[theoryofx]

One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.

On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.

But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.

At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.

It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.

Good luck and thanks!

[jdoliner]

> On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.

I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.

> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term.

That sounds good in theory... in practice it might be the beginning of the end. Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own. Although I'm actually not sure of the legal status of HN right now, maybe it's already something like that.

[graemep]

> I think it's at least as plausible that this is part of the magic that makes it good. HN is sufficiently "on the margin" that they don't have to do things like placate advertisers with their moderation policies. The mods like dang, tomhow and pg mostly care about HN as users rather than owners.

I agreed, and would say its stronger than that. Running HN well is great for Y Combinators reputation, and its focused on a relevant audience. I am sure that has to be very good for them.

> Once there's a non-profit behind it the non-profit has a mission of its own.

Absolutely. It happens a lot.

[bell-cot]

Before even the "has a mission of its own" part, an independent non-profit needs to pay its bills. I suspect that dang & Co. aren't working for free. Similar for servers & internet connections & etc.

And I'd bet that few people here want to see ads, or start paying for their accounts.

[foobarian]

It seems a lot like the Emperor Joseph II - Mozart situation or countless others like it through history. You could ask Mozart to start a nonprofit, find customers etc. but it sure is convenient when there is a Joseph II around who appreciates the arts.

[tomcam]

I hope dang and tomhow get rich doing this job. I'd happily pay for HN too.

[sanswork]

People here see ads regularly which is how hn pays the bills. YC hiring posts and company launches are all paid ads in the sense that being allowed to post them is why YC funds hn.

[ZeWaka]

I imagine 90% of users here would just block any ads anyways.

[Akronymus]

Over the years I've become quite jaded on non-profits personally. As they tend to appeal to the people who want to pursue an ideology rather than follow the goals of the non-profit. Which usually are at odds.

[throw_m239339]

I was there since around 2015 and the evolution of that forum and its population/opinion has been very interesting, to say to put it mildly...

Remember when the biggest disagreements were about ORM & Frameworks? I miss those days. I didnt even mind the discussion about the ethics of Uber or Airbnb, but now, now it is different, & not for the better.

[basisword]

Been here since 2011 and reading for a few years longer than that. I don't think the site has changed, more that the world has changed (a lot). There isn't that general excitement around consumer tech and programming that there was 15-20 years ago. We've gone from talking about how we need to start teaching coding in schools to how we shouldn't bother because AI will be doing it anyway.

The fun has been sucked out of it all. It wasn't all that long ago that we were excited by simple but fun devices like the iPad Nano and Flip camera. Now we all have phones that can shoot Hollywood films, we can access all art every created on them, and we have watches that can save our lives...and we've got a bit too used to it.

On top of that around here we used to get excited about scrappy startups raising funding and trying to change the world. Unfortunately because a number of those companies went on to dominate the world in negative ways, exploit users and hoard wealth, people have become jaded and scrappy startups are less exciting because we assume they'll eventually do something loathsome 10 years from now.

I'd love more framework debates, excitement, and creativity - but until the wider world is happy and positive again I'm not going to hold my breath.

[djhn]

I've been here since around that time and to be honest, I haven't noticed much of a change for the worse. The world around us has changed, political life may have gotten slightly more complex, but the community feels just as friendly, curious and insightful.

[mettamage]

Yea same for me. Nothing much has changed here. I guess it used to be a bit more technical? But just a bit (I miss the Dolphin emulator status updates - they got me hooked on the technical content posted on this site)

[Swenrekcah]

The whole western world is different and not for the better since 2015. Erosion of public trust since then is tremendous and regrettable so it is not surprising that we miss the communities that once were.

[sanswork]

So been here slightly longer and the only shift I can recall is a shift away from business to tech.

Early days had a lot more discussion about the business side of startups and vc. Then it started shifting more towards tech too the point now where startup/business discussion is mostly limited to Show/Ask posts.

[Karrot_Kream]

The loss of chatter around the soft skills around tech (so business but also UI/UX design, design patterns, organizational approaches (like holocracy), planning processes, etc) has made HN a lot less interesting IMO. If I just wanted the usual tinfoil hat FOSS BOFH content, then I can go literally anywhere else. Reddit, Matrix, IRC, Telegram, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, they're all full of it.

