[_r0fz]

Look I just really disagree sorry. The flavor is different but the beneath it's the same stuff.

You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.

You can find joy on here sure but it's despite the culture here not because of it.

[dang]

> You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.

That is deeply not the case, and if you or anyone finds examples of it, you should let us know at [e-mail]. If people are being cruel and not getting moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. Oh and we don't give a fuck about swearing.

The generalization you're making is so false and so mean that I would call it a slur, both of this community and of the people who work on it.

[Tomte]

For what it's worth, I feel similarly.

I've just deleted the longer part of this comment because we've had this discussion in private mail several times, but for the record: I think you're focussing too much on naked words, and ignore evil behaviour (like intentional misrepresentations of the other one's position) too much.

I'll concede that your job is hard and you're doing a mostly good job. I just think it could be better.

[_r0fz]

The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.

Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.

[tptacek]

It took 15 seconds. I just typed "poor" into the search bar, sorted comments by dates, and the first comment that used "poor" in the sense that you did easily qualified:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320284

It is wildly not the case that the median HN commenter who writes on stories related to economic inequality is biased against marginalized people.

This is a pretty clear instance of what Dan refers to as the "notice-dislike fallacy"; you've noticed people writing callous comments, because they rub you the wrong way (as they do me), but haven't noticed the countervailing comments, because they're boring (to you).

[rantwasp]

i think we may be moving the goalposts a little here. we were talking about joy, humor, whimsical and we shifted to a straight-up utopia where everyone is kind to everyone and no bad comment is ever made.

Philosophically, I would say HM is like a wealthy suburb. You don't see trash in the street. People mostly follow the law and are good neighbors. Everyone wants their neighborhood to be okay and are okay sharing/learning about gardening and home improvement from each other. Now: are some people disconnected from the what other people experience as the harsh reality somewhere else? Absolutely. This is the case everywhere. What you do when you see or hear someone with a completely different perspective is listen and try to understand what they are talking about. We all need to get better at this no matter where we are (work, store, hn, twitter, etc)

[samatman]

You do a great job, dang. Frankly I'm baffled at how you do it, and I can see why this comment would upset you.

But all you can do is push the nastiness below a certain threshold of passive aggression. It's literally impossible to do more than that.

I've found it just a bit more unpleasant to post here with every few months which pass. Insults still get moderated and downvoted, sure, but bad-faith dismissals and pugnacious pedantry become incrementally more common, not to mention drive-by downvotes on neutral and factual posts which maybe signal some kind of tribal affiliation, no matter how weakly.

I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

[dtx1]

> I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.

Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.

[eitland]

> Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum.

Here is an important observation I think I've made over the years:

All else being equal, the HN model (full names voluntary, IRL connection voluntary i.e only username and password, long lived profiles encouraged) has been better for interesting civil discussions.

Why?

Full name policies only encourage this explosive mix:

- People who don't realize the foolishness of commenting publicly using their full name on a controversial case.

- People with fake but real-looking accounts.

- People who realize it is stupid but does it anyway sometimes because even newspaper comments sections deserve some adult voices.

Very many of the people you'd want to hear from are silent because they don't want your name mixed in with the regulars in the comments there.

[munk-a]

I don't know about that, I'll occasionally post lightly trolling comments out of whimsy and not malice and they generally don't get downvoted into oblivion.

I also really disagree that tone is a minor and unimportant factor, keeping the discussion civil manages to open up the door to a lot more discussion between people who disagree strongly. One of the users I recognize on here I recognize not because we agree - but because usually when we're talking in a thread it's an interesting conversation despite a really deep philosophical disagreement.

[zemo]

right, HN only cares about conforming to protocols. If you conform to the social protocol, you can advocate for the most horrible of positions on this site.

[munk-a]

Just to clarify - why would we ever not want that to be the case? If someone is making a well reasoned argument that's clearly wrong then I'm happy to read it - I have faith in myself and those on this forum that they'll be able to comprehend the statement and read out the same conclusion - if it's hidden or using underhanded conversation techniques those will generally be called out but there might be a few interesting nuggets in an otherwise incorrect argument.

