Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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This is the sort of generic flamewar tangent that the site guidelines ask you not to post to HN.

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

If every Chinese topic turns into the same "China vs. the rest of the world" discussion—or to put it more generally, if every thread gets sucked into whatever generic black hole happens to be nearby—then it becomes impossible to discuss anything specific on HN. Specifics are where the intellectually interesting material lies.

Compare the topic of the OP—electronics markets in Shenzhen—to what we see in this subthread: "China is waging economic warfare", "They aren't all evil", "Some are very evil", "HN is full of anti-Chinese comments and this will only continue as the war with Eastasia is in progress", etc. The generic discussions are always the same, and usually turn nasty, perhaps because the mind craves extra action or amusement to compensate for it all being so repetitive.

Lots more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Particularly please don't create new accounts to take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.

My apologies, dang - I'm very sorry. I have a lot of respect for you and I'd sad to have caused offense.

I had no idea this was a flamewar topic... guess I haven't read enough of other people's comments on the issue. A lot of what people responded with is new information to me.

Is there an index of topics that tend towards flamewars that I could check periodically?

No offense at all, and I realize this happens with zero intent. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons thing. No one creates the flamewar, and still a subthread like this ends up gathering mass at the top of the page on a regular basis, clogging out the curious conversation.

There's nothing so simple as an index. Perhaps that's for the best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum. One can certainly use HN search to see which topics have this generic quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thanks Dan. I'll try to keep the generic/specific dichotomy in mind.

That would catapult you to the top 0.5% of HN users. I'm not sure this distinction is really getting through, though it seems obvious to me after staring at these things so much.

> If every Chinese topic turns into the same "China vs. the rest of the world" discussion—or to put it more generally, if every thread gets sucked into whatever generic black hole happens to be nearby—then it becomes impossible to discuss anything specific on HN.

The trouble is that issue is that earnest discussion of these serious issues has been suppressed for more than a year, and that by now, talking about this "cute" stuff while pretending said suppression is going leaves a certain aftertaste. I guess in your mind, ignoring an elephant on the couch is just the thing a curious intelligent person acting in good faith would do. But that's just you.

> The generic discussions are always the same

That's just as true for many articles about social media, node, golang, whatever. It can be demonstrated in 5 minutes that what you criticize consistently in one context, isn't even worth a mention in many, many others.

It has probably been the most-discussed topic on HN in the last year, so you're not going to get very far calling it "suppressed".

The basic problem is that such discussions are repetitive, this is a site for curiosity, and curiosity doesn't go with repetition.

For sure the problem of generic discussion is similar across all the hot topics. But some are more prone to flamewar, and those require more moderation.

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