Ask HN: Is there a place on HN for interesting yet flame-war inducing topics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a place on HN for interesting yet flame-war inducing topics?

I ask this (as truly an open question, without knowing the answer) because of 2 recent posts on HN that got flagged, one a thought-provoking article by a Yale student titled "Abolish Yale", and the other about the California proposal to use the recently-novel "citizen deputization" legal techniques pioneered by Texas, but this time to restrict assault weapons.

The reason I ask this is because there appear to be a growing collection of topics that are interesting and deserving of debate, but because they are hot-button issues they often devolve into flame wars. I've been on the other side of this as well, where I commented that I flagged a DEI-focused article because, while I thought the topic itself was interesting, it seems comment threads on DEI topics always devolve into uninteresting flame wars, and that I rarely learn something new from these threads.

I didn't feel that about the 2 topics today that got flagged - indeed, there were a bunch of comments that let me to going down Wikipedia rabbit holes and I learned a ton, and for both of these topics the first I heard about them was on HN.

So my question to the HN community is whether you think there is some way (e.g. feature changes, "sub topics", etc.) to host these topics that seem fundamentally relevant to the HN audience, but which are so difficult to have debate about without getting flooded by low quality comments?

View on HN

There are enough places where these topics can be discussed. I come to HN because it is sort of a sanctuary from the madness of other social media sites.

You seem to think that the civil discussion that occurs here would carry over to these hot button topics, but I assure you that the kind of people who enjoy dragging a discussion down into the mud and participating in “flame wars” as you said will be attracted here once they know there is a discussion about one of their favorite issues.

In short, the curation of HN is what makes it great. Relaxing it would ruin this place.

Amen.

HN still suffers from group-think censorship though.

There are quite a lot of members here who will flag any reply to them as they don't agree or simply don't like what they are reading.

Power abuse is just a casualty of cleaner boards.

What makes it groupthink rather than simply being in agreement about something?

That it's a conversation between two people, one being new to the forum and the other being a long time user, both being experienced in their fields and having valid points.

I wish it were just agreements, sadly it's not.

Thanks very much for your response. Just one thing I wanted to comment on was your opening sentence, "There are enough places where these topics can be discussed." I don't really agree with that.

The reason I asked my question in the first place was specifically because wherever else these topics are discussed, they are even exponentially more of a shit show than when they are discussed on HN. I wanted to see if there were any suggestions on getting HN-quality debate, but on more sensitive topics.

And the general consensus from responses is, basically, "no". And that consensus actually made me arrive at a fundamental conclusion I think: That it is indeed impossible to have a respectful debate on sensitive topics if commenting is pseudo-anonymous and open-ended.

Thus, I guess it may sound dumb, but it just clicked for me that it actually makes a lot of sense. It's difficult enough having discussions about sensitive topics when done in a face-to-face manner with people that have mutual trust - why should we think it's possible to have these conversations with faceless strangers on the Internet without it turning into a cesspool?

Maybe one way around that would to be only allow users that with accounts created X+ months ago (and in good standing) to comment on those type of threads?

>In short, the curation of HN is what makes it great. Relaxing it would ruin this place.

I feel like the opposite. This 'curation' creates and harbours one sided conversations at best and what's the point? 1 sided conversations are not conversations, you are playing tennis with a wall. The wall will always win.

Can you give links to some one-sided conversations? I don't see many of those.

>Can you give links to some one-sided conversations? I don't see many of those.

The first and most obvious topics are going to be the more controversial topics.

So look at climate change, covid/vaccines, US politics especially anything pro-trump or election fraud, and well anything touching on religion.

Here is today's climate change article, right on time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546875

Haven't quite read it yet but I'd bet there's only 1 side talking there.

> these topics that seem fundamentally relevant to the HN audience

The way I see it, I don't think these topics are relevant to the HN audience. I know that they are probably de facto HN topics because so many readers live in the US, but HN is supposed to be about tech regardless of where you live. For that reason I would always flag an article about weapon laws in the US, and I would expect most of HN to think the same (except maybe on weekends, when things are a bit more relaxed).

I see where you come from, though: the discussion in HN is for the most part polite and informed, and it would be nice to have more of that in general. But I fear that if you started adding "topics" to HN you would dilute it and lose what makes it special.

