> Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong,

> Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone. I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion. Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen. Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading. I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community. In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't. From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.