that were actually about Bob Lee into their own thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457341), and (2) to let the other flamewar just burn since there wasn't anything we could to do stop it. The first decision was a good one—that thread spent many hours at the top of the front page. The second decision was probably good also—I have a pretty fine-tuned sense of what we can't control. But I do regret not posting that other reminder. I very much wanted to, and overruled myself—and now I wish I had left a better record of the mods upholding the value of not rushing to judgement. I was painfully aware of this at the time.
p.s. You might be wrong about Garry too. I happened to talk with him that morning and although he didn't try to influence how we handled the story on HN (people at YC don't do that), the direction of the conversation was opposite to what you're assuming. (In any case, if you're implying that Garry's politics influence HN moderation in any way, that's definitely wrong. We haven't changed anything since he came back to YC.)
>You should understand that San Fransisco has serious problems with homelessness and crime. While some people may have been mistaken about the root cause in this particular case, that doesn't invalidate their very real concerns.
I don't doubt they have concerns. I doubt their ability to reason.
Using a single case as if it defines whether or not a massive systemic problem exists is not "ability to reason". It's ability to score gotchas on the internet. It's not the same thing.
The Chicago one gets me. I am not in SF often but we have taken 3-day weekend trips to Chicago since my children were 3. Multiple times walking around downtown, enjoying Navy Pier, even a couple of cases where we were walking to our hotel probably later than we should have after the fireworks.
Not once did we ever feel unsafe in the 10 years we have made trips out there. But read the news and you'll think it was a lawless warzone.
Its kind of funny to claim 10+ years of fawning press coverage when the reality was that electric cars and by extension Musk go ridiculed and called dangerous and unsafe in the media. The same goes for every little issue with SpaceX.
Coverage of Musk has always been mixed and in main stream media often covered negatively.
Maybe in the more techy press it was mostly positive. But even then, go threw history here on HN. The idea that Tesla was scam and just about to go bankrupt was common wisdom and anybody who disagree got down-voted.
So the idea that positive press coverage is responsible is kind or ridiculous.
Its more like its the endless pro-vs-anti Musk wars that lead to this effect. And that happens in the media as it does on HN.
That's why he showed up alongside Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 and was treated like a god on an episode of Big Bang Theory.
The media, for the most part, treated him gently until the Thai cave incident when people started to catch onto the idea that this "quirky genius" might be an asshole.
There was lots of high profile reporting calling Musk dumb for believing in EV and landing rockets. Media constantly using burning Tesla to show how bad EV are. The most important car show in the world, as mainstream as it gets, shit on Tesla hard. Lots of interviews with former CEOs of car companies explaining how dumb Tesla was.
He's admired by a lot of people who have gotten into trouble for saying bigoted things, who felt that there was nothing wrong with what they said or did (scroll up to see someone complaining that this is about "getting offended by some words and a picture") or refuse to acknowledge concepts like systemic racism...and think they were wronged. Victims of liberals, wokeness, "PC police" and so on.
They see him saying the same sort of things they did, and mistake the ability of an oligarch to escape consequences for almost anything...for "courage" and "free thinking."
