[mlevental]

i don't understand the bipolar nature of hn.

"don't be afraid to be intellectually honest and say what needs to be said - we're not afraid of hurting people's feelings for the greater good and we're proud of it"

and at the same time

"be careful you don't say anything that could in the slightest be misinterpreted as impugning someone's character"

i feel like i'm taking crazy pills? this is exactly the kind of thing that Nietzsche talked about in geneaology of morals: people in this "community" claim to be above petty politics and egalitarian but as soon as anyone points out anything that even remotely contradicts that image they get silenced or shouted down (e.g. bringing up race or gender politics and their role in the entrepreneur mythology).

it's completely within the scope of productive discourse to point out to someone that they're being irrational because no discourse can proceed until a rational framework is established. case in point: a rational discussion of the merits of django cannot begin from "i'm prejudiced against them because they made questionable PR choices".

honestly there are so few useful discussions on hn. the tech posts are either PR for yc companies or another js vdom framework and the culture posts are all mostly rehashings of the same neoliberal arguments for capital and culture etc. the few people that try to inject any heterogeneity of thought get vilified.

[dang]

HN isn't a person, it's a distribution of millions of people. If you think of it as a statistical cloud, it won't seem so paradoxical (e.g. "bipolar").

I don't follow your reference to Nietzsche but if it's relevant here, the same point would surely apply to any group. I try not to lose too much sleep over problems with HN that stem from humans in general. It's hard enough to change the few things we can.

[mlevental]

>HN isn't a person, it's a distribution of millions of people.

is obvious. what is insidious is the ideology that is preached on almost every controversial thread that papers over that fact.

[dang]

That perception usually seems to be more related to the strength of one's own ideological commitment than to the actual state of the threads. People on each side perceive the community to be biased, and people who are intensely on one side perceive the community to be extremely biased.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

[mlevental]

i'm not going to do a study of the culture of hn because i am not an anthropologist but i have many times responded to comments that were vile, that broke the rules, that did not get flagged because they toed the party line, that were in effect supported by the community

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17032257

a selectively enforced set of laws becomes defacto discriminatory and ideological: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

[chickenfries]

Exactly, my comment was mild compared to the highly upvoted and ridiculous top comment you linked.

[rat9988]

If you want to point out that something is irrational for a better discussion framework, you better prove it first. Otherwise it's just noise. Saying someone is silly and overly sensitive without giving him further information is like saying you are wrong without proof, with the insult on top.