Comment by bsuvc
3 years 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.
Thanks 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?
>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.
Can you give links to some one-sided conversations? I don't see many of those.
>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
Haven't quite read it yet but I'd bet there's only 1 side talking there.
HN 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.
What makes it groupthink rather than simply being in agreement about something?
That 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.
Maybe 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?
Amen.