Then there's the widening of scope to big social issues that's a different matter altogether.

[basisword]

Is this because many of the soft skills you mention were in flux/being 'disrupted' 15 years ago and since then they've become the accepted norm? I enjoyed that content too but feel like it was a time where startups were changing the face of how companies operated and now most businesses follow those models and they're not yet ripe for change again.

[Karrot_Kream]

I honestly don't know. On the one hand you're right, we were in a time when startups were doing things like experimenting with holocracy. On the other hand, companies and cooperatives are still today experimenting with more efficient, equitable ways to get things done. I feel quite disappointed that so much of the anger over inequality in this community gets aimed at US or international politics rather than discussing things like corporate or cooperative structures which is both more grounded and more easy for many of us as practitioners to action.

To me it feels more emotional catharsis than intellectual discussion; getting mad at politics is getting mad at something you can't control and so is more of a way to air out your emotions. Getting mad at corporate structure or envisioning a cooperative is something we can control and requires more rigor to engage with.

[basisword]

I guess we've had a massive change in terms of remote and hybrid work practices in the past few years. Sadly even those discussions become political or angry rather than good discussions of the pros, cons, and alternatives.

[Karrot_Kream]

I think HN has been gradually losing what makes it unique. The net is filled with BOFH-style pro-FOSS tinfoil hat tech content and has been since the early '90s. The joke among my college cohort about Slashdot was that IT Helpdesk 1 will have strong opinions on how MSFT execs were engaged in crazy conspiracies. You can find that kind of content anywhere that tech people talk. HN's value proposition for me has always been informed commentary; industry insiders, academics, and practitioners weighing in based on their domain expertise. Today's HN feels a lot more like a rumor mill for random people interested in tech. Along with this shift has been a widening of scope where we don't just talk about tech but also general politics. In general, HN has been gradually trending to be just another big tech subreddit.

These days HN reminds me a lot of Reddit r/programming in the early 2010s. To me this isn't a good thing because I used to come to HN to specifically get informed commentary. But there's no way for a site as big as HN to be dominated by informed content anymore because there just aren't that many people working on interesting tech in the world. So I do what most others do I suspect which is talk with friends from my alma mater and old jobs in group chats and share HN links and laugh at the unhinged, uninformed comments.

I do think at this point HN has changed its appeal. I feel that people today are attracted to HN because of its raucous, rumor-mill feel rather than informed commentary.

[frereubu]

> It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it...

[roflyear]

I really don't think that HN lets dissenting opinions thrive (well, not anything that is truly controversial but not clearly hateful). That may feel cozy but it's not a reflection of anything pure or good, imo.

[jdoliner]

My experience is that HN's Overton window is probably on average 15-20% larger than most forums. That's not uniform across all topics though. So if you skew toward a particular set of topics it may feel like a typical forum, or even in some ways more constrained.

[layer8]

My feeling is it also depends on weekday vs. weekend, and on the time of day (or night).

[hbn]

My issue is it seems like something has to only be a bit controversial to be completely hidden from everyone. There was the recent DF article about how Gruber thinks his articles are being artificially shitlisted and I can't help but agree? I don't necessarily think the mods have their fingers on the scale, but I wouldn't be surprised if the algorithm works in a way where if enough people flag something it gets automatically hidden, and there's enough people who see DF and automatically flag it that those blog posts get hidden every time.

[dang]

That site had 11 major frontpage threads in the last year, which is a lot.

Every single one of them set off the flamewar detector. That's extremely unusual. If it were one or two I'd call it random, but 11 in a row, whatever the reason, is not random. We turned off that software penalty on about half of those threads.

[yorwba]

In his article https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i... he mentions several times that he is aiming for "comment traction," treating articles with more comments than upvotes as successful while complaining that recently there haven't been as many comments.

It does make sense that DaringFireball would consider starting a flamewar a job well done, but of course HN is optimizing for the opposite.

[dredmorbius]

HN's "flamewar detector" (I prefer "spiciness indicator") is one of those tools I'd been highly skeptical of, and still have significant issues with, but ... it does in fact work much of the time. It's where it doesn't work that the problems really manifest.

