Comment by tptacek
3 years ago
On the contrary, "precise rules" make things harder for many people in the community, because the more precise you get, the more attention people pay to them, and the more work they put into getting as far with those precise rules as they can (after all, if the rules are precise, surely it's OK to come right up to their edge, like the railings at a scenic overlook).
One weird subtext of this discussion is the idea that imprecision in the guidelines is costing "the subjects" something. But getting moderated doesn't cost you anything; on the contrary, it costs Dan. You just adjust and move on.
Getting moderated typically results in a post being made invisible to most site readers, which voids the effort put into writing it. Of course it imposes cost on the person being moderated, that's the purpose of moderation and bans in the first place.
Quite beyond the quiz instructions, the rest of the psychology on display in this thread is fascinating. Having clear rules makes things harder because other people will follow them. That sounds like the kind of outcome you fear only if you don't really want there to be rules, but only cultural homogeneity. Which is a stated anti-goal of the site.
One person's "cultural homogeneity" is another's "shared community goal". There are, for example, people who share a goal of curious conversation, and others who advocacy goals, or other kinds of goals.
Yes, but the goal of curious conversation requires a diversity of views, otherwise there's nothing to be curious about. In turn that would greatly benefit from a more classical approach to rules of debate in which speakers aren't blamed for the behavior of listeners or responders regardless of what they said. Otherwise you can't be too curious, in case someone flips out about the dangerousness of that idea, and then you get blamed for starting a flamewar.
I really don't think HN does the best possible job of living up to this ideal as a consequence and you see this in the wide range of important topics that the site has largely failed to debate. For example, a common complaint on lab leak stories is that just a few years ago this site was routinely suppressing people who were attempting to engage in curious conversation about SARS-CoV-2 origins.