4 ms·
Of course not. The only states that do bad things are China, Iran, N.Korea, right?
by agorabinary 11y ago
Of course not. The only states that do bad things are China, Iran, N.Korea, right?
- Myrmornis 11y agoNo need to downvote this reply. The sarcasm was an effective and appropriate way to communicate a serious point.
- wavefunction 11y agoSincerity does a better job than sarcasm in communicating, usually.
- Myrmornis 11y agoTedious HN thought police. Not everyone, not every culture, shares the aesthetics of communication implied by recent HN directives. I think we should consider the possibility that they are, though well-intentioned, overly prescriptive and ultimately oppressive.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWe could also consider that HN has a particular culture. No one foces anyone to live here. It's a community you can freely join and leave, which makes it only more important to protect the culture that makes it good.
- wavefunction 11y agoThis is my personal opinion that I've posted you smarmy git.
- Myrmornis 11y agoSincerity does a better job than sarcasm but offensiveness and insults are best of all? I even made sure in my response that personal pronouns like "you" were not present so that it was a criticism of HN rather than you.
- wavefunction 11y agoInsults are effective in communicating some things!
- dang 11y agoThe reason for HN's guidelines is not that we're uptight finger-waggers. It's that we understand the dynamics of a large anonymous internet forum. The alternative isn't HN-as-it-is, spiced up with more sarcastic or aggressive comments. The alternative is internet sludge. The way to preserve what HN has that is good (and I'm not saying it's great, only that it's better than it might be) is to have a clear set of principles and communicate them. If you know a better set of principles, where the fitness function is high-quality discussion at scale, I'd love to hear what they are. Otherwise I'm going to suspect you of magical thinking, in which HN's current level is assumed to just happen for free, and for some reason meddlesome thought police keep intruding on it.
- Myrmornis 11y agoThanks dang, your posts on this topic are always very thoughtful and reasoned. I guess I would draw a clear distinction between aggression and sarcasm. I do believe you that it's a difficult task to make things function healthily at scale and I'm sure those involved in issuing recent guidelines were correct to do so. And of course I agree that we shouldn't be aggressive (though waveform apparently needs a reminder of this). But I'm pretty uncomfortable with eliminating sarcasm. That's really a very common mode of communication in some cultures. It feels very sterile/corporate to not be allowed to simply be sarcastic. Especially when the target of sarcasm is basically western hegemony, as it was here!
- dang 11y agoOh, I see. I think I took your concern at slightly the wrong angle. The guidelines don't rule out sarcasm. They ask for comments to be civil and substantive. The Venn diagram of those things may not have a lot of common area but there's definitely some. Just don't ask me to specify what it is—that's probably too hard.