Look how r/politics morphed in the last 6 or so years. A few regional subs I frequent are the same way and are completely unrepresentative of the actual region. The Alberta (Canadian province) sub for example is basically just a bunch of kids who've never left home that think communism is a great idea lamenting why the rest of the province does want to leave their homes. It's such an un-representative sub it's actually hilarious, these days I basically only go for the Covid updates.
Yes, some subs are OK, I mean, Reddit's model is that each sub is its own world and moderators can more or less do what they want. But on the whole, HN has more (respectful) dissenting opinions versus Reddit's most subs are echo chambers and the rest are anarchy.
Contrast this with r/conservative, where > 50% of threads are locked to members only where membership is gained by demonstrating that you only express right-wing opinions (I'm not making this up). Even further, you can still be banned as a non-member for expressing views too far outside right-wing orthodoxy. r/politics seems like a shangri-la for political debate in comparison.
> Contrast this with r/conservative, where > 50% of threads are locked to members only where membership is gained by demonstrating that you only express right-wing opinions (I'm not making this up).
Did you frequent r/politics circa 2016? There was a very obvious point when Bernie supporters and Trump supporters alike were driven out, and where all views essentially became pro-Clinton and pro-establishment overnight.
Before that, it was a place that was pretty inclusive of views from the whole spectrum.
If you're on a knitting forum and people keep talking about fantasy football, they deserve to be flagged.
The problem with my analogy is that hobbies aren't opinions, but I think that's a great reason for people with different opinions to start their own discussion forums.
Is that acceptable or does this site have to be all things to all people?
Well, it depends when they are allowed, sometimes.
I'd prefer if there were fewer discussions on this site about issues where the stakes involve oppression, persecution, and death, and more discussions about text editors, frameworks, and infosec.
But the last one in that list makes a big Ouroboros out of my argument...
High quality, well intended comments are fine, but people have trouble making high quality well intended political comments, and even more trouble realizing that their comments are not high quality or well intended to others.
Even if you are cordial and present your point perfectly dang may hit you with a:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
When it comes to the user moderation, it really doesn't matter how you present it, if the political comment goes against the grain, it will be flagged and it will be deleted.
Forum rules will generally discourage any political commentary that doesn't fit extremely unambiguously into the curiosity mould (because observation of how political discourse goes on other sites leads to some pretty strong prior beliefs that both assertions and "just asking questions" can create a climate that rapidly degenerates into useless flamewar). By the rules, plenty of discourse in the political space should probably be discouraged; it's default thin ice.
But moderators focus on threads that leave a big flag / downvote wake, and there aren't very many moderators (one?). So in general, a subset of commentary will have the "eye of Sauron" drawn upon it, and that's the subset that the average reader with more than N-hundred karma finds objectionable.
There are folks here with all kinds of different political views (communist, capitalist, socialist, left wing, right wing, discordian, etc.) who express themselves in such a way as to avoid the ban hammer.
I wouldn't consider myself a "culture warrior" whatever that means. I might consider myself a contrarian :)
I comment on issues I know about, whether it's programming or a political event / issue, though there have been a lot of political submissions as of late.
Thanks for verifying there are people that mass downvote, even when you unlock downvote I think it should be limited.
I'm suspect you do know what that means, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. The rhetorical style you use here on HN makes you seem to me to be a "culture warrior".
> A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values. The term is commonly used to describe aspects of contemporary politics in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
You seem (to me) to be more interested in battle than in having a constructive conversation. Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment history, if so let me know, I'm open to feedback. Really I'm just trying to elucidate why you might be catching so many downvotes on this forum.
> Thanks for verifying there are people that mass downvote
Are you really grateful, or is this just poor rhetorical style?
In re: "mass downvote" I want to be clear that I didn't downvote comments because they were made by you, I downvoted some comments and then noticed afterwards that several of them were by you.
FWIW I went and checked which comments of yours I downvoted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28800848
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28800861
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801353
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801807
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28801506
I downvoted these comments for poor rhetorical style combined with anti-vax sentiment.
Do you feel like controversial subjects on HN are allowing dissent?
If a post about climate change, death penalty, abortion, womens rights, vaccines, etc is posted?
Going with the first one, especially in context of google banning climate deniers recently. Do you see anyone from the climate denial crowd being allowed to comment?
In my experience you're not allowed to discuss denial. You will be called a climate denier or other unflattering names and them removed.
The approach to avoid flamewars is to ban dissent and not the attacks. If everyone agrees with each other, you don't get flame wars.
The obvious problem is that you also don't get discussion.
A. There is no measurable climate change.
B. The causes of the planet's climate change are cosmic, not human made.
C. Industrial activity is causing climate change, but it's unclear how to limit industrial activity without vast increases in poverty.
D. Industrial activity is causing climate change, but the extent of the negative consequences is unclear.
I'm pretty sure all these opinions are allowed, especially if backed by evidence. Though I would expect A. and to a lesser extent B. to require quite a bit more of a thick skin. There is plenty of readily available data that indicates climate change is already happening.
I think climate denial is much simply defined than your well laid out levels.
>I'm pretty sure all these opinions are allowed, especially if backed by evidence. Though I would expect A. and to a lesser extent B. to require quite a bit more of a thick skin. There is plenty of readily available data that indicates climate change is already happening.
The thing is, go check out the daily climate change topics and you won't see any of those. Why is that?
AOC says we have about 10 years left until 'world is going to end'
Todays climate post has a DEADline clock of 7 years 281 days. Even sooner!
The reason you're not allowed to be a science denier is because you are literally trying to kill humanity.
Vax is interesting. The hivemind here seems to be undecided on this one. I actually attribute this to a single thing, Fauci's lies. He has admitted to lying how many times now? He has been caught lying how many more times?
The cost of those lies has created this hesitancy.
That doesn't seem to be what the parent poster is talking about? I take his comment as talking about certain opinions (on a given topic) being flagged, not random off-topic discussion getting flagged.