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So here's a startup idea: create an HN-like forum for topics that are usually avoided on HN. Such as politics. And the only way to have a civil politics forum

So here's a startup idea: create an HN-like forum for topics that are usually avoided on HN. Such as politics. And the only way to have a civil politics forum is to have some professional moderator like dang who can step in and explain the rules to anyone who gets carried away a bit too much. Little by little, the users get educated and start enforcing the rules themselves, either via downvotes, or via actual comments. Wouldn't that be great? In an age of complete political polarization, to have a sanctuary place on the internet where you can go and exchange thoughtful ideas with considerate peers who may or may not share your political alignment, but treat you with respect.

iliketosleep 6y ago
It's a beautiful dream, but I don't think it would work. Quotes from what is civil discourse about heated political topics would get taken out of context, posted on twitter, labeled as hate speech, picked up by the media, and probably end up getting the startup more or less canceled.
SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
Have you seen this subreddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ Forums are very hard to start. You need a catalyst. HN’s was YC - that’s the bar.
- balladeer 6y ago
  Thank you, this looks nice. Do you know something similar for /r/worldnews? Something that's more like what you shared and /r/askhistorians.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
    r/TrueReddit might be close to what you’re looking for.
atombender 6y ago
The problem with such an idea is that there's a lot of room for abuse below what can be expressed in the form of rules, which means it can be difficult to moderate without appearing to censor or favor particular sides. People can be abusive in subtle ways that enter a gray area of civility. For example, a discussion thread that devolves into a combative exchange about what a participant really meant by their comments, and whether that means they're a white supremacist, will eventually become exhausting and pointless, and everyone knows it, but what kind of rule can ban "exhausting and pointless" threads? But any moderation that can't be enforced on technical terms will start making the enforcers seem subjective and biased. Reddit has a long record of subs abandoned in anger by a large cohort of users because they consider the mods to be unfairly biased, and it's not always the case. Conversely, forums can die if the "good" users think that not enough is being done to shut up problematic users. I help run a private discussion board that's been active for ten years now. It's great, but it's had its own share of drama. The hardest problem we had was a person who simply incited trouble. He didn't break any rules. He was just a very difficult person, and we knew (through friends of his) that he had mental issues. In the interest of being fair and keeping to our terms of use, we let him stay. While there were people who openly argued that the community should have room for people like him, others complained and started leaving the site, just because of all the heated drama. This went on for years. After several incidents where it just became too much, we decided to ban him permanently. But it was a hard decision. We still have "problem users" who, purely by voicing unpopular opinions (from nationalist/fascist sympathies to belief in anti-vaxx or rejection of Western medicine), incite a lot of heated discussions. They're not breaking any rules, they're just loud and controversial. I think a discussion board lives and dies by the trust its users put in the moderators.
zone411 6y ago
On our forums we have a special forum called Great Debates that might be interesting to you: https://www.city-data.com/forum/great-debates/ https://www.city-data.com/forum/great-debates/.
intended 6y ago
> where you can go and exchange thoughtful ideas with considerate peers who may or may not share your political alignment, but treat you with respect. I'll bet that this will never happen for topics like politics. Politics is a 0 barrier to entry conversation and a maximally emotion driven discussion. If a forum allows politics, the mod work load goes up and the forum will polarize itself. Politics is one of the natural scissor statements of the web.
tux1968 6y ago
Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum? While the battles going on over ideas on social media are base --- there is still progress. Ideas are being put through the grinder and being put on display for all sorts of people who might never have had that opportunity a few short years ago. It's quite possible, that while it's hard to watch, it is just the growing pains of a whole new chapter in the evolution of human thought. One that isn't restricted to sophisticated and polished elites. Maybe the real problem is our aversion to an all out brawl, rather than the fight itself. It's possible that younger people will just be able to deal with it better -- learn how to better cope with and ignore distractions like trolls etc.
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  I have a slightly different take on this one. Maybe the problem is the aversion of the all out brawl... but the deeper problem is "who gets to brawl"? In an era of sock puppets and low effort comments, I've thought of a system where only those who at least regularly make very good arguments are allowed into the main event brawl so to speak. I've thought of this in two ways. Either you have a free for all section on the website all are allowed into and then select from there, or you actually search for users on other websites and try to recruit them. If you give users incentive to be better so they "get selected", they will respond to that. Then once you get them in you have to reinforce that somehow, and while slashdot made a lot of mistakes, I really like the random mod and metatagging system it used for that. The particulars aside, just doing something to keep the users from devolving is the important part.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  >Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum? Yes. Speaking as a minority who sometimes gets downright livid with the responses here to issues where social-issu technology intersect that are simply phrased eloquently and with “proper decorum” but are still pretty deleterious and exclusionary in their markedly disparate impacts and results for people like me-as more emotionally charged (rightfully, I will defend staunchly) comments criticizing such thoughts and opinion turn grey and ultimately get flagged into non-existence.
  - 6y ago
tchaffee 6y ago
I'm not sure how you have a civil discussion about inhumane acts that are supported by an oppressive system. Sometimes the only appropriate reaction is outrage. Just as an example I wouldn't engage in a civil conversation about whether or not to interfere with a rape in progress. When you find people demanding a civil conversation about unacceptable behavior, it's a pretty good sign that the entire point is to tone police the outrage and therfore normalize the oppression. Why should anyone consider for even a second to a demand that you must politely ask someone to stop raping a child? It should be called for what it is: a delaying tactic. We actually need more, not less, outrage for some of the problems society tolerates or even encourages. So what you'd most likely find in a political forum that demands polite interaction are mostly folks who are not oppressed and for which there is zero urgency to change things. What you find elsewhere is often ugly and uncomfortable. The real problem is that no one has solved is an extremely difficult one: when is outrage appropriate? Sometimes it is. Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way. What we need is to eliminate that while still allowing for appropriate outrage. For sure the fix is not allowing the privileged and the oppressors to decide what is appropriate . I don't have any solution in mind. But I do hope I've brought some nuanced clarity to how difficult a challenge it is to moderate outrage without silencing appropriate outrage.
- leotaku 6y ago
  I heavily disagree. While outrage at e.g. societal problems might sometimes be appropriate, directing that outrage at forum posters that defend what you call "unnaceptable behaviour" is just a bad idea. If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them. If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands. Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/201401/beware-being-right https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...)
  - tchaffee 6y ago
    > If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them. That's classic victim blaming and no one should take these threats seriously. Any further radicalization of a viewpoint is entirely the responsibility of the person with those views. > If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands. I agree that's a risk. > Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation. I agree we have to consider the topic and I did give an extreme example. Yes, I do honestly think some topics that are being debated in society at the moment are just as horrible and as urgent to stop as a child being raped. I also already addressed this in my original comment: "Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way." > (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...) That article has very little to do with the topic. The author is an expert in marriages and treating people for anger and relationship problems and he goes on to talk about exactly that situation: "Divorce and Being Right". A marriage is ideally a relationship of equals. It has very little to do with an entire group of people being oppressed by society. In most cases we stay in a marriage by choice. There is no easy way to leave society or to replace it with a better alternative.
lazyjones 6y ago
> politics > Wouldn't that be great? Yes, until 10 years ago or so. Try it today and people, whose idea of a public discourse is to doxx, cancel and threaten people with opposing views, will still harass whoever they can identify if they read something they don't like. Even if they can't post.