The first guideline disagrees with your premise

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I agree and personally appreciate, let's say, "oddball" non-tech topics; for example, the article about Merlin earlier today, or the one about mushroom cultivation from earlier in the week.

But I put it to you that some topics -- such as US politics -- are less likely to gratify one's intellectual curiosity than to provoke reaction and negative emotion.

I would think the consensus is that this is not the place.

Already sometimes seemingly less-incendiary topics get a bit distracting, which is not too bad within limits but it's probably not an improvement to go that direction intentionally.

No mater how good their skillz, the best hackers don't troll.

> The way I see it, I don't think these topics are relevant to the HN audience. I know that they are probably de facto HN topics because so many readers live in the US, but HN is supposed to be about tech regardless of where you live

I disagree here - I'm the one who posted the California using Texas' abortion law tactics against assault weapons, and I've never been to the US.

Nonetheless i find topics around history, human rights, laws, political systems interesting, hence the submission ( i have to admit i hesitated though).

Sounds like you basically want political debate, but only among smart and/or well educated people?

It's an interesting idea for sure, but I'm not sure how or if such a thing can exist. Moderation becomes a headache, and well, a lot of truly brilliant people I've met in life have zero interest in debating it. How do you keep out the YT commenters, Fox News or r/politics commenters, etc?

It would be interesting if HN had some bucket like /offtopic, for things that are flamebaity and removed from the main view, but I fear it would attract the aforementioned people who only ever troll there, and dang probably having zero interest in mod'ing it.

> Sounds like you basically want political debate, but only among smart and/or well educated people?

formalized highschool and college debate is pretty much this

That is sort of the opposite of what I've been told about high school and college formal debate, from people here who did it --- i.e., that there's little actual discussion involved. I'm trying to track down something Patrick McKenzie wrote about it; it made me stop regretting missing out on debate (one of only a few aspects of school I used to think I would have enjoyed).

I did one year of high school debate and this is accurate. There is no real discussion at all, strictly statements supported by facts.

It was really boring for me, and at times a lot of work. However, one thing I appreciated about it is that at times you'd obviously be arguing a side you don't necessarily agree with, and learn a ton in the process. Also surprise yourself a bit in how convincing you can be. In a way, I wish everyone had the time and effort to research a POV they don't agree with, but as if they did.

Probably great training for a lawyer or paralegal, perhaps even public speaker, but I personally didn't find a lot of joy in it.

> There is no real discussion at all, strictly statements supported by facts.

What do you mean by this? I did a few different forms of debate in highschool and this seems like a really surface level characterization of just a few of these sub-types.

Mine only had one, but it's been 20 years so some details elude me. I remember we used to have LD and policy, but there wasn't enough interest to maintain two anymore.

So in ours, it was a 1v1 and basically you just spoke for 2 or 3 minutes to a judge, wrote down notes from the other speaker to make rebuttals, then it was over.

What I meant is it very much isn't a back and forth discussion of any sort. In fact, you were never really speaking to each other at all, just to the judge or moderator. Speak for a couple minutes spewing facts and references, listen, do it again, etc.

Apologies if I overgeneralized all debate based only on my experience.

I've written a lot about debate over the years, but the one you're most likely referring to is (copied from a Reddit comment):

---

The jargon in the community for speaking really fast to win] is “spreading” and it was a dominant strategy by the late 1990s. Serious debaters expect to learn to read, listen, and talk that fast. There is widespread acknowledgement that it is tactical, and many sniff “against the purpose of debate” (while speaking at 200+ words per minute), but debate is a sport like football is a sport and if you want to play football without running or losing to people better at running than you, you may be selecting for a high friction lifestyle.

(There are several debate communities with some overlap, given that there are several styles of debate with different rulesets, organizations, and microcultures about performance. At least when I was doing it in 2000-2004, spreading was hegemonic in Policy debate and less effective (and beatable) in Parliamentary debate.)

This is absolutely true and it is prevalent in the two forms of debate I participated in (lincoln-douglas and policy). But I think it is disingenuous to say that there is "little actual discussion involved."

