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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations.

I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.

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Your experience on HN does not resemble mine at all. I'm frequently downvoted for controversial opinions. And I see a lot of outrage and disinformation here.

And on twitter I see little outrage and disinformation. Our experiences are so far apart on social media that I'm not sure anecdotes will do much for the conversation here.

How depressing if true =(

Can you point to some example topics I should keep an eye out for?

Anything critical of the failure that is the United States, it's crumbling democracy or the Frank insanity inflicted upon the world by the psychopaths operating out of silicon valley. Unbridled Capitalism of the American variety is cruel and big tech is complicit in propagating antidemocratic efforts through walled gardens and mass tailored propaganda. How's that?

>I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.

That's probably because you don't post any opinions that the HN hivemind finds controversial. Stray outside the lines just a bit and expect moderator censure and downvotes/flags.

Flags and moderator actions are also much rarer, but controversial stuff does get downvoted quickly unless it’s quite high quality.

It's hard but possible, I find, to post and discuss controversial things. You have to be very carefull how you present the topic, and you have to put a lot more effort into the discussion than you normally might to make sure it doesn't devolve, but if you wade through and cut off the drive-by commenters that misunderstand your position because they aren't actually bothering to think critically about it,and try to try to keep the discussion it on track, you sometimes get very interesting discussions out of it.

Sometimes I end up softening or changing someone's position on something, sometimes I soften or change mine or learn a lot of new things, and I have to imagine that happens with some lurkers as well, and I'm not sure what more I could hope for, besides wishing it was easier sometimes.

Indeed. As one point of comparison: Solid scientific information showing efficacy for AA gets routinely upvoted here at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25493182

Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-Reddits (/r/atheism cough cough) delete links to scientific evidence showing AA efficacy: https://archive.is/gEXfA Why let facts get in the way of a good social networking rage fest?

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