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Comment by tekla

2 hours ago

HN is tries (and mostly succeeds) to discourage controversial topics.

Does it? The rules seem to suggest that the intent is to discourage arguments and grandstanding in favor of discussions, and many controversial topics and posts tend to end up as shouting matches in the comments.

  • Religious wars like emacs vs vim are common, so that kind of controversy shows up, but for example anything related to Elon tends to get insta buried.

    Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.

    • > Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.

      Well yea, that’s officially part of the guidelines: “ Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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    • It’s a shame. I distinctly remember a DOGE topic about assertions Musk was making that were easily explained by COBOL oddities. There was a great discussion about it here with knowledgable folks chiming in. And then it got flagged into oblivion. Mainstream news covered it but without any of the knowledge HN users had.