Spreading is not intelligible to the layperson, and to the extent to which debate is about presenting ideas in a way that convinces a layperson, it is a failure. But there really is only so much that one can say in short 6 minute speech times. Talking faster, provided people can follow what is happening/read quickly, allows oftentimes for a more in-depth discussion than what was previously possible.

> Sounds like you basically want political debate, but only among smart and/or well educated people?

Not OP, but it's not smart/educated that I like to have these conversations with. It's humble, polite, open minded people. For the most part these two axes are usually orthogonal and independent. The one correlation I've found is that if one's lack of education is approached in a way that contributes to them feeling insecure, then they move into survival mode, become defensive, and thus less open minded.

I hate to say this, as I sound... like I'm trying to act superior. I don't mean it that way, but it really is a lack of educational process. It isn't just a complete lack of education, but a lack of a specific education.

HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking. Even if the user has a degree in the liberal arts, the application of their mind in technology forces their thoughts in a way that pushes them to think critically and not just accept what is given to them without question - I would think. As with all thoughts and theories, this is a general rule and a hypothesis, I might be way off the mark.

Generally speaking, though, people who have learned critical thinking skills seem more willing to discuss an issue in a reasonable manner and drill down to the truth of it, rather than "dig in" and just decide they're right with whatever information they might have on hand.

I only bring this up as I have a fine arts degree, but shifted into programming as I wrote scripts for different art applications and the transition was natural as I had a background as a script kiddie from my high school days. A large amount of the people I went to school with, however, are absolutely unwilling to apply critical thought to specific subjects even though some have masters degrees.

> HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking.

I couldn't disagree more.

HN is one of the few places where you will get people who have no idea about a topic expounding at length on that topic. The psychology of this place is fascinating.

It is unrelated to education and, for some people, education is deleterious. Engineering is, in my experience, definitely one of the worst subjects for teaching false confidence. I worked in finance, sometimes client-facing, and worked a lot with individual investors in a business I started...any kind of engineering background was a red flag because, time after time, they rarely accepted the limits of their knowledge (doctors is another one, I don't think anyone who has met a doctor would dispute this either). Engineering backgrounds also seem to the cornerstone of most modern authoritarian states (the CCP and Singapore's fetish for engineers as an example).

So learning critical thinking is something that is totally distinct from attending university or even the job you do. People who are totally ignorant of something are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge. Not always, they are probably more prone to irrational or emotional reasoning but, again, I don't think critical thinking is something that can be taught in every case.

On the original post, I think people believe that it is difficult to have conversations about politics because of the behaviour of a small minority of people. In some online places that minority is very large. And in many communities, moderation is also aimed at limiting disagreement. The result is inevitable. HN has the community it moderates for.

I accept your point—-to a degree (pun?). For me it’s more about cohort/context I guess.

My net experience on HN, is overall positive. But, most of the discussions are about software/tech things.

When not trying to put a ding in the universe for irrigation automation, I also enjoy a life as a father/husband/grandfather, budding pilot, active faith community participant, water ski enthusiast, snow skier, Lego enthusiast. I have noted that on the occasions when discussions on HN overlap some of these areas, that the “I’m educated so I must intuit more than your life experience informs you” is off putting. I don’t think I would enjoy any but the most tangential discussions about family, romance, marital relationships, religion, engagement in the environment, or child rearing in the HN forums. There are places I can go and discuss some of these with humility and open mindedness and politeness, but it would be a while before I felt that way about these topics in these forums.

Which is not a diss on HN at all. I just think we all have areas in our life where we can find cohorts and feel secure and have polite open minded discussions (if we’re so inclined). And other areas where the context/cohort doesn’t align with the premise of the cohort well.

A degree won't give you an immunity to groupthink.

> It would be interesting if HN had some bucket like /offtopic, for things that are flamebaity and removed from the main view, but I fear it would attract the aforementioned people who only ever troll there, and dang probably having zero interest in mod'ing it.

What if, along with the '/offtopic' bucket there were participation criteria that could be moderated by other /offtopic participants? Not my wheelhouse, but something like '/offtopic' threads are only readable by HN members, only editable by members in good standing, presence of an 'evict the troll' button that disallowed further comments on a thread if enough users press it about a given comment/user.