I'd come to that conclusion after scraping all "past" front pages from 2006 through May-ish 2023 and doing a number of analyses of that corpus. (I've commented on that a few times here on HN and on the Fediverse.)

One of the absolute spiciest discussions ever was a pg post about HN itself. Which suggests that when a topic of of direct interest and familiarity, people will tend to hop on it. There are also a great many flame-y threads, though note that by virtue of making the front page, my sample probably skews to less disastrous threads with the absolute sh*tshows being well below the top-30 fold.

Among other weaknesses, spiciness doesn't distinguish between pure troll/clickbait threads, and those on which there's a significant and justified spread of opinion. As such, the metric makes hard discussions even harder to have, though mods can and do turn off the penalty on request (often many hours after the discussion's started, for obvious reasons, which is its own penalty). I do wish that HN could have those discussions, and I've thought and written (both on HN and in emails to mods) about what that might entail. I'm coming to the long-delayed and somewhat regrettable conclusion that it's not the right tool for that particular job.

[roflyear]

Or - he's critical of SV and large tech companies?

[J_Shelby_J]

I follow the HN subreddit and routinely see very active threads that aren’t in the feed.

[tracker1]

Strong disagree here... While there are definitely those that will bury some opinions with downvotes, there are others that will upvote. Conservative, Libertarian, Progressive, Liberal and even outright Communist views get expressed in varying comments and that's just political leanings.

I only really recognize this because I'll be actively reading/replying sometimes and see comments go +/- 2-3 up or down votes back and forth on the same comment. While you may be at say -2, that's just the aggregate. I sometimes wish I could see the total up/down votes just out of curiosity.

[otterley]

Then you're not spending enough time reading the comments on controversial stories. Disagreement is alive and well on HN.

[xboxnolifes]

I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.

Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.

[infecto]

I would also argue that shutting certain posts down early is what helps it thrive. Maybe you lose some value of topic but you gain the ability to discuss other things in depth. You also prevent pollution of discourse.

[otterley]

There are over 1,200 comments on this controversial story alone, with plenty of debate within: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517833

What more evidence do you need that spirited disagreement is alive and well here?

[dooglius]

That seems like a pretty mild controversy to me. How many people could even say whether their water has added fluoride?

[otterley]

What kind of evidence would satisfy you, then?

[dang]

Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

[Karrot_Kream]

It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.

[boredhedgehog]

Wouldn't that only be true if the vote thresholds are absolute? If the impact of a vote is adjusted based on voters present, it should scale.

[Suppafly]

> People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing

Those people are wrong.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out, effectively silencing them. It creates echo chambers.

I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false information as an argument.

If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with, but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.

[otterley]

Your very comment is now downvoted but not silenced. We all see it, as we do every grey comment, as long as one works their way down the comments page. Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.

[Suppafly]

>Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out

I don't see how that's a problem. People that agree with them can upvote them and ungrey them out and push them back up.

[lordfrito]

>> Disagreement is alive and well on HN.

> I disagree.

Head explodes

[xboxnolifes]

I had a whole paragraph that I removed that was to preempt this reply, but I thought it wasn't needed.

[perching_aix]

Is that a moderation issue? Because to me that's more of a system / culture issue.

You can't argue in people's stead. If most dissenting commentary is hurtful, inciteful, manipulative, generally demagogue, etc., it's going to get culled, and you get a situation where "dissent isn't thriving".

[Teever]

Moderation drives culture and should in the very least offset the worst tendencies of culture.

Otherwise, what exactly is moderation for?

[perching_aix]

Moderation does participate in the culture of course, but I disagree that it would drive it necessarily. You can only do so much by reminding people to align with the posting guidelines and removing ill fitting posts and individuals.

[Teever]

This place would look like 4chan if it wasn't for the moderation.

Moderation absolutely drives the culture, by setting a tone that drives away certain users while attracting others.

In other words what ever issues a site has are inherently due to moderation whether it be a choice on the part the moderators or a lack of resources to moderate as they would like to.

[perching_aix]

I don't think we're actually disagreeing. Yes, moderation is key, but ultimately people post the content. As you say, it's a matter of attraction. But if the target group of attraction is empty, there's no amount of moderation that can help that.