iliketosleep 6y ago

It's a beautiful dream, but I don't think it would work. Quotes from what is civil discourse about heated political topics would get taken out of context, posted on twitter, labeled as hate speech, picked up by the media, and probably end up getting the startup more or less canceled.

SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago

Have you seen this subreddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/ Forums are very hard to start. You need a catalyst. HN’s was YC - that’s the bar.

balladeer 6y ago
Thank you, this looks nice. Do you know something similar for /r/worldnews? Something that's more like what you shared and /r/askhistorians.
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
  r/TrueReddit might be close to what you’re looking for.

atombender 6y ago

The problem with such an idea is that there's a lot of room for abuse below what can be expressed in the form of rules, which means it can be difficult to moderate without appearing to censor or favor particular sides. People can be abusive in subtle ways that enter a gray area of civility. For example, a discussion thread that devolves into a combative exchange about what a participant really meant by their comments, and whether that means they're a white supremacist, will eventually become exhausting and pointless, and everyone knows it, but what kind of rule can ban "exhausting and pointless" threads? But any moderation that can't be enforced on technical terms will start making the enforcers seem subjective and biased. Reddit has a long record of subs abandoned in anger by a large cohort of users because they consider the mods to be unfairly biased, and it's not always the case. Conversely, forums can die if the "good" users think that not enough is being done to shut up problematic users. I help run a private discussion board that's been active for ten years now. It's great, but it's had its own share of drama. The hardest problem we had was a person who simply incited trouble. He didn't break any rules. He was just a very difficult person, and we knew (through friends of his) that he had mental issues. In the interest of being fair and keeping to our terms of use, we let him stay. While there were people who openly argued that the community should have room for people like him, others complained and started leaving the site, just because of all the heated drama. This went on for years. After several incidents where it just became too much, we decided to ban him permanently. But it was a hard decision. We still have "problem users" who, purely by voicing unpopular opinions (from nationalist/fascist sympathies to belief in anti-vaxx or rejection of Western medicine), incite a lot of heated discussions. They're not breaking any rules, they're just loud and controversial. I think a discussion board lives and dies by the trust its users put in the moderators.

zone411 6y ago

On our forums we have a special forum called Great Debates that might be interesting to you: https://www.city-data.com/forum/great-debates/ https://www.city-data.com/forum/great-debates/.