> presence of an 'evict the troll' button that disallowed further comments on a thread if enough users press it about a given comment/user.

Such features will be abused by trolls, and that sooner than later. Case in point: Twitter's recent new policy about doxxing, that was instantly (as in, not even 24 hours after release) abused by a bunch of far-right mobs to silence BLM, antifa and feminist accounts.

Systems that ban people without a human (with decent training, context awareness and time to properly judge) in the loop should be straight out banned because of the abuse potential.

Those were done by human moderators, who Twitter said needed retraining.

But yes, this also happened on, e.g. Facebook where activists were blaming "color blind" application of the rules for flagging a lot of things as "hate speech."

> Those were done by human moderators, who Twitter said needed retraining.

Given how often Twitter has had issues with "AI" (like people getting shadow banned or blocked for posts years old coincidentally timed with PR releases about "how to combat xxx"), I don't trust that statement at all.

Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and Google/YouTube are widely known to use AI as first stage of content moderation for years (want to try it? post a picture of genitalia on Twitter, and your account will be set to NSFW in a matter of seconds, or post something with a "copyrighted" audio part on YT), and people have exploited that for just as long. We've seen various complaints about unjustified bans on all services made #1 here on HN simply because the affected people don't have any other way to contact a human support resource.

I do get that this might be necessary out of scale - if fifty people flag something for abusive content or spam, it likely is abusive content... the problem is the 1% that are the target of organized reporting/trolling campaigns, and for these people, that really really sucks.

I'm going to contest that applying a policy against doxxing to people who were in fact doxxing should be described as "abuse". It would be more accurate to say that applying the policy fairly led to unanticipated consequences.

> Sounds like you basically want political debate, but only among smart and/or well educated people?

I mean, maybe, although I think there is substantial non-overlap between "people able to have a good-faith, respectful debate" and those traditionally considered "smart and/or well educated".

As a lot of comment responses attest, it seems the answer may just be "it's human nature, it's not possible", but given that I just see these kind of topics more and more and more (i.e. interesting but where the debate ends up getting more vitriolic and going in circles), I'd hope it's something beyond just human nature at work.

Heck, maybe even the possibility to keep interesting upvoted articles without any comments would be worth trying.

> How do you keep out the YT commenters, Fox News or r/politics commenters, etc?

Have clear written criteria for what constitutes virtuous and unvirtuous conduct, and make it clear that commenters can be banned for the sort of angry, low-quality discourse that's the norm on those platforms. Then enforce it, with temporary bans at first and permabans for repeated or particularly egregious offenses. Most people won't want to be mods, but hopefully enough will.

I'm not speaking hypothetically here; I'm describing how moderation works on /r/TheMotte. I won't comment on any of the opinions expressed there since that's not the point: the point is that it can be done. It's existence proof that you can have a large discussion forum talking about controversial topics without it turning into an ideological monoculture or a cesspool.

This is already the case here; and still the flame wars get out of control.

One thing to keep in mind; the moderation on HN is absolutely designed to steer the conversation in a direction (one in line with YCs mission / vision). Most political topics that veer from centrist make-nice are not in line with that direction.

YCs moderation is a paid, editorial position. This ain’t Reddit, and to the degree that HN has regular users in the mod loop, it’s usually in a democratized way (flagging / vouching comments, the way up/downvotes work, etc.) The goals are different, and HN absolutely becomes a cesspool on any political topic when it’s left to simmer (lest you think the commenters here are of any higher quality than elsewhere on the Internet — in my experience HN tends to have more user crossover with Reddit than anywhere).

Interestingly enough, just a few days ago, I saw large language models successfully applied to toxicity and humbleness detection (was something something about building a corpus, but can't find it anymore).

Since then, I've been seriously pondering how a community would feel like that would simply enforce humble, fact-based discussion by technical means. FWIW, I'd be curious to try it out.

I've found out the hard way that social problems are usually a really terrible fit to technical solutions, but I'm curious anyway.

This idea might be a great one to try to go together with that idea.

I think what you’re looking for is a high quality conversation: where both parties invest effort in maintaining good faith and are self-aware enough to recognize what assumptions and biases they bring into the debate; where there is a mutual goal of learning, rather than winning; and where the participants are self-secure and mature enough not to need their tribal identity validating.

