Comment by leanstartupnoob
5 months ago
First off, thanks for providing all of the moderation energy and you clearly maintain a level of civility on hacker news across a wide range of controversial topics.
However, I think placing this long list of stories all under the same MOT demonstrates that conversation is "happening", but at the same time it isn't really happening.
One of the key strategies used by Trump and Putin is to flood the zone (“Flood the zone with shit”: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...)
As an example, the parent story of this comment is no longer on the front page and instead of anything related to Musk at the fed there is now another distraction about him trying to buy OpenAI.
I haven't read all of the above articles, but from just a cursory glance it looks like many different important events are happening. If they happened one at a time over the course of a year no one would consider it MOT, but because its all happening in the same week it gets mashed together. Individual stories quickly fall off the front page.
From my perspective, all that is true, but it's not HN's job to be the zone that is flooded by it. HN's job is to be a place for intellectually curious stories and conversations. We have to hold fast to that mandate because if we don't, the site will quickly cease to exist for its intended purpose.
What this means in practice is that there's some space for discussing these topics, but only some, and not nearly enough to fully cover everything that's going on right now.
I understand that a lot of users want this to be otherwise. Quite rightly, they feel like current events are important and deserve a great deal more airtime. But our first responsibility is to preserve HN for its intended purpose, and HN is not an instrument that can accommodate much more of this. The threads that I listed above are, from HN's point of view, already a lot.
It's a pity, because to the extent that discussion here is marginally* more substantive than what's available elsewhere, it's natural to wish that it could be applied to much more important issues. Why care about the origins of Proto-Indo-European when the government is being burned down? and so on. We should turn our attention to the things that matter! But this argument just doesn't work in practice. The only thing that would happen if we "flooded the zone" on HN too is that the place would burn out.
* emphasis on "marginally". I'm not claiming it's particularly good—there is a great deal not to like.
From my perspective it seems like HN abandoned the mandate of intellectually curious stories and conversations and is instead a place where only non-controversial stories and conversations are encouraged. If people can only talk about things where no one can vociferously disagree then we aren't really being inquisitive and curious, merely eccentric.
Your comment of "discussion here is marginally* more substantive" footnoted that it's not particularly good also seems a bit condescending. Its dismissive to those attempting to engage with these stories in good faith even if a vocal minority are behaving in bad faith. When a dozen stories are popping up and disappearing in a few hours it feels a lot harder to participate in a thoughtful and substantial ways.
I can understand HN is in a rough spot. But on the other hand, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
> a place where only non-controversial stories and conversations are encouraged
I've made a list of 23 threads (see the reply below), all from the last month. There are over 13k comments in those threads alone, and it's not a complete list.
It's interesting how claims like "only non-controversial stories" or "no discussion of this sort shall be allowed" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018472, to pick the most recent example. In fact we must see more of that than any other reader, simply because it's our job to.
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