Sometimes when people get shocked by what they read here, the shock experience has more to do with encountering voices that (often loudly and/or at length, and sometimes even eloquently) express opinions we don't run into in our circles. We're all pretty good at siloing ourselves among the like-minded. Even when we're aware that a topic is divisive, we don't relate much with people on the other side of the divide. Mostly we label them as idiots or worse, and don't encounter them in their complexity.

HN is a non-siloed site [1], meaning we're all in one big room here, so it doesn't work that way. The reality is that on any divisive topic, there are millions if not billions of people on the other side of the divide, a bunch of them are here, and they tend to be otherwise normal people whose different beliefs derive from their different backgrounds rather than them being idiots or worse. One might think that makes for an easier experience, but in fact it makes things much harder.

I wrote a longer description of this a while ago if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all...