I agree with him partly, and another user has voiced the same concern, albeit in an abrasive manner. It's still the best place to have a debate though.
There are some topics that are very predictable, some of them are noticeably left issues, some things more loosely connected. Crypto, Tesla, Brave, Facebook, Israel, etc. are all subjects you'll most likely get heavily downvoted and probably flagged if you don't view the common (to here) opinion.
HN is not immune to group think and talking points get parroted here often, dissenting views flagged and downvoted. But not always, it's definitely nowhere near Reddit bad.
Like I said at the top, it's the best place on the internet to have a discussion, but not perfect, and seemingly getting a worse slowly, the way it always seems to go.
HN is quite open intellectually and it's probably the only large online community I know where unpopular opinions will mostly not be buried in downvotes on sight, at least as long as they're well argued. I value that dearly. That being said it's also rather obvious that all these years later it's still more "startup news" than "hacker news", I find that there's rather strong USA-style libertarian dogma expressing itself in many discussions and shortcuts like "regulations = bad" that are meant to be self-evident and therefore not argued are annoyingly common. It's not the fact that I disagree with the point of view that annoys me, it's the somewhat condescending tone and lack of argumentation that accompanies it that's rather frustrating.
Interestingly that whole cryptocurrency epic we're witnessing is quite educative from that point of view, it makes the dogmatic "government = bad" position rather precarious and forces a more nuanced approach from either side.
I think that on technical issues, HN has great discussions that far exceed any other place.
On social issues, threads tend to get brigaded, people talk past each other, and generally nothing new/constructive is added.
I think this site specifically attracts people who are not deeply knowledgeable about (or interested in) the nuances of social issues, and the consequence is that the discussions are poor.
I don't think that's a bad thing. You can have great, substantive discussions elsewhere. It would be nice (and consistent with HN guidelines) to have a place that isn't an incessant culture war.
Yeah, I’ve been here a few months only and there is a very different attitude than on better-known websites like Reddit. HN is the only forum I’ve seen where anyone who argues in obviously bad faith will get downvoted to invisibility, and most well-made arguments get upvoted, no matter which side they’re on.
A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks eventually.
I disagree. I've always found HN to be a great place to discuss things like this. In fact, HN sometimes feels like one of the only places I can discuss things like this without being downvoted to hell and back.
I agree. Having used Reddit for too long, and Facebook too before I deleted it completely, my experience has been that HN is much better at talking about things, and more careful about wording. Despite the predictable slippery slope comments, there is always some good commentary in most threads. I can't think of anywhere else to go to get discussion on a multitude of complex topics like this.
That doesn't mean that threads on HN can't take a nosedive and become flame wars. But that's what good moderation is here for, and I believe HN has that.
In the past, I've valued HN as source of uncommonly good discussion. I still feel that way about how pure-tech topics are handled here, and I think HN remains better than 90% of other discussion fora for politics. (Twitter, anyone?) But "better than 90% of alternatives" is completely compatible with "reductive, vicious, and uninformed".
A particular frustration of mine: the scattering of dialogue across multiple comment trees over multiple posts. There are snippets of quality discussion, but they're broken across ~8 different posts. There's no particular way to find them when they're not highly voted, or keep the quality high after they become popular.
Meanwhile every single post has multiple instances of "The original essay is clearly inaccurate, so..." "Sources?" (Or conversely: "Is clearly backed by science, so..." "Sources?") I'm not sure either person in the exchange is behaving badly - the first person wants to make a conditional point without litigating the condition, the second person doesn't want to concede something uncited as objective fact. But the result is that every post is full of horrible, discussion derailing fights over whatever sources two random people can throw at each other.
However one feels about a given exchange, it ought to be fairly obvious that replaying the dispute fifty times with varying sources and no acknowledgement of the other instances is a terrible way to make any kind of progress.
I don't know what can be done about it within the HN format, though.
They can suck ass here and still suck ass way more everywhere else. I concur that HN is pretty much the best place online for these discussions, that I'm aware of, but I also think these discussions are far inferior to what is typical here. There might even be some interesting points being made about the role of technology in all this, but they're being drowned out by the purely political back-and-forth.
While the situation here is better than elsewhere, don't be fooled. There's plenty of group think and (self) censorship going on around here too.
Give any human the ability to down vote and a reputation number, and comments will automatically converge to some kind of social standard.
HN is mostly filled with people with an interest in tech, finance, and getting rich off tech. That allows for deeper discussions on technical topics and startup finances, but when it comes to politics there's not that much difference between HN and your average subreddit.
