Comment by krapp
3 days ago
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.
I have a strong emotional investment in what’s happening to my country. That’s why I’m getting upset. It has fuck all to do with HN. I’m getting upset about what’s happening with my country and predictably taking it out on other HN commenters, and other HN commenters are upset about what’s happening and are clearly taking it out on me. (I basically painted a big target on my forehead saying “I flagged this post” and people are talking to me as if I’m one of the ICE supporters or something.)
I’m not against politics on HN. I’m against anger-driven discussions on the internet in general. It’s not only bad discussion by this site’s standards, it’s bad for the world. As in, the internet causes us to hate each other more than we otherwise would, and those divisions are (I believe) directly responsible for the shape of the political landscape today. This is not a game… people talk online, they develop hatred for other people they wouldn’t otherwise have, and take that hatred to the voting booth.
And I don’t count myself as better than average here either: I’m just as likely to post flippant one-line hot take responses to someone else’s flippant one-line hot take responses. I’m just as angry as all of you. I’m not trying to ignore anything, I’m not trying to silence anyone. I’m only saying that arguing angrily at strangers on the internet is the opposite of constructive towards actually fixing any real problems, and we would be better off with “normal” journalism where we hear the news from experts and discuss it with people we generally trust.
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