intended 6y ago

> where you can go and exchange thoughtful ideas with considerate peers who may or may not share your political alignment, but treat you with respect. I'll bet that this will never happen for topics like politics. Politics is a 0 barrier to entry conversation and a maximally emotion driven discussion. If a forum allows politics, the mod work load goes up and the forum will polarize itself. Politics is one of the natural scissor statements of the web.

tux1968 6y ago

Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum? While the battles going on over ideas on social media are base --- there is still progress. Ideas are being put through the grinder and being put on display for all sorts of people who might never have had that opportunity a few short years ago. It's quite possible, that while it's hard to watch, it is just the growing pains of a whole new chapter in the evolution of human thought. One that isn't restricted to sophisticated and polished elites. Maybe the real problem is our aversion to an all out brawl, rather than the fight itself. It's possible that younger people will just be able to deal with it better -- learn how to better cope with and ignore distractions like trolls etc.

arminiusreturns 6y ago
I have a slightly different take on this one. Maybe the problem is the aversion of the all out brawl... but the deeper problem is "who gets to brawl"? In an era of sock puppets and low effort comments, I've thought of a system where only those who at least regularly make very good arguments are allowed into the main event brawl so to speak. I've thought of this in two ways. Either you have a free for all section on the website all are allowed into and then select from there, or you actually search for users on other websites and try to recruit them. If you give users incentive to be better so they "get selected", they will respond to that. Then once you get them in you have to reinforce that somehow, and while slashdot made a lot of mistakes, I really like the random mod and metatagging system it used for that. The particulars aside, just doing something to keep the users from devolving is the important part.
dvtrn 6y ago
>Is it possible that we're overvaluing decorum? Yes. Speaking as a minority who sometimes gets downright livid with the responses here to issues where social-issu technology intersect that are simply phrased eloquently and with “proper decorum” but are still pretty deleterious and exclusionary in their markedly disparate impacts and results for people like me-as more emotionally charged (rightfully, I will defend staunchly) comments criticizing such thoughts and opinion turn grey and ultimately get flagged into non-existence.
- 6y ago

tchaffee 6y ago

I'm not sure how you have a civil discussion about inhumane acts that are supported by an oppressive system. Sometimes the only appropriate reaction is outrage. Just as an example I wouldn't engage in a civil conversation about whether or not to interfere with a rape in progress. When you find people demanding a civil conversation about unacceptable behavior, it's a pretty good sign that the entire point is to tone police the outrage and therfore normalize the oppression. Why should anyone consider for even a second to a demand that you must politely ask someone to stop raping a child? It should be called for what it is: a delaying tactic. We actually need more, not less, outrage for some of the problems society tolerates or even encourages. So what you'd most likely find in a political forum that demands polite interaction are mostly folks who are not oppressed and for which there is zero urgency to change things. What you find elsewhere is often ugly and uncomfortable. The real problem is that no one has solved is an extremely difficult one: when is outrage appropriate? Sometimes it is. Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way. What we need is to eliminate that while still allowing for appropriate outrage. For sure the fix is not allowing the privileged and the oppressors to decide what is appropriate . I don't have any solution in mind. But I do hope I've brought some nuanced clarity to how difficult a challenge it is to moderate outrage without silencing appropriate outrage.

leotaku 6y ago
I heavily disagree. While outrage at e.g. societal problems might sometimes be appropriate, directing that outrage at forum posters that defend what you call "unnaceptable behaviour" is just a bad idea. If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them. If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands. Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/201401/beware-being-right https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...)
- tchaffee 6y ago
  > If they actually believe in what they say, you have just further radicalized them. That's classic victim blaming and no one should take these threats seriously. Any further radicalization of a viewpoint is entirely the responsibility of the person with those views. > If they don't and just want to provoke, you've played into their hands. I agree that's a risk. > Also, consider if you're actually being honest with yourself. Are the people you are arguing against actually just defending "raping a child"? Giving in to outrage often leads to people ignoring vital parts of the conversation. I agree we have to consider the topic and I did give an extreme example. Yes, I do honestly think some topics that are being debated in society at the moment are just as horrible and as urgent to stop as a child being raped. I also already addressed this in my original comment: "Too often outrage is thrown around about trivial issues or towards a specific person in a witch hunt sort of way." > (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anger-in-the-age-ent...) That article has very little to do with the topic. The author is an expert in marriages and treating people for anger and relationship problems and he goes on to talk about exactly that situation: "Divorce and Being Right". A marriage is ideally a relationship of equals. It has very little to do with an entire group of people being oppressed by society. In most cases we stay in a marriage by choice. There is no easy way to leave society or to replace it with a better alternative.

lazyjones 6y ago

> politics > Wouldn't that be great? Yes, until 10 years ago or so. Try it today and people, whose idea of a public discourse is to doxx, cancel and threaten people with opposing views, will still harass whoever they can identify if they read something they don't like. Even if they can't post.