This is all much more likely to happen outside of the public gaze.

And so I think you are looking not for a website but for a person, or perhaps a website that helps gather such people - and somehow keeps out those who claim to be all of the above but are fooling themselves or the rest of us.

Where do you find good people? There’s probably a market for an “intellectual dating site”.

While I agree, in my experience it's very difficult to find people you describe, and once you do, you won't really have a long and interesting debate you might have hoped for.

First, you start by agreeing on the axioms which is necessary to even think about a meaningful discussion. Already at that stage you can discover you have different set of axioms (e.g. one party has an utilitarian world-view and the the one doesn't). The subject of the discussion is secondary, because it all boils down to your set of values. You can discover it by having several discussions with the same people: you will quickly realize you get stuck on the same fundamental issue (e.g. the value of life having precedence over one's personal choices).

Note that the axioms might not seem that obvious and you might discover them only in the last stages of discussion, when one party says, "Of course X" and the other party responds, "Of course not!" Especially all kinds of discussions between the so called religious and non-religious people are completely useless as the axioms in both cases are usually very different.

So in my opinion discussions should be not so much about convincing someone (as this is hardly possible as it's related to one's beliefs, not facts) but about how to coexist in the optimal, most harmonious way while having different - and sometimes conflicting - views.

I think it is hard to have "high quality" conversation because not only is it difficult to determine what counts as high quality but also because it is so easy for a public thread to get derailed by comments that present nuanced issues as simplistic.

I'd say interintellect.com 's salons are on this path. The quality of objections I get on HN are usually good enough to help refine an idea, which is the most you can really ask for. I've also walked back comments after controversy, and that's a useful tool, as I think the secret to getting smarter is to become excellent at having others disabuse you of your ignorance, especially at scale.

The sparring and point scoring that charaterizes a lot of spirited debate depends on a kind of collegiality that I think is an artifact of a former time. You can't engage in that with (or even near) someone whose recieved identity is founded on being a reaction to that specific collegiality, but even still I've come to think it's not even the "Them," that ended it.

Debate itself is a kind of intellectual leisure that you don't want to flash around too much because what social media did was put us all all in an arena that was previously reserved for elite level competition, where players play and commentators comment. The way people signal their membership in the players' club is by not commenting. If you're talking, you probably aren't in the game, and if you are you're probably losing. I have been writing almost as long as I've been in tech so public discourse is my idea of fun, and the choice to take on that player/commentator opportunity cost was personal, but the reason you aren't seeing great online debate is because what it comes down to is, for the people you want to hear from most, it just isn't worth it.

There was a community on Reddit created for the purposes of discussing these heated “culture war” topics in a rational manner. It’s called “The Motte” and largely grew out of other communities that had started banishing culture war topics.

And it’s universally terrible. It turns out when you dedicate a forum specifically to open debate of hot-button issues, you attract a lot of the participants who have been driven out of other communities for their views. Even when the discussion is dressed up in a veneer of formal discussion, the topics and comments are such that most people with moderate views have zero interest in being part of such a forum.

You might want to check out https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/. It's decent and the mods are pretty strict with deleting comments that don't have source & facts in them.

As someone who loves to discuss these topics, I don't think there's a place for them on Hacker News, and the quick flag-and-ditch act that happens when they arise is one of the reasons — along with excellent moderation, sensible rules, and a baseline pretty decent community — that HN has not descended into social-media Hell. I'd oppose any of the approaches that I've seen suggested in the comments here that would encourage these flammable topics.

> HN has not descended into social-media Hell.

I'd argue the converse - it IS a social media hell, populated primarily by the elite themselves.

Shying away from hot button social issues is inherently what the capitalist class does, because they can purchase themselves out of any particular problem. And these effects contaminate most conversations here outside the purely technical.

Abortion? Find a Euro country to quietly and cheaply complete. No need to help solve it in the USA.

Medical? Med tourism for the best and cheapest docs in the world. Why demand single payer when we can travel to a country that already has single payer.

Citizenship? That too can be purchased.

Politics? The billionaires hedge their bets by donating/bribing both major US parties. You don't lose when either choice is a win.