Facebook is a "shouting into the void" platform, kind of like Twitter but without the length requirement. In my experience it's never been possible to have any kind of reasonable discussion on there.
Edit: Just noticed a downvote. If anyone disagrees with this observation, I'm interested in hearing your feedback. One of the things I appreciate about HN is that it's one of the few places on the Internet were people with differing opinions can have truly productive and enlightening debates.
Despite a lot of bad stuff, HN does comparatively good job of allowing free thought without descending into some kind of ideological or troll cesspool like most "free speech" oriented forums. It's definitely not perfect but at least contrarian opinions exist alongside regurgitated mainstream stuff, vs say reddit (with which I have little familiarity, so maybe there are niche subreddits but I see lots of places that basically say you can't post anything that doesn't conform to groupthink) or big tech that just censors things that go against their agenda.
HN is one of the few places where informed discussion is actually possible and even opposing views (as long as they are objective and well reasoned) are adding to the discussion (and often upvoted). Shutting that off just because of some unfounded downvotes or trolling in times where such discussions are extremely important is cowardly and a very sad move in my opinion. HN is better (and more important) than you think.
Even for the political discussions, HN still has the least-bad discussions on the internet, which I think is why people keep engaging in them. The only discussions that really bother me are the reddit style stuff
You can often spot the impact of "why is the sky blue" type posts in that there are no discussion threads, it's just a long list of one-of "Rayleigh scattering" replies
Eh, depends on how you carve things up. There is a subreddit for just about anything, so you can find diverse opinions there. But you will not find reasonable disagreement on hot-button topics where one side doesn't get downvoted into oblivion. If you want genuine engagement on sensitive topics, HN is better than reddit.
I'm happy to discuss facts but I agree that HN is probably the wrong place for politics and non-technical discussion.
IMO The community doesn't like politics and honestly I think thats one of the reason HN is such a great place.
HN is no better, perhaps worse because of shadow banning, heavy meta moderation, government actors that are ignored or allowed, mods who constantly lie and gaslight, and finally elistist usees who think HN is somehow 'well' moderated. Total lies.
Ive had accounts banned for posting 'generic econmic views', lol, whatever that means -- but we all know what it means, people in power didnt like what i had to say (well, what austrian economists have said)
There is no debate, only power, truth isnt found here because its insanely corrupt here, down votes, vote brigads, some users having more power than others and finally mods to push their heavy hand on whatever side they deem best(the pro government side).
And mods response? Nothing at best, but usually its just bans or lies (we dont do that, oh but you do, you have, and you will ban peopl÷because you dont like their opinion or their facts are inconvenient to whatever propaganda is coming out of washington).
Astro turfing probably the worst problem and mods cant even admit it happens despite overwhelming proof. So yeah HN is terrible for discussion.
4chan (/pol/ in particular) is probably the best place for actual debate, but most people cant handle the truth or learning how wrong they were about so many things.
HN is intended for discussion of technical news, but social/political subjects of current interest often show up. Some people resent that, but those threads are obvious from the title, so you can just ignore them if you want. As for the discussion quality, can you think of any forum that manages to maintain a more balanced tone? As for society in general, I don't think the polarization is any worse than it has been in my lifetime.
I'm pretty far to the left, but I will say that one thing that's good about HN is that you can discuss an idea here without it getting down voted into the abyss, sometimes. Sometimes people even argue on good faith. Try finding that on Twitter.
If you're insinuating that HN suffers from group think, I assure you if you spend some time going through the comments you'll find many healthy spirited debates. There's nothing inherently wrong with the OP, it's about how it was said, not what was said. From what I've seen, HN tries to be a friendly yet intellectually challenging place, and I personally really appreciate that spirit.
HN typically lets critical thought rule, which is one of the main reasons I post here. Although it is not perfect, HN is still one of the best online places to have nuanced discussions.
The problem is that the public at large seems to ignore many issues as long as their person is the one in charge.
There are some topics that are very predictable, some of them are noticeably left issues, some things more loosely connected. Crypto, Tesla, Brave, Facebook, Israel, etc. are all subjects you'll most likely get heavily downvoted and probably flagged if you don't view the common (to here) opinion.
HN is not immune to group think and talking points get parroted here often, dissenting views flagged and downvoted. But not always, it's definitely nowhere near Reddit bad.
Like I said at the top, it's the best place on the internet to have a discussion, but not perfect, and seemingly getting a worse slowly, the way it always seems to go.
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