[pstuart]

I'm not sure about that, but a lot of it depends on what you consider to be "dissenting opinions".

[kccqzy]

For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.

Personally I hope Tom will bring new moderation policies that will truly let unpopular opinions thrive, but I don't have high hopes here since this is just an announcement of a new moderator, not an announcement of new moderation policies.

[otterley]

"Not thriv[ing]" is not the same as being quashed. Minority opinions don't always rise to the popularity or acceptance level of majority opinions, and that's OK.

[kccqzy]

Let us not use the word "thrive" or "quash" to avoid misunderstandings. To rephrase, I hope that on HN even minority opinions have reasonable rebuttals. Unfortunately what currently happens is people flag minority opinions with no discussion.

[JoshTriplett]

"flag" and "downvote" are two different tools with two different purposes.

"downvote" seems more appropriate for for "this is not interesting and should be less prominent".

"flag" seems more appropriate for "this should not be here at all".

By way of an example, on a political story, if you say something merely unpopular, you'll get downvotes and replies; if you say something hateful, you'll (usually) get flagged.

[otterley]

I agree that that's not a best practice. It's not what the downvote mechanism was intended for.

[hackyhacky]

> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.

There is a difference between expressing unpopular opinions (e.g. "manifest V3 is good"), which receive an appropriate level of considered disagreement; and expressing opinions that are removed administratively.

In my experience, the former is quite common, while the latter only occurs in cases of hateful or off-topic comments. That is as it should be. No one is obligated to agree with you, and that fact should not dissuade you from expressing yourself.

[maccard]

I’m a fairly steadfast holder of the “I like apples walled garden, it’s my choice to be there” argument, and I think as a dissenting opinion on this forum I get a lot of flak for it. But that’s not a moderation problem, it’s the fact that my opinion is different and I have 10x the number of people disagreeing with me than agreeing with me.

[stuartjohnson12]

Upvoted, but your opinion is wrong and I didn't want to leave without telling you I hate your opinion.

[buttercraft]

> having the opinion

What I see a lot of is this:

User posts "$opinion $generalization $snark $dismissal $adhominem".

User gets down voted or flagged. User complains that downvotes are for expressing $opinion and that $opinion is not allowed on this site!

But we can all see the other things in their post that probably brought on most of the downvotes.

[ziddoap]

I agree. "It's not what you said, it's how you said it.".

Most stuff I downvote is because of the way it's expressed, not because of the opinion itself.

[JoshTriplett]

> For example, having the opinion that manifest V3 is good for users is an opinion that will not thrive on HN.

That's not a moderation issue. You can post that opinion, and people will disagree with it, post responses to it, and downvote it. It will not be flagged out of existence, unless it's also violating site policy in other ways.

[tptacek]

As someone who actively believes Manifest V3 is good for users, I second this: my opinion is not suppressed by this forum. It's simply unpopular among nerds, the population to whom this forum is aimed.

[nailer]

A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.

Meanwhile personal attacks and hyperbole regarding Elon Musk and Trump have become very common on HN.

[JoshTriplett]

> A polite well worded post that disagrees with the mainstream will indeed still exist, but it will be moderated to unreadably transparent and hidden by default. It’s not a great experience.

Speaking from personal experience only: I have mostly not observed "polite, well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream" get downvoted to oblivion, unless some other factor also applies, such as that they're also things that seem likely to lead to a rehashed old-as-the-hills disagreement with no new information that will not on balance change any minds.

If you post (by way of example only, please observe the use-mention distinction here) a polite version of "ads are good and adblockers are stealing", and get a massive pile of downvotes, I think that's a reasonable signal that the community isn't interested in seeing iteration 47,902 of that argument, and has no expectation that anything new will come out of that argument. If you have something new to say on that topic that is likely to lead into new and interesting arguments, at this point you would need to signpost that heavily, prefacing it with some equivalent of "Please note that I'm aware this is an age-old argument, but I think I have a new point to make that is worth considering", and then actually make a new point, at which point I think you're less likely to get downvoted to oblivion.

Personally, I don't downvote "mere" disagreement. I downvote (among other things) what seems to me to be uninteresting or thoughtless or insufficiently diligent disagreement, or factually incorrect information, or anything that seems like a discussion that spawned from it will not be interesting.

