Comment by dang
5 years ago
Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological arguments. It just leads to tedious, lame, and nasty flamewar—always the same—and those are off topic here.
It's quite incredible how bad the internet is at discussing this stuff thoughtfully. It's clearly not the medium for it. It bonds with all its failure modes (e.g. snark, screaming, and paranoia) into one hell of a compound. We're trying for something different on HN, and for that to work we need users to be aware of this and not go there.
Doesn't this thread already pose an ideological argument (e.g. country x and y are authoritarian/bad, while country z isn't)?
I personally find it really hard to refrain from commenting when there is a very once sided view presented on a front-page topic.
The issue I have is that some topics feel like they are either flamewar or a one-sided view where people feel like they can't comment because going against that view might start a flamewar. Neither promote curiosity
edit: My comment isn't necessarily connected to that of parent, but more to your reply
No one is asked to refrain from commenting, but everyone is asked to comment within HN's guidelines, which call for respectful, curious conversation, avoiding flamebait, political/ideological/national battle, name-calling, fulmination, snark, and other internet failure modes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'd really like to know what it is. Just please familiarize yourself with the past material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
This, this whole thread is both generic and ideological.
I wouldn't say that about the OP. It obviously has political overlap, but it's not generic-ideological. That would be more like "all corporations always do what authoritarian governments say"—yet even such an article could conceivably be on topic here if it were substantive, went deeply into specific evidence, and wasn't primarily flamebait. What we don't want as an initial condition for a thread here is the unsubstantive sort of ideological article that hurls flameballs of snarky rhetoric.
After that, it's the commenters' duty not to take thread further into flamewar, such as with generic ideological rhetoric. I know it's not easy but it's not as if the principle is hard to understand.