Comment by akerl_
6 hours ago
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.
6 hours ago
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
I meant before the DOGE stuff: the technical discussions on his claims about Tesla’s future capabilities, purchase of twitter and latter management, etc.
I am generally very happy with HN’s moderation, but I do feel some borderline topics that have been banned or buried missed interesting discussion. I don’t fault those responsible for not wanting to deal with the potential mess though.
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.
I tend to flag submissions about these kinds of political topics because it becomes clear in context that they're being submitted primarily to provide space for complaining about a political outgroup. This never leads anywhere productive. Best case, everyone agrees and they just stew about how awful the world supposedly is. Common case, people are forced to confront the fact that other people have different values, cultural assumptions etc. and can reasonably come to wildly different conclusions, even starting from the same evidence, because a lot of this is nowhere near as objective a matter as it appears. Worst case, the disagreeing people in the hated outgroup also feel that their position has been grossly misrepresented in the submission.
I could name 10 widely held societal opinions that would instantly get flagged and likely your account banned if you mention a few times. Very hive mind place here
Can you cite any evidence of anybody being banned for the societal opinions they’ve expressed here?
HN wants polite discussion which lends itself well to science and technology topics. Get farther away into history or politics where opinion comes in, then it becomes impossible to debate because arguments that disagree with the hive mind (upper middle class, intelligent, center-left technology professionals) get downvoted and flagged because of popularity.
This just isn’t a site for arguing politics, if you do it too much with opinions different from the hive mind you get banned for disruptive behavior
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What opinions do you want to share that are going to get you banned here?
Which controversial topic do you want to hear my hot take on?
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