Now, that said, another factor here is that some people posting on political topics in particular believe they're making "polite well-worded posts disagreeing with the mainstream", and others do not share that belief and flag it to oblivion. For example, posts expressing bigotry mostly get flagged, no matter how surface-level "polite" they are.

[layer8]

Downvoting and flagging is not moderation.

[roflyear]

I agree it depends on the definition. Quite honestly my vibe, and really that is all it is for any of us discussing this, is pretty much anything more aggressive than my comment above (or even including my comment above, once more people read it).

I definitely DO NOT mean clear hate speech, etc.. that's not my point at all.

[alwa]

I, for one, come here in substantial part for the norms against aggression and toward calm substantive discussion.

Shouting matches and rhetorical posturing are exhausting. There are places for that—most places online, anymore; this is not one of them.

[mac-mc]

So, do you mean you don't like tone policing? You can say pretty much anything as long as the tone stays intellectual and doesn't go into brain damage politics, harassment, or conspiracy zone where it's being banned because it's off-topic and, frankly, exhausting and unproductive.

[roflyear]

No, and if you read the tone of my posts and even the tone of dang (and others) here I would argue that my tone is not out of line and arguably more polite.

But I'm the one that is rate limited in this thread and prevented from interacting with people politely.

[infecto]

I think it’s a tough balance because you want discussion but certain topics have diminishing returns.

[airstrike]

On the one hand, I think it's a bit unfair that this comment is currently downvoted as it's discussing moderation on a topic about moderation, so very much on-topic in this particular submission.

On the other hand, I think it needs to be more specific in order to be valuable feedback. Which dissenting opinions? Can you provide specific examples of comments you think got unreasonably flagged?

There's been an uptick in political posts which are off-topic per the guidelines, so an uptick in the absolute number of flagged submissions would just mean the community is properly enforcing the guidelines, which is good. However, as a consequence of that uptick in political submissions and flagging, there's also an uptick in the number of users complaining a post is unjustly flagged, because they incorrectly conflate enforcing the guidelines with political opinion, and that is not good.

I think a lot of users are tired of this back and forth, so my guess is they are reading between the lines of what you said (since you didn't provide specifics) and filling in the blank with what _they_ think you mean about undeserved flagging, with the topic of politics being top of mind at the moment. This shows that being specific helps both by providing actionable feedback while also increasing clarity, which is your responsibility as a communicator.

[layer8]

My understanding is that flagging does not imply moderation. When enough people flag a comment, it becomes dead automatically. There is, separately, the case that a moderator “kills” an unacceptable comment, but then it only appears as [dead] I believe (unless it was also being flagged by people). Someone correct me if this is wrong.

[airstrike]

Moderation by the community is still moderation.

[layer8]

Well, you can call it that, but there is not a singular will or policy behind what is getting flagged, and the HN “community” isn’t homogeneous. HN users can also “vouch” to counteract flagging. It only takes a single vouch to un-kill a comment.

[ttepasse]

The value of "enough" is a moderation decision made by a human.

[layer8]

It’s not a decision made per individual submission or comment, I think. Of course, the specific automated mechanism exists because some human decided to implement it. My point is, in the case of the flagging mechanism, it’s not the moderators who are deciding based on the contents of the submission or comment.

[jszymborski]

Little ironic considering you're the second comment everyone sees on this thread at the moment.

[Etheryte]

A sample size of one doesn't really tell you anything in this context. HN definitely has a pretty heavy bias in some directions, it's mostly that the crowd that naturally flocks here tends to mostly agree on those topics, so you don't see conflict too often.

[jszymborski]

I feel like I often get into protracted discussions here in which I am defending a minority view, but I don't feel discouraged from doing so.

A huge part of that is that the tone is almost always civil and the arguments are typically in good faith.

[roflyear]

Well, let's see how that plays out first, I did just post it a few minutes ago (refresh has me at 0 karma fyi)

[Lerc]

It is a shame that people will downvote a thing that is expressing an honest opinion.

I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.

I don't think this extends to the way that HN is moderated or run. It is worth looking at dang's posts every now and again to take in the job that he does and how patient he can be, even with antagonism aimed directly at HN or himself personally.

