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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

All: if commenting, please be up to date on the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and be sure follow them. Start here:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Don't use a thread like this to fulminate or flame. It helps no one. It adds toxic fumes. Regardless of how right you are or which color the fumes, that points in the direction we're trying to avoid in this community.

There are important and interesting issues here. It's fine to debate, but do it within the guidelines. You'll do a better job of making your substantive points that way too.

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This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place, so that it can be collapsed and prevent too much offtopicness at the top of the thread.

@dang,

Maybe the text in italics ("Be kind. Don't be snarky...") should be always shown above the HN comment box? It'd be nice to get the reminder every time we are starting to write something unkind or snarky...

Speaking as a frequent reddit user where various subreddits have added their versions of such an instruction, I think I've never really been reminded by them to behave a certain way.

Parts of the UI like that can really only be seen once: once the user has seen that it is just a warning that is always there, it becomes an uninteresting piece of clutter that is zoned over and never again influencing the user.

I think the current system works much better: a thoughtful and appropriate comment written by a human when deemed appropriate (or possibly copied, I don't know).

This reinforces the ideas when necessary, and by itself is already a push for humanity, while a robotic repeating reminder serves only rarely to reinforce good reactions.

Yes, I agree. It also reminds me there are folk looking out for and guiding the culture of the forum.

IIRC, Stack Overflow shows the link to the site guidelines when you have under a certain amount of rep. Something similar here might solve a lot of problems.

I don't think we should have to be constantly reminded to be kind and discuss in good faith. Maybe it is necessary for some, but I expect better of HN users than to need their hands held. The regulator of HN behavior should be the users themselves; that responsibility should not have to fall on the administrators.

Do the mods here ban users who have a track record of non-substantive + snarky/combative comments?

I feel like sites experience a downward spiral of intellectual entropy as time goes on if effort isn't put into maintaining a constructive culture.

Sounds like an excellent candidate for a browser extension or grease monkey script.

Why has a question mark been added to the title here?

IMO by HN's usual standards it makes it a worse title, not better.

I assume it's to present it as a debate for discussion rather than appear partisan? (Let me say here I'm British, live in the UK, don't really care for US politics, at that level at least.) But we have controversial titles all the time that are presented as fact (the author's opinion, the author's title) and yet discussed all the same.

If we need a '?' to have a discussion, then every submission needs a '?' suffixed.

We do that sometimes when a title is particularly contentious, to explicitly encode the contentiousness into the title. It tends to bring down title fever, and it seems to help discussion be more substantive.

The title is the dominant initial condition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353829

Sorry I’m not a native English speaker. What does do not cross examine here mean? I thought cross examination is good?

I suppose the dialogue in comments should be closer to two researchers thinking about a problem than lawyers cross-examining witnesses in court

Ooh okay I get it. Thanks.

Precisely. Your wording is reminiscent of an old thing pg wrote, which I love:

Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.

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

Simple, but an absolute gem.

I understand it to mean, do not pick at small faults in others arguments. Cross examination is good in a courtroom trial, but does detract from the flow of conversation.

Good for fact-finding, if answers are required, but bad for community-building.

Just wanted to say: This is the best, most thoughtfully worded mod guidance I’ve read anywhere on the web. Thank you!

What's wrong with cross-examination?

I think the gist is to avoid aggressively picking apart minor details, and instead discuss the main points. This is in line with another section of the guidelines:

“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

It’s a good idea in principle, the problem is that the devil is often in the detail and people can say things that seem broadly like a decent argument while slipping in details (whether intentionally or not) that completely reverse the meaning or make the meaning quite different.

This is why cross examination in needed in trials - of course everyone tries to make a plausible argument, so noticing the incongruities is important.

Assuming good faith and cross examining are not mutually exclusive.

Pointing out, or asking about, incongruities is fine. How one does it makes a difference, as does the intention with which one does it. If you want to call all of that cross-examination, that's fine, but in that case we're using the term differently. The main distinction the guidelines are trying to draw is the one between open exchange and destroying enemies.

That might actually be a better way of saying it then.

I think it’s clearer and more direct and has less of an implication of being overly deferential to bad arguments.

airstrike answered this nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23451214.

In curious conversation, people want to know what the other person really thinks and what their experience has been like. In cross-examination, the goal is to defeat an enemy, so people are aggressive, try to make the other person seem as dumb or awful as they can, and generally seek to back them into a corner.

In one case the goal is to receive information from others' comments, in the other case it is to fire weapons into them. One can't do both at the same time. I think there are even physiological reasons for this: one is in a very different state when doing the one vs. doing the other.

Moreover, since curiosity evokes more curiosity and aggression evokes more aggression, the effects are systemic, meaning they apply to the site as a whole. We must choose which one we want, and we choose curiosity. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Cross-examination can be perceived as hostile, particularly if conducted as you might see in a court of law.

When you make a call for civility the people most likely to exercise increased self-restraint are those who would in any case tend to be more judicious in how they express themselves. Meanwhile those who spew racist hatred will not be deterred and moreover they will now face lesser pushback calling out their barbarism. Source: this thread.

I didn't make a call for civility. The specific words matter.

I haven't read this whole thread, but the parts that I saw definitely did not lack for pushback. The question is how best to push back. Denunciatory rhetoric doesn't work. Its purpose is to provide momentary relief to the denouncer, at the cost of damaging the container and evoking more, not less, hatred from the other side.

There are better mechanisms for pushing back against hatred: flagging, downvoting, responding within the site guidelines, and in egregious cases emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

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