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Wow, this flamewar could win a few awards... It progresses toward constructiveness near the end of the thread though, FWIW, so it's worth reading through if you want sort-of-closure I guess. My only disagreement is with the one person who said that the other people in the group were strongly-opinionated and that it was "healthy". No. Some of the messages in this thread are deeply insulting personal attacks and simply inappropriate to ever submit anywhere. That you managed to stay focused is impressive. I fear I would have spent _way_ too long on, shall we say, an "appropriate" reply. Actually I might've just up and left, heh. I appreciate the TIL regarding a community to call out and avoid. Yes, people like the ones found in this thread are everywhere, but to paraphrase something I said on a similar subject recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730570, see parent comments for context), I have no inclination to field the signal/noise ratio to engage communities where such people are majority vocal. With such people, it seems you have two options - argue against their views and suffer the continuous backlash; or implicitly agree by not arguing, and risk the potential expectation to behave contrary to your personal standards as a result. Alternatively, one simply avoids them, or calls them out. HN's moderation does a reasonably good job of eliminating such contention. As time goes by I continue to find new ways to appreciate the carefully-curated status quo here. It's certainly not perfect (particularly the automated post-killing system, which kills a small but noteworthy number of good posts) but at least I never have to drown in distraction and meta basically ever, and I have showdead on so I can read the dead comments (and, most importantly, read with the expectation that they might be inflammatory so there's less surprise), so it's pretty good. |
When someone's only interest is in being right and explaining how right they are, it's not worth talking to them when you disagree. You can listen of course, but that doesn't need a conversation.
> I appreciate the TIL regarding a community to call out and avoid.
This was 3-4 years ago, I'm sure the community has changed at least a little since then, like any online community does. It also may be completely different today.
> With such people, it seems you have two options - argue against their views and suffer the continuous backlash; or implicitly agree by not arguing, and risk the potential expectation to behave contrary to your personal standards as a result.
Silence is not implied assent. Silence is the right solution to most situations. Having been on the arrogant end of those kinds of "debates" for far too much of my life, I've learned that silence is effective because it does not give the arguer any satisfaction in their prior arguments nor the opportunity to continue showing off their arrogance with further arguments.
> HN's moderation does a reasonably good job
Having been in many, many online communities for the past 20 years, HN is in fact a minor miracle. It is a bit of an echo chamber, but you can't really escape that while still having a "peaceful" community. cake.eat(); cake.have(); throws "Error: cake reference has become invalid"