From time to time I also have a look at the histories of some of those antagonistic people. Frequently there are signs that their behaviour was not always like this. Recent posts might be outright abusive and sound like the postings of angry teenagers. A few years earlier they might have been posting reasonable discussions on their thesis topic or tutorials on some useful subjects. Keeping that in mind helps you realise that these are real people and there may be other things going on in their life.

I think there are some good things to learn from people who work with addicts. You can simultaneously challenge bad behaviour and be compassionate to the person who committed it. Similarly, this is why I'm not a fan of cancelling people or holding them forever accountable for past bad behaviour. If they recognise that their behaviour was bad and are endeavouring to not be that way again, I don't think permanent ostracism benefits anyone. If anything it restricts people to a community that amplifies their negative behaviour.

[pvg]

I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.

That's a valid use of the button by design, HN is literally made to allow for that use. Plus it mimics real life interactions - there is a social cost/friction to saying things people disagree with or think are outright wrong. Most online chitchat places deteriorate because they remove such social frictions.

[Lerc]

I would say it mimics real life interactions of some communities. I do not think that is universal. I tend to think that the communities, in real life and online, that permit civil discussion of dissenting opinions are the healthier ones.

I think there is a far greater real life social cost in violating standards of behaviour, such as aggressive engagement, or acting without empathy. I would argue that it is those influences that can be lacking in online discussions that cause them to deteriorate. There is also a lower barrier of entry for joining an online community than joining a real life community. A few dedicated but detrimental people can always evade safeguards and pollute a community to some degree, online communities being larger provide the possibility to each individual to do more damage, while also increasing the chances of there being individuals that would do so.

[wglb]

> I can't really relate to the mindset of people who use downvoting as a 'I disagree' button.

Downvoting is a legitimate expression of disagreement according to PG.

[roflyear]

He's probably wrong about it. Imagine if you could do that in real life.

[r00fus]

There are some shibboleths that you absolutely can't touch or you'll be downvoted rigorously. But less than on other fora.

[homefree]

Your comment being downvoted for suggesting dissenting opinions are not treated well on HN kinda makes your point. I agree in general and spend less time here because of it. HN is still not as bad as many alternatives, but I wouldn't say it's great for ideologically diverse views.

[pvg]

If you think your dissenting opinions should be popular, your opinions probably aren't all that dissenting. This person's dissenting meta-opinion is unpopular, it's still there and it's still being discussed. Discomfort is inherent in dissent, it's not people putting a lot of likes on your NormanRockwellFourFreedomsPainting.gif.

[homefree]

It's not that they need to be popular, it's that voting them down leads them to be dropped off from view (and makes it less likely dissenting views will be shared). Reddit is the extreme case of this where anything outside the majority group consensus is heresy to be voted down/hidden/banned.

Better sites don't do this and have in-good-faith discussion despite disagreement.

[pvg]

Can you link some of these better discussions on better sites?

Dissenting views are regularly highly visible, often as replies to consensus views. Even better - well-argued counter-narrative/counter-conventional wisdom views regularly appear as top or highly ranked comments. That's because the people making those arguments do what sensible people do when making an unpopular argument - they put in the work to make their case more persuasive. They don't sit around complaining that the other kids don't listen to them, they care about their issue enough to try to work with human nature rather than hoping some magical technology will change human nature for them.

[homefree]

"Better sites" is probably the wrong phrase, you're right that most forums are worse.

I do think most interesting conversation has moved from forums to group chats and podcasts for this reason though. Scott Alexander's blog also had good comments (though on a narrower subset of topics).

[incoming1211]

The problem is HN is mainly left leaning so its difficult to have discussion at times as dang and the community will shut it down quickly as differing opinions are not welcome even if its factual.

(chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")

(Love how HN proved my comment as correct)

[dang]

> (chances are people will downvote without comment or scream "ThAtS nOt TrUe")

> (Love how HN proved my comment as correct)

Please don't do this here. It's against the site guidelines (see the bottom: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which guarantees downvotes, and then the combination of help-help-I'm-being-repressed and I-told-you-so is annoying to pretty much everyone.