Guns? It's vogue to be against guns, yet hire personal protection staff who own guns and will use lethal force.

Taxes? Yeah. Move that money around, and commit tax fraud/"creative money management". Even if caught, the bribed gov't does not care.

The real world is like this but people come here to get into a bubble.

This seems way off base as a description of HN. The set of users here who are hiring personal protection staff with guns, or using offshore tax havens, surely has measure zero.

One of the most intriguing things about HN (to me) is what a big Rohrschach test it is. There are enough data points for people to read in whatever they choose to see for whatever reasons. I'm sure the rest of the internet is like this too, but when it's your job to focus hard and long on one corner of it, you become aware of this phenomenon much more acutely.

People are likening this to "political debate, but among smart/humble/etc. people". I think this isn't quite right.

I think what people are looking for is political discussion among people who are generally bright but whose identities are not politically-focused. If you set up an internet forum for talking about politics, you would attract people whose primary interest is politics, and whose identities are wrapped up in politics. These people would be blinded by all sorts of biases and groupthink. The conversation would be largely terrible.

HN, on the other hand, has an audience that is mostly technical/startup-focused, and many of whom are quite bright. They also come from all over the world, though there is a clear US bias. Using these categories as filters, as opposed to "I care a lot about politics" as a filter yields relatively more interesting political conversations, at least for me.

>I've been on the other side of this as well, where I commented that I flagged a DEI-focused article because, while I thought the topic itself was interesting, it seems comment threads on DEI topics always devolve into uninteresting flame wars, and that I rarely learn something new from these threads.

You reference DEI and other hot-button issues: they are discussed here, usually in light of how they affect people building software / hardware. Those conversations are some of the best here. Those topics will always attract unenlightened and strong opinions because they are constructs of emotion, driven by emotion and forged by intensely emotional experiences. Most people's first experience with DEI come from experiencing discrimination or being accused of it.

This community does a good job of getting the balance right - and I've enjoyed being a part of the discussion.

I don't like the conversation that goes in circles with no seeming chance for resolution (nearly anything political). It's all very interesting however, Political Science is not the kind of Science I come here for.

As for how to host these topics without devolving into flamewars - I think you'd have to try a different species. Emotions get all of us.

Precisely. Without anyone having the cognitive capability to change their own mind or fundamental beliefs, no progress can be made. If everyone is stubborn, no discussion is valuable except for the bystanders that are unsure. Digging heels further leads to flame wars.

Honestly a flame war isn't really that useful to the bystanders either.

How do you think scientific progress happens? They didn't just have flame wars in the past, they literally set humans alight. Even today, science is a very emotive topic (I studied economic history, people have fierce arguments around 17th century agricultural practices...humans are emotional beings).

I think the problem today is that people are unwilling to debate emotional issues, unwilling to have their own views challenged, and confuse their own emotional response to some topics with their own feelings of safety and well-being.

It is perfectly fine to have strong opinions, but because you hold a strong opinion does not mean you have to go to the grave with it.

Also, I am not really sure that there as many flame wars as people think. A lot of what people call "flame wars" are people attempting to trigger other people. If you get triggered by what someone says online, you only have yourself to blame.

> people attempting to trigger other people. If you get triggered by what someone says online, you only have yourself to blame.

In one breath you say there are people going around trying to upset others, and then in the next breath you blame a completely different group of people for the predictable outcome of this.

Also I dare you to name even a single example of scientific progress that has resulted from an online flame war. Everyone I've seen simply consists of people shouting the same talking points back and forth with no one changing their mind, let alone learning anything new

You have explained the mindset I am referring to. Thanks. Saved me time.

Is there a place on HN

Probably not HN but you could set up a forum, set some guidelines and see what you end up with. With topics that evoke emotion there will always be people that are offended or outraged so I think you would be starting from a losing position. The world is a big place with many cultures beliefs and values. The internet makes that big world much smaller. From my own experience doing this I can tell you that your site will get DDoS'd when people get upset. They can't attack the other person so they will take it out on your site instead. They will also try to get your domain taken down. Do not allow uploading multimedia content. If you want to practice defending against such things and take on moderating emotional content then it might be an interesting learning experience for you. Register the domain through the DDoS/CDN provider and don't use that account for any domains you care about. Same goes for your server provider. Keep it separated from accounts you have anything important on. Expect to be doxxed by angry people. Avoid doing any of this if you have children.