[zemo]

because if you have one party that is nice and polite and uses proper decorum and they are actively doing harm to another party, and that other party is upset because harm was done to them, and your response is "I will listen to the person that is behaving according to decorum", you are taking the wrong side. Bad actors -love- decorum, especially when access to understanding the rules of that decorum is itself a marker of class, tribe, or belonging in some way.

[throwamon]

It's really pretty simple: Being polite is better than not being polite. This doesn't mean you should never listen to someone who is angry, but it makes perfect sense to make it a site-wide policy to disallow this sort of behavior when the goal is to have productive discussions.

The problem is not politeness vs. impoliteness, but rather acting in good faith vs. pretending to do so. As readers, it's our responsibility (now more than ever) to tell good faith from trollish decorum.

[watwut]

This place allows angry response in technical discussion, but not to following guy: I had seen on HN a guy literally advocating forced marriage and forced sex - all politely. He also advocate for strong punishmemts of women who have sex out of wedlock.

Oh and forcing them to marry a guy they had sex with, regardless of whether it was rape or not. As social engineering to force good behavior on others.

He was all polite and serious. And I still perceive him as the biggest threat to my safety and well being. And the most uncomfortable thing that was tolerated here.

No, being polite is not better and does not make it better. If I am expected to be perfectly nice to him in response, well this place sux sometimes.

[munk-a]

I think it's also our responsibility as commentors to provide civil counter arguments so that other readers are able to see both sides of whatever topic is being discussed while not being pre-disposed to either angle. If you're an expert on a topic and see an error being stated you should clarify the discrepancy so that other folks less versed on the topic can see the error as well.

HN does have an assumption built into the guidelines that we should assume all arguments are being made in good faith - I don't actually have an issue with reading arguments made in bad faith in good faith myself - if someone makes a baseless claim that is refuted soundly and sanely in a comment then readers will be able to parse the two comments and will generally favor the one more clearly made in good faith. Ad hominem attacks actually hurt your argument here while on twitter they can bolster it - most of hackernews has no respect for "sick burns".

[zemo]

> I think it's also our responsibility as commentors to provide civil counter arguments so that other readers are able to see both sides of whatever topic is being discussed while not being pre-disposed to either angle.

it literally is not. The idea that all topics have equal both sides is not founded in any actual reality, it is a device used by those who would push falsehoods to demand an audience. Falsehoods do not deserve equal footing to truth.

[zemo]

it's really pretty simple: caring more about politeness than about the core of people's arguments is both intellectually dishonest and endemic on this site.

[nsonha]

Like stated in another comment, it's not about politeness, it's about constructive discussion, you present rational arguments and that only. If someone's position is abhorrent, no matter how they sugarcoat it, people should be able to tell

[lovegoblin]

> Being polite is better than not being polite.

And if it is those aforementioned bad actors who get to define and gatekeep what it means to be "polite"?

[throwamon]

I don't think that's the case on HN, which is what is being discussed on this comment chain. If you're indeed referring to HN, I'd be glad to read an expanded argument.

I agree that on Twitter this is a much more complicated matter.

[oceanplexian]

I'm not sure that it is true that there is even such thing as decorum on social media, or if there was, if you could reasonably define it. The Internet is a global communications system linking hundreds of countries, thousands of cultures, and perhaps millions of sub-cultures, class affiliations, and tribes. Even the fact that we are here, on HN, speaking English puts us squarely in the minority of people who use the Internet.

[JW_00000]

For me, that's exactly what I want: any opinion is okay to be expressed, as long as it's expressed respectfully. My problem with Twitter is exactly its "social protocol", which is often leaving out all nuance, taking things out of context, and provoking on purpose (in anything vaguely related to politics).

[mr_toad]

> If you conform to the social protocol, you can advocate for the most horrible of positions on this site.

You shouldn’t assume that every argument made against a particular solution to social injustice is an argument advocating for social injustice.

While there are some people who are just plain racist or bigoted or have certain religious views; and therefore believe that racial/gender/etc injustice is inevitable, many others are just arguing against a particular solution.

For example, not everyone agues against dialectical materialism because they want people to be poor. They just don’t think communism can work.

[itsoktocry]

People have been talking about how "superior" the conversation on HN is compared to other fora for as long as I've been participating (over a decade). I don't find it much different.

It certainly has its share of silliness, especially around the subjects of VC and Silicon Valley culture generally. And economics...