As for "left leaning", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 (Feb 2021). The specific examples are old now but there is an endless fresh supply from each tap.

[Tadpole9181]

Yeah, as someone who has criticized the mod team, saying you are biased is just laughable. You go out of your way to be as unbiased and user-oriented as possible. My biggest criticism is procedural, Dan and friends are doing good work.

[hnpolicestate]

It's not left leaning, it's establishment leaning. But that's only regarding politics and social issues.

[lolinder]

> HN is mainly left leaning

This is largely an illusion, as can be seen by the number of people complaining in the other direction about how wacko libertarians or MAGA or whatever dominate on here.

What you're actually observing is that HN is one of the more diverse public spaces you participate in and there's no personalized algorithm that filters the content to only show what you want. When your exposure to left-leaning content goes from <10% on an algorithmic feed to ~50% on HN, it feels like being overrun.

Just know that it feels just as overwhelming to the left-leaning people on here, and they will jump to the same interpretation in the opposite direction.

[wordofx]

If 2 people end up in a civilised debate. It’s not uncommon for people to flag and downvote the opinion they disagree with even if the opinion is valid or backed up with facts. Feelings get too hurt here.

[Tadpole9181]

That's why you have to earn down vote and flagging privileges here. It's still abused, I agree.

[roflyear]

Sure but I'm not even talking politics! My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN and, yeah, downvotes don't matter - but it's exactly what I am talking about. Any push against that coziness/bubble is not tolerated.

I do think it's OK for some forums - if the community agrees - to say certain topics (like politics) are off limits.

I don't really think it's ok for a community to say discussion about what should be discussed is off limits... or being critical of policies, the bubble, etc...

[hackyhacky]

> My comment itself was barely a criticism of HN

Your comment is (a) off-topic and (b) smacks of a complaint about not getting enough up-votes. Neither of these areas are looked upon positively in HN. If this style of comment is your modus operandi, it may explain why your work is not well-received, and in short it has nothing to do with the popularity of your opinions.

[roflyear]

With respect, those are two strawmen.

[hackyhacky]

No, I am just describing your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559544

[megadata]

I think the fact that you're being downvoted for your comment proves your point.

[layer8]

There is a difference between downvoting and flagging, and between flagging and moderating.

[rectang]

The effect is the same — the comment becomes unreadable.

[megadata]

I said nothing about that.

[megadata]

And me pointing it out is also being downvoted.

[ziddoap]

Probably because a single example at a single time point can't really be extrapolated to the entire platform across all times. The comment being downvoted proves nothing (as evidenced by the fact it's now upvoted to the 2nd top comment!)

And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from it).

[megadata]

> because it's a complaint about votes

It's not a complaint. I'm just pointing them out. Without them I couldn't argue my case at all.

[dang]

Yes, because the comments are offtopic and against the site guidelines (see the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

"I the noble freethinker, standing bravely against the mob" comments are boring and repetitive, and therefore always off topic.

[roflyear]

It's exactly my point that it's impossible to be critical of these guidelines on here, and I think that's a problem.

[altairprime]

HN does not welcome dissenting opinions in certain areas of tech where the individual freedoms of techies come into conflict with status quo social harms to non-techies; so, for example, you won’t see many HN articles about the ethical dilemmas of working at Palantir, how our industry’s libertarian foundations obstruct labor organizing today, what advantages the ‘bros’ receive in return for their misogyny, and so on. HN is a light-touch moderation site — as libertarian as possible, in keeping with our roots — so I certainly don’t hold the mods as responsible for the community’s defensiveness in that regard. In general, whether tech or otherwise, it’s not possible for a community to welcome uncomfortable dissent against its own underpinnings without a heavier hand on the moderation wheel than is cultural acceptable for HN and for our community. That doesn’t mean that HN rejects all dissent — certainly they may be other pillars of obstinance I haven’t personally identified and studied over the past fifteen or twenty years participating here — but, yes, absolutely, HN’s community has zero tolerance for certain dissent.

[saagarjha]

You don't see those articles because they get flagged instantly by users. You'll see plenty of comments on it though.

[iambateman]

I'm like 80% sure this is trolling as a tee up for all the people responding with "HECK YEA DISSENT IS HAPPENING." :D