Comment by 93po
3 days ago
there are a lot of places to be angry on the internet. in fact, basically every single website other than HN is a place to be angry. HN is deliberately not that, or at least it aims to not be that.
3 days ago
there are a lot of places to be angry on the internet. in fact, basically every single website other than HN is a place to be angry. HN is deliberately not that, or at least it aims to not be that.
But people on HN are angry in non-political threads all the time, to the point that there are several items in the guidelines about it (the latest being "don't be curmudgeonly".)
And not everyone in every political thread is simply expressing anger. The majority of comments in this very thread are reasonable. The ones that aren't have been flagged, which is proper.
But flagging all political threads for "anger," regardless of the actual anger on display, while being far more lenient towards it elsewhere (no one is flagging every thread where someone expresses rage about javascript or AI or the modern web) seems hypocritical.
If HN were only anger, then HN would suck in general, yes. The quality of discussion on this site generally coincides with how much people are able to separate their emotion from the facts at hand. For threads like these that basically drops to zero.
I haven’t really been able to find any comments here that are all that reasonable, other than the meta-discussion we’re having now (and trust me, I hate meta-discussion like this. Honestly I’m regretting even bringing any of this up at this point. I should have just flagged and moved on, and had a discussion with IRL friends or family about it instead. Or talked to a therapist, I dunno.)
It seems to me like you're the one with a strong negative emotional investment in this thread. I don't know what your bar for "reasonable" is but the entire top thread seems fine to me. It's certainly better than many discussions I've seen of LLMs or other controversial but technical subjects.
In any case, I disagree that this thread, much less all "political" threads, deserve to be flagged by default. This community's specific grudge against politics is weird given how much politics gets excused in "technical" contexts.
2 replies →
> HN is deliberately not that, or at least it aims to not be that
Is this a joke? I don't think anyone in this thread is half as angry as people get about React or Cloudflare