Some forum software will let you configure ranks by post count or admin trust so that a message posted by anyone below a certain trust level will require moderator review before anyone other than that person or a moderator can see it. I would strongly recommend doing this if you plan to set up such a discussion site. This won't solve all your issues but it may extend the lifetime of your domain a little bit. Get some good moderators that you can trust from multiple timezones.

My guess is that the answer will be "not on HN" but I'm curious where such questions could be discussed/debated as well. I get banning flame-bait questions so that the forum/website doesn't become know as the Hackers' Fight Club. Maybe a clone/similar kind of site -- perhaps called HackersFightClub.com? -- could be created where topics that are NOT flame-bait get flagged and removed.

I guess the corollary to my question is whether there is a way to have discussion of these sensitive topics without it turning into Hacker's Fight Club. For example, perhaps instead of a single "flag" option, having something like a "quarantine" option (a horrible and incorrect name I know) that had more restrictions on comments, perhaps:

1. A higher bar for comments based on age of account and karma.

2. A limit on the number of comments from any individual account, e.g. each account would only get one or two comments. The idea being "get out your point as clearly as possible in one message", because you won't have the option for endless back-and-forth (and potentially escalating) debate.

I've always thought there should be better filters on here, for example I don't think answers with many up and down votes should be censored but I think there should be a filter for that if you don't want it. i.e. dead posts shouldn't be quite as extremely dead as they currently are.

To be fair the corollary is that you already know what you are getting from this place so probably sticking to purer tech topics on a tech accelerator's forum is fair enough. Interesting the these things overlap of course as I suspect will become ever more common.

> dead posts shouldn't be quite as extremely dead as they currently are.

You may already know this, but you can turn showdead on in your profile, which lets you see dead posts easily.

I will say that 95+% of the time the dead comments I see have earned their status, but I could see a case for decreasing the grayness for downvoted comments or making it a configurable option.

Eg: Hackers' Oxford Debate Club, complete with following the rules of respectful debate?

> whether there is a way to have discussion of these sensitive topics without it turning into Hacker's Fight Club

Watching any post that touches on Covid over the past year and a half -- which should at least have aspects that are not inflammatory, unlike your examples -- I've become convinced that the answer is simply "no". It may be better here than other places, but it still isn't good. And it's not what I come here for. I don't engage with them anymore and I would prefer a world where they weren't submitted here at all.

I would love to see this higher bar for throwaway accounts on topics like CCP and other geopolitical discussion where there is a strong incentive for organized brigading & propaganda.

But I've also personally used a couple new separate accounts to comment my experience & knowledge on topics that I wouldn't want to be google able to myself, even if I share that with my IRL friends.

Maybe there could be an option for 'private post' that you can still use your main account so mods can still look at coordination across accounts etc but the public facing handle is not tied to your public profile.

Probably would still encourage the type of comments most in this thread are against though that's a hard problem.

No.

Although the argument could be made that heavy manipulation of public discourse (by a few) is why flame-war inducing topics even exist in the first place, and that if one wanted to block progress/discussion on a particular topic one could just turn the topic into a flame-war at every opportunity.

Also, any posts about the Python programming language should be flagged as well because Python is pure garbage.

No, the ground has been salted since 2015, if not before.

I flag a good third of the front page stories every time I visit, because they are topics that are not business or tech related that have beaten to death so badly that they are just tiresome.

I don't think it is possible. Any topic on here that is about politics, sexuality, gender, or hell even covid gets overwhelmed with comments that are full of fallacies and closed minds.

Or anything to do with cars, urban planning, real estate prices, etc., etc. Just because HN is probably frequented by "smarter" (whatever that means exactly) people, doesn't mean there isn't a considerable opinion bubble on certain topics.

Even technical discussions suffer from this. Too many threads on cryptocurrency/web3/whatever or Rust/C devolve into cheerleaders for whatever side derailing threads with things that aren’t even relevant to the article.

I'm inclined to believe the downvotes on parent form an argument supporting the parents claim.

