The main purpose of HN is to be a place for discussing things that appeal to intellectual curiosity. This is pretty much the opposite of topics that “everyone has lots of feelings” about.
Moderators and longtime top contributors to HN come to recognise that these regular dramas about politics and culture wars bring out the worst in people, and lead to the very worst discussion threads we see on HN, precisely because “everyone has lots of feelings” about them.
It’s not wrong for people to have strong feelings about these topics. They're important issues, we get that, and that's why we try to be at least somewhat accommodating of discussions about them.
But when they routinely turn out to be the worst discussions we ever see on HN, and start to turn HN into something very different from what it is intended to be, we think that maybe these discussions should happen on the many other places that want to attract and encourage them, and not so much on this little corner of the web that’s trying to be something different.
Can you elaborate on how feelings about a subject and intellectual curiosity are mutually exclusive in your world view?
This is an article about a conservative tech company producing an AI that pushes their conservative talking points. The only common trait in these so called ‘low quality’ threads that the HN staff feel the _need_ to call out is that conservative look really bad. The tech is still just as interesting to discuss.
tomhow|9 months ago
Moderators and longtime top contributors to HN come to recognise that these regular dramas about politics and culture wars bring out the worst in people, and lead to the very worst discussion threads we see on HN, precisely because “everyone has lots of feelings” about them.
It’s not wrong for people to have strong feelings about these topics. They're important issues, we get that, and that's why we try to be at least somewhat accommodating of discussions about them.
But when they routinely turn out to be the worst discussions we ever see on HN, and start to turn HN into something very different from what it is intended to be, we think that maybe these discussions should happen on the many other places that want to attract and encourage them, and not so much on this little corner of the web that’s trying to be something different.
trust_bt_verify|9 months ago
This is an article about a conservative tech company producing an AI that pushes their conservative talking points. The only common trait in these so called ‘low quality’ threads that the HN staff feel the _need_ to call out is that conservative look really bad. The tech is still just as interesting to discuss.