[bamfly]

I'm finding the responses in this whole thread a strong argument for making STEM majors take more social science courses. Econ too, probably, especially behavioral. Way too many are a freshman-level bad "reading" of the situation & systems at play, and of the positions staked out by the more-reasonable posts. And some of the posts are even worse than that—straight-up basic reading comprehension failures.

God's sake, you need to be able to think better about these kinds of things than this to understand business. It's all human systems—you ask for bad behavior, you get bad behavior, and sitting around tut-tutting over the people doing the bad behavior won't do jack-shit to fix things, no matter how good it feels. It's immature as hell.

[dang]

Ok, but the best way to react to wrong comments is to post correct information. Then the rest of us have something we can learn from. At present it's not even possible to tell which comments you're complaining about, or why they're wrong.

Putting down groups of other commenters just makes the thread more dyspeptic, even if you're right.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[bamfly]

Fair. I don't find HN correctable when it veers off of tech topics—confidently-wrong and often ideologically-fixed while lacking basic education in a topic is a bad mix; some folks try, but it mostly just adds to the noise or ends up... well, here, which similar-tone tech-related observations do not, they typically have to get much nastier first and these kinds of general and ought-to-be-obvious expressions of bafflement get a pass, I guess because the HN "hive mind" more often experiences the same "WTF?" as the poster, in those cases.

... however, complaining about it doesn't help, sure, and I'm aware that posting (in basically any capacity...) doesn't improve it, so, shouldn't have posted. I'll leave it be, thanks for the deserved "bop".

I do wish there were a way for HN to get better at this specific thing, as it's always been about the same amount of bad, and avoiding non-tech topics doesn't seem to be something HN's interested in doing ("it's hard to define what that is" well, yes, but other tech-focused forums manage regardless—but they also get less engagement, and that does matter for this site's advertising purposes, I get it).

I think downplaying identity was a good idea to try and I like the ideals of it and appreciate what it's trying to achieve, but I'd say the evidence is firmly favoring the "failed" column for that experiment. We see the same people having the same extensive bad exchanges over and over, and identity helps avoid that with group-education about repeated behaviors by certain posters in certain contexts. Changing course might help with this and some of the other most-acute issues on the site. I expect nothing, just putting it out there. I know, unsolicited opinions are like assholes :-)

Failing that, user-managed blocklists would be a godsend—I know those come with their own problems, but it'd be well worth it on here. Bonus points if you could have separate lists for tech and non-tech posts (I know, tricky, that's why it's bonus points, haha). Some posters exclusively post uninformed flamebait nonsense (within the threshold of "HN Nice" so it keeps happening—not a dig at moderation, that's a Hard Problem in that space) in non-tech threads, but do contribute positively to tech threads. ("so correct them" -> folks do, that's how the threads keep happening, it's like sitting in on a 101 course mostly attended by non-majors who are nonetheless passionate about their uninformed position, and arguing with the professor and won't accept they may be wrong—it's not productive or enlightening) It'd be lovely to never see that again, but get to keep reading the site. Blocklists are the #1-100 features I'd add to the site, if I had a genie that could grant 100 only-HN-feature-related wishes.