Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

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> And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe.

Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature).

> You can't even have decent political discussion here

Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter.

Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.

> Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.

Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.

Hardly. It's just that there's a standard for quality of argument, which means that a lot of conservative nonsense gets shot down on sight. There are big conflicting "liberal" and "libertarian" factions, a lot of European social democrats, a growing pro-union faction, but also the gun owner faction and (unsurprisingly) a lot of "small business conservatives" and so on.

You can, for example, debate pro-vs-anti nuclear power without necessarily getting downvoted. You can't post straight up climate change denial.

You can argue that the stackexchange moderator fiasco was incredibly badly handled. You can't post straight up homophobia.

A delightfully condescending reply.

An ad-hominem response.

More importantly his comment was a Straw man.

> It's just that there's a standard for quality of argument, which means that a lot of conservative nonsense gets shot down on sight

Please don't post ideological flamebait to HN or take threads further into flamewar.

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

Whether it is actually here in part, what votes go where, etc. does not alter that it is not considered on-topic here.

"The rule is already broken in one direction, so it should be right to break it in another" isn't a helpful take IMO.

I'm not sure how you have interpreted my statement to mean the above. Please re-read without the assumptions.

> I'm not sure how you have interpreted my statement to mean the above

You said that you saw one side being downvoted. I took that as meaning you thought it should be left alone like the other side is, when IMO that is not the solution. If both are off-topic (which they usually are, by my reading of the guidelines) both should be down-voted. The fix for the imbalance is not to encourage more but from other angles, it is to enforce the desired topic limits evenly.

(using the word "side" above may be ill-advised on my part, I know most matters are far more complex than a binary this-side-and-that-side, but better wording did not spring to mind)

Just because the discussions exist doesn't mean they should. Everyone feels their particular ideology is the one targeted. It's why Fox News can claim to be an underdog despite being the number 1 news station in the US. It's why liberals were shocked when the President won by following a strategy of electoral votes versus popular vote. Everyone is in their own bubble and it's the reason why politics are bad conversation. No one wants to have a conversation and come to an understanding they mostly just want to yell at one another about how the other side is wrong and stupid.

No, not everyone is in their own bubble. Some are able to be objective, and profit from being so.

There is room for reasoned debate but many are incapable of it, especially on an internet forum.

I'm not complaining, I'm just pointing out the difference.

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