Hacker News Reader

Comment by c3477372 | Hacker News Reader

Do leftists love him or hate him? On the one hand there is that quote you just posted, but on the other there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Y693cSF7E

View on HN

Please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts on HN. This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be an entirely different forum.

I don't agree with this sentiment. I've seen having a "consistent identity" get in the way of a discussion for a variety of reasons:

- Ad hominem attacks

- Disclosing hypocrisy (as a logical fallacy)

- Celebrity posters distracting from the subject

- Appeals to authority

Consistent identity is a no-brainer within the context of a single post; beyond that, there are downsides.

Yes, if you list only the downsides it sounds like a bad idea.

You already listed the upsides. I'm taking the opposite stance, of course I'll list downsides.

In any case, HN doesn't feel like it has an individual-driven community, at least compared to Reddit. I'm hard pressed to name any users on this site. That might be more a reflection on me - I come here to read about interesting topics, and I have more interest in the message than the speaker.

Incidentally, how many HN users can you name? (I'm genuinely curious)

I didn't list all the upsides, just the executive summary :) But for sure there are multiple legitimate views about how best to set up an internet forum. Nevertheless HN is set up the way I described and we're not going to change it.

Re names: No idea, but more than it would be worth taking the time to try listing. I'm the wrong person to ask, though, since it's my job to monitor HN.

Comical request, given the extreme anti-free speech environment of Hacker News.

Crazy idea, but maybe there are individual people that have a spectrum of political and social beliefs that don’t neatly fit into “left” and “right.” Maybe the world isn’t so starkly bipartisan as you suggest. And maybe such people have a variety of complex feelings about people that don’t neatly fit into “love” and “hate.”

Maybe, just maybe, binary thinking is the exact opposite of being a Hacker. Maybe it’s a crutch, an excuse for not seeing the world as it really is, or a rhetorical device for steering discussions away from truth and towards an end someone is trying to socially engineer.

> binary thinking is the exact opposite of being a Hacker

Would that were true, but I fear that all those 0s and 1s pattern our brains in even more intensely binary a way.

I agree. I consider myself as an independently conservative liberal libertarian with social and anti social leanings.

You can define leftist to mean basically whatever you want, so you can probably answer your own question.

Woah, that's just painful to watch. Thanks for the video.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com