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Comment by IntronExon | Hacker News Reader

This is a great write up, and answered a question I had about comments which are automatically collapsed. I understand the frustration around the lack of politics/diversity discussions, but I agree with the way it’s handled here. Those discussions need to be had, but do they need to be had here? They are divisive, and often leave lasting wounds which lead to the creation of factions.

Mostly though, the internet is short on places like HN, and long on places to endlessly discuss politics, usually in a very predictable circle. I don’t believe that much good comes from anonymous text exchanges online where politics are concerned.

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People like discussing things on hn because the quality of discourse tends to be (relatively) very high. Naturally people would especially want to discuss politics or anything else that's almost universally a shitshow in a place where they thing commenters are thoughtful and fair and level-headed. Of course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here _because_ debating politics is discouraged.

Of course it could well be the case that we have such an environment here _because_ debating politics is discouraged.

I strongly believe this, and I think the evidence is the content of threads where the mods gave people a chance. The volume, in both senses of the word, becomes extreme, with hundreds of angry nested comments.

You've put your finger on one of the fundamental problems of this site.

There's another phenomenon at play with political stories, I think. Much of what occupies the front page is sort of implicitly siloed. Rust programmers are the active writers in Rust threads. Data science programmers are active in ML or word vector threads. People interested in math are active in math threads. There's a story on the front page about Google's "TPUv2's". I don't even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal with my comments on that thread.

Not so political threads! Everybody is on equal footing in them. There's no "people with expertise relating their experience" and "people asking questions" and the rest of us reading with interest. Rather, everyone's broadcasting.

That's not inherently bad, I don't think; there are lots of other kinds of threads that are like that and they seem to be fine (for the most part) for HN's culture.

But politics is a particularly toxic combination of broad-spectrum and polarizing. There are never voices of reason or experience, the most active participants are often on a hair trigger, and participation is amplified because everyone's got an opinion.

> I don't even know what a Google TPU is, so you're unlikely to have to deal with my comments on that thread.

Damn there goes our shot to hear what serious crypto people are really saying about Google TPUs.

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