With all due respect, I am not attempting to be rude with you and it would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy.
As bluntly as I can say it - it will be years before we have peer reviewed studies published that detail the effect (or lack thereof) of the vaccines on pregnancy. It is an unknown and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. What we do know, though, is the outcomes of people who have covid stratified by age/race/sex/etc.
What we find is that covid is heavily impacted by age and existing comorbidities. If you look at the mortality rate stratified by age alone, you will see drastic outcome differences between < 40 women and > 60 women. To suggest that an injection is always better than possible infection, when we know the outcomes of possible infection on the average person in the 'having a child' demographic, seems disingenuous.
Losing a child is a hard thing, losing a child in the womb is hard as well. Trying to have a child before age takes it from you is difficult. Some of us have went through this pain. To laugh off the risks in a group that was not well tested during the vax approval process does not really make me feel good.
There is simply no plausible way for the virus to be less harmful to the population, or even just the ‘having a child’ subpopulation, than the vaccine.
Please omit swipes and flamebait from your comments here. They break the site guidelines, and they also discredit what you're arguing for, which is really bad if you happen to be right. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
You wouldn’t happen to be anti-vax, would you? Because holy cow, you sure are allowing the anti-vax, fear-promoting front page posts to proliferate these days, which only encourages loons to brigade the site and downvote any comment that counters their bullshit narrative.
Your toleration for anti-vax nuttery serves to encourage it. It’s a variation of Popper’s maxim.
We moderate accounts that break HN's rules regardless of what they're arguing for, and regardless of how right they are or feel they are. Being right is no license to break the rules. Quite the contrary—the more right you are, the more responsibility you have.
Routinely, when people see moderation happening to accounts they happen to agree with, they overlook and excuse how those accounts were breaking the rules (no matter how extreme it was!) and jump to the conclusion that the mods must secretly be in cahoots with the other side. Of course, the other side feels exactly the same way. It's cognitive bias in both cases.
Dude, I ask not because I broke rules, but because there has been a LOT of fear-promoting bullshit being posted, by users who post a LOT of fear-promoting bullshit, and you allow it, and them, to remain active.
You normally have a very even hand on the tiller. Your words are always calm and rational. You frequently kill posts that delve into disinformation and nuttery. And yet you allow fear-mongering posts and fear-mongering nitwits to continue to harm the society in which you live and the site you moderate.
In my opinion, you should realize that your view of this is shaped by your own strong commitment on the topics you care about. Because of that, you're much more likely to notice the points you disagree with, to overinterpret them (as you've done with the link you mentioned in the sibling comment), and to weight them more heavily. It's the charge of your own view that attracts this view of moderation, like a magnetic field attracting iron filings into its own pattern.
Pretty much everyone with strong views feels this way about HN moderation, but the specifics of what they feel (and see) are as different and as disagreeing amongst themselves as their underlying views are. We get this sort of complaint from every angle under the sun, literally every day. When you're forced to look at the problem from every perspective, you realize that the dynamic at work is completely different than what each specific perspective thinks it is. But those perspectives are awfully convincing, because the force driving the perception is so intense.
The very same intensity, of course, is what leads people to break the site guidelines in the first place, while feeling entirely justified in doing so—because, after all, one is so right and other people on the internet are so wrong. This is the dynamic we're trying, to the extent possible, to nudge discussion out of.
How tiresome that you continue to scold me for the mocking message that initiated this thread, instead of addressing your nigh-complete lack of moderation of the fear-mongering fringe that have identified HN as a place where they can wield influence without consequence.
MuchoMaas, who you claim to have banned repeatedly, has made 62 posts in one month, nearly 10% of which you have seen flagged and then deleted, but you claim “Moderation is necessarily inconsistent because … we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.”
But… you have seen it: you’ve been active in squelching a repeat offender that you well recognize as persistently problematic.
Of course, in your view, it is my cognitive bias that is causing me to see this as a problem, and not your cognitive bias that is causing you to turn a blind eye to the problem.
I don’t think I’m over-or even mis-interpreting anything: the proof is shown in your words and your actions: you are not effectively moderating the users who are using your social media platform to promote an agenda of fear and doubt.
Have the last word, Dan, because it’s evident that I’m pissing into the wind here. If anything, I expect I’ve only managed to entrench you deeper into supporting the FUD crew. What a shame.
We've banned that user many times. Moderation is necessarily inconsistent because (a) we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, and (b) not everything we do is visible.
It's a huge non sequitur to go from seeing something like that to thinking that the moderators are secretly in cahoots with your enemies.
As bluntly as I can say it - it will be years before we have peer reviewed studies published that detail the effect (or lack thereof) of the vaccines on pregnancy. It is an unknown and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. What we do know, though, is the outcomes of people who have covid stratified by age/race/sex/etc.
What we find is that covid is heavily impacted by age and existing comorbidities. If you look at the mortality rate stratified by age alone, you will see drastic outcome differences between < 40 women and > 60 women. To suggest that an injection is always better than possible infection, when we know the outcomes of possible infection on the average person in the 'having a child' demographic, seems disingenuous.
Losing a child is a hard thing, losing a child in the womb is hard as well. Trying to have a child before age takes it from you is difficult. Some of us have went through this pain. To laugh off the risks in a group that was not well tested during the vax approval process does not really make me feel good.