Comment by tptacek
3 years ago
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.
3 years ago
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.