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Comment by hnums

5 months ago

Apologies, I did not mean to imply that the set of [dead] posts was "the news".

Rather, I understand and appreciate the moderation strategy as it applies to discussion.

That said, there's a subset of intellectually stimulating news that also happens to not be great discussion material.

In the hypothetical where there's some important news that warrants being seen but you know the discussion would be impossible, why is there no option to just lock the discussion?

Again, this is a hypothetical where the* news is deemed intellectually stimulating, important, or otherwise deserving* to be shown.

I trust you have a reasonable answer, I just didn't see it in your comment.

I respect the efforts you put in and the wonderful place it carves out on* the internet. Thank you!

Edit: edits

3 comments

hnums

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dang  5 months ago

Apologies from me also, for misreading your comment and getting a bit defensive!

I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.

I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.

Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more

  • hnums  5 months ago

    No worries! I originally had a second half to that comment that I suppose did all the heavy lifting of making it palatable.

    Thank you for the insight!