Diverse conversations are actually pretty rare in reality when conflicting opinions exist. The paradox of tolerance pretty much demands you weed out the extremists or they will be all that's left.
Some say yes, others will say no. It depends on the topic.
Now the moment you start acting like a jerk on HN you'll get a message from Dang or one of the other mods, and if you keep it up you'll be banned.
Diverse opinions are fine. The problem is there are a lot of people that get way too wound up in the rightness of their opinion, and there are others that are just trolls that live on the conflict. When you start banning the trolls/extremists they go off and make articles like "Site X bans any difference of opinion because they are big meanies" Then other groups like free speech extremists show up to complain about how the site is authoritarian in the most annoying and offensive ways possible, and it's not long after that admins block entire topics to make the problem FOAGA.
Being an admin/moderator of places where people can post will quickly drain you of understanding and compassion. The frog and the scorpion is a good fable here. You get tired of the scorpions asking for a ride then stabbing you in the back on your forums.
The trick is not being an ass towards someone you disagree with. If you quote Popper on this, you failed that and are rationalizing your behavior because you know its not good.
The trick is the other person doing that too. Simply put a lot, if not most people don't want a rational debate where they discuss the many sides of an issue. They want to win.
Take religion for example, seemingly most people that have one tend to believe not only they are right about it (if you debate it's correctness it shows your lack of faith), they are trying to convert you and if they fail you are an enemy.
Nah, this approach is not good because it kinda starts with the frontiers already drawn.
You don't even need to assert your own position, just ask question like "What is your intent behind saying that" or "Why does it have to be this specific way?" to derail them into some status quo. Provoke them into explaining their "great plan" until they tumble.
Can you think of a forum that isn't tiny that does not do this kind of moderation that isn't a cesspool? Your theory seems sound, but I don't know if I have ever seen it implemented such that the theory is correct.
HN weeds out/flags a massive number of topics very quickly. Especially political topics that lead to flame wars. It also weeds out the unnecessarily argumentative posters pretty quickly.
But at the same time because of this there are some that say that this limits conversations and topics that can be discussed on HN. So, no you can't make everyone happy, but you can attempt to at least make the atmosphere pleasant.
I agree. HN has a strong moderation policy against trolling and other awful behavior. Forums that aren’t as moderated as HN don’t tend to last as long, or at least don’t tend to maintain this level of civil communication.
So are we just not supposed to debate anything ever? Just find a convenient excuse to ban/block/mute and move on?
> The paradox of tolerance pretty much demands you weed out the extremists or they will be all that's left
Too bad everyone has a different idea of who an "extremist" is, and conveniently ignores the ones on their side.