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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The trouble with this is that when people bring grandiose or generic rhetoric, the only place the discussion can go is into flamewar, as others get even more grandiose and generic (or personal).

You're not adding any information when you post like this. It's just a strong opinion with a strong feeling attached. When someone else with the opposite opinion comes along and blasts their opposite feeling, no interesting information will be exchanged. Therefore it's off topic for thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here.

An HN thread thrives on curiosity and specifics, withers on the gruel of grandiosity, and fries under scorching rhetoric.

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Okay dang, have a link:

http://time.com/5366225/china-uighurs-detention-report/

A million Uyghur and Muslims in camps. That's a sixth of a Holocaust.

It's unsurprising that you Godwinned this thread, since where else can monotonic escalation go? By doing that you've cemented the point.

If you guys want to fling furious links around, you need to find another site to do it. It isn't part of thoughtful discussion—it's pure reflex.

Dismissing links out of hand as you are here doesn't serve to help discussion either.

So, real talk, why do you think concerns over YC working with a government with super shaky human-rights record are unimportant or unfounded?

A valid answer is totally "Because we're gonna make money and nobody complaining is in a position to actually do anything."

What do you think about it?

Without a doubt the worst bullshit I've ever seen from dang.

So tell us, Dan, how would one criticize the Chinese government for imprisoning dissidents and genocide, while staying within your guidelines? How must one couch it to pass the Great Firewall of Hacker News? Serious question.

The answer to your question is in the site guidelines: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To the extent that people are fulminating rather than saying anything substantive, and reacting ideologically or tribally rather than thoughtfully, they're crossing outside the scope of what this site is for. Heated rhetoric, grandiose generalization, and angry name-calling are the kind of thing that mark this distinction. Your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17764244 is an example of the kind of thing that clearly moves the needle into the red.

Complaining somebody "godwinned" a thread (which is a total misrepresentation of godwins law, and even the person that coined it said this kind of interpretation of it is stupid) is an unbelievably lazy dismissal of a situation that is quite literally directly comparable to some of the worst actions the nazis took.

If we aren't allowed to talk about and compare what the nazis did, how will we learn from it?

If this comparison is not permitted in this situation, when will it ever be?

Really quite disappointed in your stance on this one.

And please, spare us the condescending attitude that we don't actually care about this stuff. If we are going to veer off into "unstated positions and assumptions" territory there is a white hot glaringly obvious apparent conflict of interest with HN moderation shutting down discussion of human rights abuses right as YC china launches, dont you think?

On the internet, no one is "talking about and comparing what the Nazis did" for the purpose of learning. It's a rhetorical device, the cheapest, most sensational, lowest-information one around.

We actually moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC is the topic—this is a longstanding principle on HN. But that doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all. You only need to read a small sample of the moderation comments we post to this site to see how consistent we are on these questions.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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