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Comment by uncle_j | Hacker News Reader

> Just the fact that StackOverflow have been accused of not being inclusive at all.

Can you clarify this? Anyone can sign up with an account and the whole thing is meritocratic.

Maybe it's best if we don't go off topic into that. HN has had massive discussions about it and this wouldn't be a great place for another.

Can you please share a link? It would help a lot!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks!

I was asking her why she thought that. Not what other people thought.

Your comment was perfectly natural. It's just that we know from experience what sort of thread that would likely lead to, as I explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22140452. Stack Overflow is much larger than the OP's fledgling community, and the recent controversies about it have burned pretty hot, so it could easily have become the dominant topic. That wouldn't be fair either to the fledgling community or to the HN community, which benefits more from having a new discussion than repeating an old one.

Also, I don't think it's really fair to the OP if we start putting her on the spot about Stack Overflow. She probably hasn't thought that much about it, since for most people the only way to get a project like this off the ground is by focusing on one thing for a long time.

And you don't see any issue with suppressing the discussion around this clearly sensitive issue? You taking one side is a sure way to alienate many on the opposing side. Let's have an unbiased discussion while maintaining civility.

It seems like you're trying to tell people what they can and cannot discuss more and more on HN.

> Can you clarify this? Anyone can sign up with an account and the whole thing is meritocratic.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable question.

It isn't a question of suppressing discussion, as you'll see if you look at the voluminous threads HN has had about that (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22132714). It's just a question of what's on topic in a given thread. If you allow a hotter topic with greater mass to enter into a smaller thread, the discussion will get sucked into its gravitational field. That approach leads to all threads being dominated by the same handful of hot topics over and over, so we try to avoid that here.

Re "taking one side": it always feels like mods take the other side. The people on the opposite side from you feel that we're taking your side; I guarantee it.

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