[tptacek]

Stories about COVID controversies are almost certainly getting flagged off the front page by users, not touched by mods. People look at the titles of these stories and think that's all flaggers are going by, but lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like, and the threads on COVID controversies are fucking dreadful. I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

[verticalscaler]

But why must they be dreadful? Genuine question, I am not being obtuse. We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow.

I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it off HN.

Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You might be getting played. Or not, I really don't know. No obvious answers.

[alwa]

Whether or not we’re able to discuss controversial subjects, a topic’s controversy doesn’t imply importance or relevance.

It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.

There are communities that are good for that kind of discussion, but that’s not what we come here to do. And for this place to stay good at what it does do, it can’t afford to drown out the signal with the noise of emotive bickering.

The site guidelines do, I think, an incredible job of articulating what sustains the tenor here.

But at the end of the day, how best to capture “the vibes” about whether we collectively think a topic is tired or doesn’t fit here? It seems like HN does it just like a good dinner party host would: Change the subject when your guests—that is, the people with a strong track record of positive contributions—indicate that they’re weary of it. After all, we’ve got plenty of things to talk about that we do agree would be fruitful.

[ggdG]

> It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.

The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.

If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].

If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].

But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215242

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262856

[tptacek]

There's a lot of expertise about COVID here! The problem is, in a variational autoencoder discussion, that's mostly all there is, and in COVID threads there is lots of energy from non-COVID experts.

This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.

[ggdG]

>This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is.

I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.

>That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.

You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.

But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231535

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232084

[ithkuil]

Sometimes the signal to noise ratio is so bad that I can't blame the experts for no longer engaging and/or me disengaging before I encounter an expert steering the discussion towards more fertile grounds

[tptacek]

The dinner party analogy is perfect.

[verticalscaler]

Sure. Thanksgiving dinner.

[fragmede]

They're dreadful because people are coming from opposite places and are unwilling to be convinced otherwise, so the conversations are repetitive and dull, with little new information. We really don't need to hear for the 100th time how Covid was or was not a lab leak when there's no new real evidence one way or the other, but every time Covid comes up, there's gonna be some unresolvable argument in the comments that's just dreadful and not worthy of this site's time. Hence the flag. With a infinitely more heavy handed moderation team (or LLM) to judge comments before they got posted, we might be able to have good discussions on such topics, but until then, you can turn on show dead in your profile to see what kind of low-quality comments certain topics attract.

[snowwrestler]

COVID stories are dreadful because there is a very low average level of applicable domain knowledge for COVID discussions.

In plain English, not enough people actually know what they are talking about to create an informative and educational discussion. So they all just end up as a pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum flame wars.

HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives, etc.

There’s a long list of topics where that is just not available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of topics that, while interesting, are just not a good investment of everyone’s time here.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I asked this exact question in an Ask HN post a couple of years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676

That thread actually changed my mind on the issue. You say "We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow." Well, guess what, we're not, or at least we're not without a great amount of care. Stories like the submitted one, which may be factually accurate but clearly have a political axe to grind are absolutely not going to lead to anything but a shitstorm of useless discussion.

[tptacek]

I don't know why they're dreadful, but they empirically are, and that's the end of the matter for me.

[verticalscaler]

I think this sort of thing taken to the limit will cut every which way until eventually we run out of subjects and the overton window shrinks into an overton dot.

[_Algernon_]

The risk that the quality of discourse on HN falls to Reddit leveles of shitposting seems a greater one to me. Having high volume of popular highly polarized discussions seems a great way to have an Eternal September[2] event, and there is no way to recover what makes a forum unique after that.

HN is a single place on the internet with clear moderation guidelines[1]. It doesn't have to cater to every form of speech. In fact, actively not doing so is probably the reason why HN's level of discourse is comparatively high.

People who want Reddit should go to Reddit, not drag HN with them through the mud.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[tptacek]

We've been running this system for something like a decade now, I think we know how it's going to converge.

[verticalscaler]

I don't. I'd like to know however! Do tell!

[tptacek]

It converges to the front page we have now, which, while imperfect, seems to be to the liking of the community, such that stories like this carry a bunch of comments about how happy they are about moderation here, and how about how few if any of the stories getting yeeted from the front page are things they even want to see on HN.

HN does not have to be a space for conversations about every important story. It is enough for it to be good at the conversations it is good at. There's a whole wide internet out there for the rest of the important conversations to take place on. Moreover: that has always been the premise of HN; it's not a principle we just sort of slipped into accidentally.

[nvm0n2]

Empirically they are not. What you mean is that you don't like to be faced with the reality revealed by these stories and the comments.

But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may not like these stories, but other people do find them useful and you should not interfere with them.

[tptacek]

Comments like this really make me feel viscerally what we're missing out on by not having COVID fights on the front page more often. Thanks.

[nvm0n2]

This isn't actually COVID specific. It's a nasty and frequent tactic on this forum, where someone makes strong assertions about one side of an argument whilst simultaneously claiming that the other side can't be allowed to speak because it would be "fighting", a "flamewar", a "trash fire", "not curious", "tedious" or whatever. It's an attempt to manipulate the site rules to suppress debate and is itself anti-curious.

Concrete examples from your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32104731

"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."

(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).

In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."

If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.

[tptacek]

Hm. I think what I'm going to do instead is relentlessly flag them.

Check this out. It's barely on the front page, and has just 3 comments right now. How great is this post? How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235484

My son is a biochemist (interviewing for grad school slots right now, as in this actual evening, I'm living vicariously through him, wish him luck). I've been for years paying attention to bio/chem/biotech experts on HN, because I'm a biochem dad. We have lots of expertise about COVID here. None of it is on these COVID threads because all of them would apparently rather eat a bug than "truth it out" with people paraphrasing Bari Weiss. The verdict is in. You're on the wrong side of it!

But these have been useful data points for me, and I appreciate you offering them up. Have a great weekend!

[wtallis]

HN's guidelines have this relevant bit:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

An editorial that clearly does not embody that spirit is a poor starting point if you want the discussion to trend towards sanity.

Especially when the title itself violates—and ensures further violations of—this rule:

> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

[saagarjha]

We should, but we don’t.

[jtriangle]

Some things just don't scale well conversationally.

[_Algernon_]

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

[ggdG]

> lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like

IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.

> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.

[tptacek]

It's good to want things! We can just disagree.

There's not enough space on the front page for all the good things we want to read. I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious conversation.

I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.

[ggdG]

> I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation.

I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:

> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

[tptacek]

It takes very little effort at all to flag stories that I'm convinced are both colorably off-topic, or duplicative of other marginally topical stories that have run within the last year, and that I'm convinced will create nightmare threads. That's the purpose of the flagging system. That system is also monitored, so that people who abuse it as a super-downvote for stories they just don't like quietly lose flagging powers. So: I plan to keep on doing it.

Remember though: we're not having this conversation so you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. (_The Devil's Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford).

[nvm0n2]

It doesn't get less curious that "I try to bury discussion before it even happens and can't even explain why". You should be ashamed that you spend so much time here yet fundamentally do not get the rules.