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Comment by madez | Hacker News Reader

Dang, would you mind taking a look at the behaviour in this thread? The content and the voting feels very odd and unusual.

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Many comments are breaking the site guidelines and the thread is certainly wretched but I'm not sure what behavior you're worried about beyond that.

Btw, it's best to send these concerns to hn@ycombinator.com. I only saw this by accident.

When many comments break side guidelines and the thread is wretched, then that feels odd and usual for me for HN. Probably you see more threads like this and it isn't unusual, but for me it feels not at all what I expect and relate to what I think happens on HN. This speaks for the quality of this site. Thanks for the info!

Alas, we do see a lot of threads like this, way too many to feel so great about this place. But it does feel good to hear from a user to whom it is unusual.

This might be a clear case of a selection bias. When the quality of threads goes down, I tend to stay away from them and the moderators need to interact more with it. When a thread has a fantastic quality, I feel a urge to interact with it, to read it, while the moderation is not needed.

Odd and unusual? It matches the political climate of the US. We have a largely despised president with a small following of fanatics. This is what it looks like reflected on social media sites like HN.

I think the odd and unusual thing was that for a long time comments were mostly against the president and those comments were mostly being downvoted but now comments and votes look more correlated.

It might be that people genuinely dislike discussion of politics on here even on a thread that is about politics or that Trump's supporters here are more likely to have downvote buttons.

As distastrious as it might be that this may be part now of US American culture, it doesn't need to start happening here nor be tolerated. The nature of this place is that we can talk with reason and share facts based on evidence. If people seek to disturb that, for whatever reason, I advocate for corresponding moderation.

> The nature of this place is that we can talk with reason and share facts based on evidence.

This has been the utopia of the tech nerd mentality for over 30 years since I first started using UseNet. The reality is, this kind "reasoned and fact-based" discussion model (a) doesn't really exist when there are subjective components or unknowably complexities, but worse (b) it is actually used to suppress discussion! The number of times I've observed discussion with people using "logic" to gatekeep is uncountable.

The fact of the matter is: some topics are messy and you can't just throw around "logic" and make it go away. Well, you can sequester yourself, but good luck with that.

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