[jikbd]

What flagging achieves in many cases is nothing more than turning this site into an echo chamber. One can choose to throw the baby out with the bath water, but let’s not pretend that’s the best approach. It’s a bunch of people nodding at one another all the time.

[Mikeb85]

Dunno, Reddit and other platforms are much more of an echo chamber. You see dissenting opinions on HN far more often.

[jimbob45]

I think I'd struggle to find five threads in all of reddit for which "sort by top" and "sort by controversial" don't yield dissenting opinions.

[Mikeb85]

More about how some subs ban the hell out of dissenting opinions.

Look how r/politics morphed in the last 6 or so years. A few regional subs I frequent are the same way and are completely unrepresentative of the actual region. The Alberta (Canadian province) sub for example is basically just a bunch of kids who've never left home that think communism is a great idea lamenting why the rest of the province does want to leave their homes. It's such an un-representative sub it's actually hilarious, these days I basically only go for the Covid updates.

Yes, some subs are OK, I mean, Reddit's model is that each sub is its own world and moderators can more or less do what they want. But on the whole, HN has more (respectful) dissenting opinions versus Reddit's most subs are echo chambers and the rest are anarchy.

[KennyBlanken]

Look at the discussion thread Dang waxes poetically in and note that he doesn't moderate several significantly more flamebait-y, political comments that happen to be on the others side of the political fence.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27164027

[jimbob45]

Yes, Dang misses some, but I think the idea is that some posts fall through the cracks but if you routinely break the rules, you're going to eventually get flagged/banned. That way, we avoid a lot of false positive flags/bans that would otherwise be unjustly punished on Reddit.

[Mikeb85]

Yes, Dang is a good moderator and HN is still my favourite discussion board on the internet in large part due to their approach to moderation.

[jimbob45]

I feel fairly strongly that r/politics is fine the way it is. If you sort by controversial, you're still free to peruse uncensored dissenting opinions. Sure, there may be some astroturfing and sure, the articles may be cherry-picked, but the sub overall is welcome to healthy debate.

Contrast this with r/conservative, where > 50% of threads are locked to members only where membership is gained by demonstrating that you only express right-wing opinions (I'm not making this up). Even further, you can still be banned as a non-member for expressing views too far outside right-wing orthodoxy. r/politics seems like a shangri-la for political debate in comparison.

[Mikeb85]

> I feel fairly strongly that r/politics is fine the way it is.

> Contrast this with r/conservative, where > 50% of threads are locked to members only where membership is gained by demonstrating that you only express right-wing opinions (I'm not making this up).

Did you frequent r/politics circa 2016? There was a very obvious point when Bernie supporters and Trump supporters alike were driven out, and where all views essentially became pro-Clinton and pro-establishment overnight.

Before that, it was a place that was pretty inclusive of views from the whole spectrum.

[dr_dshiv]

Let's agree to disagree on that, shall we?

[ethbr0]

Can't tell if written ironically or not. :)

[SavantIdiot]

I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

If you're on a knitting forum and people keep talking about fantasy football, they deserve to be flagged.

The problem with my analogy is that hobbies aren't opinions, but I think that's a great reason for people with different opinions to start their own discussion forums.

Is that acceptable or does this site have to be all things to all people?

[gruez]

>If you're on a knitting forum and people keep talking about fantasy football, they deserve to be flagged.

That doesn't seem to be what the parent poster is talking about? I take his comment as talking about certain opinions (on a given topic) being flagged, not random off-topic discussion getting flagged.

[SavantIdiot]

Ah good point: I guess I'm talking about "offtopic" vs what "flamebait". Hmmm... How about if I shoehorn my argument into that shape though: if the problem is constructing an echo chamber by downvoting differing opinions, is that OK? Can we have a board that is predominantly one set of opinions? Again, I'm not entirely sure that is a bad thing all the time. (Putting aside the opinions of sociopaths and other universal unsavories.)

[hunterb123]

The difference is political articles are allowed, but political comments aren't.

Well, it depends when they are allowed, sometimes.

[ativzzz]

Political comments are very much allowed. The issue is how people present political comments. Most people present them in the same way they would on a subreddit for their particular political ideation, which is more akin to an echo-chamber and not conducive to the conversation that HN is trying to accomplish.

High quality, well intended comments are fine, but people have trouble making high quality well intended political comments, and even more trouble realizing that their comments are not high quality or well intended to others.

[hunterb123]

No, they aren't allowed, but it depends on when the wind blows.

Even if you are cordial and present your point perfectly dang may hit you with a:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

When it comes to the user moderation, it really doesn't matter how you present it, if the political comment goes against the grain, it will be flagged and it will be deleted.

[carapace]

You've been here just under two months and I've already noticed that you tend to be, in my opinion, a culture warrior. I usually don't look at usernames when reading comments, but I found myself downvoting at least a half-dozen of your comments in the last week or so. If you want to fight the culture wars you can do that on e.g. Twitter or Reddit. If you want to have a deep and nuanced conversation about your politics here you can do that, but you're gonna have to adjust your style or take the downvotes.

