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There are enough places where these topics can be discussed. I come to HN because it is sort of a sanctuary from the madness of other social media sites. You s
by bsuvc 5y ago
There are enough places where these topics can be discussed. I come to HN because it is sort of a sanctuary from the madness of other social media sites.
You seem to think that the civil discussion that occurs here would carry over to these hot button topics, but I assure you that the kind of people who enjoy dragging a discussion down into the mud and participating in “flame wars” as you said will be attracted here once they know there is a discussion about one of their favorite issues.
In short, the curation of HN is what makes it great. Relaxing it would ruin this place.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago>In short, the curation of HN is what makes it great. Relaxing it would ruin this place. I feel like the opposite. This 'curation' creates and harbours one sided conversations at best and what's the point? 1 sided conversations are not conversations, you are playing tennis with a wall. The wall will always win.
- dang 5y agoCan you give links to some one-sided conversations? I don't see many of those.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago>Can you give links to some one-sided conversations? I don't see many of those. The first and most obvious topics are going to be the more controversial topics. So look at climate change, covid/vaccines, US politics especially anything pro-trump or election fraud, and well anything touching on religion. Here is today's climate change article, right on time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546875 Haven't quite read it yet but I'd bet there's only 1 side talking there.
- oakfr 5y agoAmen.
- seoulmetro 5y agoHN still suffers from group-think censorship though. There are quite a lot of members here who will flag any reply to them as they don't agree or simply don't like what they are reading. Power abuse is just a casualty of cleaner boards.
- babygoat 5y agoWhat makes it groupthink rather than simply being in agreement about something?
- seoulmetro 5y agoThat it's a conversation between two people, one being new to the forum and the other being a long time user, both being experienced in their fields and having valid points. I wish it were just agreements, sadly it's not.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThanks very much for your response. Just one thing I wanted to comment on was your opening sentence, "There are enough places where these topics can be discussed." I don't really agree with that. The reason I asked my question in the first place was specifically because wherever else these topics are discussed, they are even exponentially more of a shit show than when they are discussed on HN. I wanted to see if there were any suggestions on getting HN-quality debate, but on more sensitive topics. And the general consensus from responses is, basically, "no". And that consensus actually made me arrive at a fundamental conclusion I think: That it is indeed impossible to have a respectful debate on sensitive topics if commenting is pseudo-anonymous and open-ended. Thus, I guess it may sound dumb, but it just clicked for me that it actually makes a lot of sense. It's difficult enough having discussions about sensitive topics when done in a face-to-face manner with people that have mutual trust - why should we think it's possible to have these conversations with faceless strangers on the Internet without it turning into a cesspool?
- duck 5y agoMaybe one way around that would to be only allow users that with accounts created X+ months ago (and in good standing) to comment on those type of threads?