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Comment by novia | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

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To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.

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Population dynamics and sexual activity statistics is arguably something that "good hackers would find interesting". If those statistics are changing significantly, then I'd definitely consider that something "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

Edit: And to clarify, lots of science can be political, but that doesn't make it not-science. For example, breaking news about a new discovery in climate change projections is inherently political but it is also inherently interesting from an intellectual standpoint. Something purely political and not intellectually interesting to hackers might be news about what's happening in the White House right now. In my opinion, anything that falls under the science category is fair game for this community because plenty of people who are hackers are also very interested in science and technology.

Yes climate change is political, but would the comment section to a climate change article on this site be full of the types of comments we see in here? Would it be an actually divisive topic for the users of this site?

What I love about Hacker News (usually) is the lack of flame-wars. I know they exist, but they get hidden very quickly. After reading the article in full, and finding it sparse in actual data, I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site.

Edit to add: If it is merely the "population dynamics and sexual activity statistics" that we should be interested in, why not link directly to the study instead of this meandering commentary on it?

This[0] and this[1] are previous discussions on HN about climate change, with plenty of trolls. Just because something gets trolls, doesn't mean the whole thing should be destroyed or censored. Look at all of the other great discussion in those threads (and this one). If you get rid of every thread that is a potential double-edged sword, then you will eventually find yourself browsing an empty forum. There is no such thing as a perfect safe-space for discussion, and places that claim to be are typically void of interesting discourse.

> I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site.

The current thread as well as the two linked threads have plenty of positive discussion. Again, every topic is a double-edged sword. You're going to get people who agree and disagree, people who are serious and others who are trolls. That doesn't mean threads should be completely destroyed. The best course of action here is to flag the offending comments, rather than the entire thread.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698237

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332012

> The best course of action here is to flag the offending comments, rather than the entire thread.

The best course of action for my mental well-being is to flag the whole thread and move on without reading the comments. Unfortunately I'm already in here, so I am flagging the particularly egregious comments, as well as vouching for the dead comments that I think were unjustly buried.

> Just because something gets trolls, doesn't mean the whole thing should be destroyed or censored.

One flag doesn't destroy an entire thread. It's a numbers game and I'm adding my vote to the pile. If the thread dies, people who think it is valuable can vouch for it.

> The best course of action for my mental well-being is to flag the whole thread and move on without reading the comments.

Guidelines:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Your comments here suggest that you have a personal problem with the article. Articles should not be flagged for how their words and numbers make us feel, they should be flagged if they are off-topic, spam, or not intellectually stimulating. This article abides by the rules and thus should not have been flagged by a neutral actor.

> If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Oops! I'll keep this in mind for the future. But the cat's out of the bag already here so...

> Articles should not be flagged for how their words and numbers make us feel, they should be flagged if they are off-topic, spam, or not intellectually stimulating.

I maintain that I am flagging this because I consider it off-topic and not intellectually stimulating.

> I maintain that I am flagging this because I consider it off-topic and not intellectually stimulating.

The discussion happening in this thread does not support your conclusions. As per the HN guidelines:

> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

There is an interesting phenomenon here -- that sex rates are apparently changing very significantly. Whether or not you personally were inspired the post, it is clear that this has provoked plenty of intellectually stimulating discussion here. If the flag button is abused, it makes the moderator's jobs harder. To properly flag posts, a good rule of thumb is to ask these questions before flagging a post:

  1. Are people having civil discussions and learning new 
     points of view in a constructive manner?
     Whether or not you are interested or able to 
     participate in the discussions has no bearing on the 
     answer to this question.
  2. If the post isn't about computers/technology,
     is there something academic about the post?
     Is there data to discuss, its implications, etc.?

If you can answer "yes" to these questions, you probably shouldn't be flagging the post.

First you say "I don't mean to belittle your decision to flag the article"

Then you write several comments doing just that.

I'm not belittling you, I'm trying to say that the flag button is very important, serves a specific purpose, and should not be treated like a downvote button. You are probably missing the point. As someone who has been a moderator, I've had to work with people who use their personal feelings to decide what should and shouldn't be censored -- and they make awful moderators. Moderators shouldn't censor things because "they personally feel it won't lead to discussion". That's what user interaction is for: the users decide what is and isn't appropriate for discussion with their votes and comments.

The best moderators use objective criteria when exercising their powers. You might want to say that you're not a moderator and that you're just a user, but this also misses the point. HackerNews has been kind enough to give users a moderation tool (flagging), so you should treat the tool with respect. You have great power with that tool, and your contributions are very important, so it's important that we contribute in a good way.

I can state that this topic is quite interesting to me. I can also understand why women tend to feel dehumanized by it. But we as a society must not turn blind eye towards problems that afflict humanity. Withdrawing from painful reality won't do anything to address it.

To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial.

How so? It's not about political decisions one way or another but observing a new phenomenon on the market for sex and relationships. There are tons of scientific angles available for approaching the issue. Why is this happening? What has changed? What factors can contribute?

Flagging comments such as "that's good, all sex should happen in a marriage anyway" would be contributing to the discussion, flagging the entire topic would not be.

>> To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial.

> How so?

It's in the very next sentence.

But oh by the way, the author doesn't have a great track record on this issue.

https://slate.com/business/2018/05/robin-hanson-the-sex-redi...

The article isn't about politics, and controversial topics are not out of bounds. If you don't like an article, you have the option to ignore it, or even better, contribute your perspective to the conversation. The flag button isn't there to suppress any and all discussion of a topic that you don't personally care for.

I flagged it AND I'm contributing to the conversation.

> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.

> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I feel like this is on-topic? I feel that the flag button is not there for "I found this uninteresting", because at any given time a significant portion of the articles on the front page are uninteresting to me. I don't go around flagging those because I'm sure others do find it interesting and it's possible to have a valid discussion about it without devolving into flamewars.

> See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre.

FWIW, this was not covered by Hacker News.

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