There are folks here with all kinds of different political views (communist, capitalist, socialist, left wing, right wing, discordian, etc.) who express themselves in such a way as to avoid the ban hammer.

[hunterb123]

I comment on many things that matter to me, I do find myself having to represent the "other side" a lot of the time in some political submissions. But I also found myself on that same opposing side when defending crypto in Brave the other day, it's not just politics.

I wouldn't consider myself a "culture warrior" whatever that means. I might consider myself a contrarian :)

I comment on issues I know about, whether it's programming or a political event / issue, though there have been a lot of political submissions as of late.

Thanks for verifying there are people that mass downvote, even when you unlock downvote I think it should be limited.

[shadowgovt]

My understanding is there are two phenomena here in play: forum rules and aggregate forum political culture.

Forum rules will generally discourage any political commentary that doesn't fit extremely unambiguously into the curiosity mould (because observation of how political discourse goes on other sites leads to some pretty strong prior beliefs that both assertions and "just asking questions" can create a climate that rapidly degenerates into useless flamewar). By the rules, plenty of discourse in the political space should probably be discouraged; it's default thin ice.

But moderators focus on threads that leave a big flag / downvote wake, and there aren't very many moderators (one?). So in general, a subset of commentary will have the "eye of Sauron" drawn upon it, and that's the subset that the average reader with more than N-hundred karma finds objectionable.

[sleepysysadmin]

>Political comments are very much allowed.

Do you feel like controversial subjects on HN are allowing dissent?

If a post about climate change, death penalty, abortion, womens rights, vaccines, etc is posted?

Going with the first one, especially in context of google banning climate deniers recently. Do you see anyone from the climate denial crowd being allowed to comment?

In my experience you're not allowed to discuss denial. You will be called a climate denier or other unflattering names and them removed.

The approach to avoid flamewars is to ban dissent and not the attacks. If everyone agrees with each other, you don't get flame wars.

The obvious problem is that you also don't get discussion.

[angelzen]

I'm not sure what 'climate [change] denial' means:

A. There is no measurable climate change.

B. The causes of the planet's climate change are cosmic, not human made.

C. Industrial activity is causing climate change, but it's unclear how to limit industrial activity without vast increases in poverty.

D. Industrial activity is causing climate change, but the extent of the negative consequences is unclear.

I'm pretty sure all these opinions are allowed, especially if backed by evidence. Though I would expect A. and to a lesser extent B. to require quite a bit more of a thick skin. There is plenty of readily available data that indicates climate change is already happening.

[sleepysysadmin]

>I'm not sure what 'climate [change] denial' means:

I think climate denial is much simply defined than your well laid out levels.

>I'm pretty sure all these opinions are allowed, especially if backed by evidence. Though I would expect A. and to a lesser extent B. to require quite a bit more of a thick skin. There is plenty of readily available data that indicates climate change is already happening.

The thing is, go check out the daily climate change topics and you won't see any of those. Why is that?

AOC says we have about 10 years left until 'world is going to end'

Todays climate post has a DEADline clock of 7 years 281 days. Even sooner!

The reason you're not allowed to be a science denier is because you are literally trying to kill humanity.

[weeblewobble]

There are plenty of vax-hesitant, anti-anti-anti-vax, and anti-vax comments in every HN thread on the topic. Most discussion in those threads is centered around those topics. If dissent weren't allowed, that wouldn't be true

[sleepysysadmin]

>There are plenty of vax-hesitant, anti-anti-anti-vax, and anti-vax comments in every HN thread on the topic. Most discussion in those threads is centered around those topics. If dissent weren't allowed, that wouldn't be true

Vax is interesting. The hivemind here seems to be undecided on this one. I actually attribute this to a single thing, Fauci's lies. He has admitted to lying how many times now? He has been caught lying how many more times?

The cost of those lies has created this hesitancy.

[SavantIdiot]

Yeah, I don't get that either. It feels like a Roreshach test and I never know the answer.

I'd prefer if there were fewer discussions on this site about issues where the stakes involve oppression, persecution, and death, and more discussions about text editors, frameworks, and infosec.

But the last one in that list makes a big Ouroboros out of my argument...

[mindcrime]

"Echo chamber" is meaningless nonsense at this point. That's just a phrase people throw out to indicate displeasure with any conversation that doesn't cater to their particular biases. It's basically become another "thought terminating cliche"[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28246850

[fragmede]

Not really, or rather, it depends on who's calling what an echo chamber. If someone's using it to shut down discussion, then yeah sure. But if you can't recognize when you're in one, then you're the one losing out. This is especially important when interacting with sales people, who benefit greatly from customers who won't or can't or don't look critically at their product offerings, and if their prices are at all reasonable.