I think one should not expect that every comment on a hot button issue is good, but that a good place to discuss hot button issues would reliably have good comments even if many or most were bad.

Another way to think about it is: my average comment quality, if I commented on everything I read, would be very low. For most things I just don't have that much to add. So, for most things, I don't comment. Nothing to add? I just move on. The nature of hot button issues though is that they are more likely to elicit comments. They're lowering that innate "Do I have anything to add?" threshold. The result is that average comment quality declines - but their still could be good comments.

Writing this makes me think about a different approach than I'm seeing suggested in other comments here. Less rules and moderation based, and more sorting based. Up and down votes aren't quite right, you get reddit and echo Chambers. But, they aren't entirely wrong either. You need a way to elicit lots of comments (hot button issues) and mitigate the bad ones.

I experience this in comment threads as well. I'm often surprised by down votes I get when I respond to some of that.

Ultimately a large part of this problem is a total lack of diversity and heavily cis male white perspective here. Tech in general suffers from lack of diversity and it shows. Fixing this would help at least balance the threads a bit and maybe open some minds. I'm cis white male too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . we need other voices.

It might not be possible, or pointless, to have a conversation when people live in alternate realities or hold plainly racist, sexist, non factual views.

I do think these topics are important though.

Gender, race, & immigration are great examples of 'political' topics that also tie into what most in this thread feel HN should focus on: tech/startups. These topics are important in discussing hiring, company culture, human rights etc.

The https://news.ycombinator.com/active front page has a listing of "active" topics, where active sometimes correlates with controversial. I'm not going to pretend that everything in there will be "interesting" in any real sense, but it's a place you might want to look at.

This would be simple enough to flag and separate into a hot/controversial section. I imagine for it to work reasonably well that there would need to be active members serving as moderators whether official or not to keep things on-topic and objective.

HN is best when at least some of the commenters have domain expertise or experience that is relevant to the main topic of that thread.

A topic might seem interesting, but if everyone here is just coming at it with whatever random facts and biases they’ve picked up in normal life, then the discussion has a low chance of being valuable. It’s just going to meander until it scrolls off to deep pages and everyone gets tired of fighting.

I don’t think HN needs a discussion on every topic that hits the zeitgeist. There are plenty of other places on the Internet to power discovery. My personal favorite is Twitter, but Reddit is good too. (Both require curation, though.)

I've seen healthy debate on hot-button issues at places like /r/politicaldiscussion: in fact, I think that sub avoids the flame-throwing devolution better than HN does. There might not be a place here for it, but there certainly are places that exist function as you're describing. It won't be a technology-catered audience, but you don't need to be a technologist to respectfully discuss these topics.

Maybe Reddit's r/ChangeMyView. It normally has a decent level of discussion, but you'd have to frame the question in a way to drive discussion.

The right way to think about the kinds of discussions you want to have is that they come at a cost. As you note in your own title: they're flamewar-inducing. HN is open-access and pseudonymous; there's no way to bar participation in threads to only those people who will follow the site guidelines. So, to host them, HN has to expend energy, both from the community and from moderators.

It's for that reason that hot-button political topics generally have to earn their place, by being more-than-usually interesting not just to people who love to debate politics (hey, it me!) but also to people who are on HN to gratify their curiosity more generally. Most hot-button topics can't pay their way this way, and get flagged off the site.

No, arguing about political topics online is an unproductive use of your time.

If you care about politics (and you should, that's how society decides who does and doesn't wield power!) then do something about it. Call your congressman. Join or organize a rally. Knock on your neighbors doors and convince them to vote in the next election. Even just talk to your coworkers about DEI or some other topic you care about.

I think people like myself have throwaway accounts for this purpose. For example, I use this account to say things I think might end up with negative karma. However, right now this account has positive 78 karma. Just a hack I and probably others use to get around 'reasonable-ey' filters like the HN karma system.

Sounds like there isn't; you 'd have to build it. Reddit is not suitable - too lopsided and abused. Twitter is kind of better, if you can ignore everyone else you can actually get interesting insights, although the format is limited.

Random idea: make a new HN-like site, but only allow signups by publishing a public key to your HN profile (and have a minimum karma limit).

You’d get some karma portability to filter for the nerds here, but could focus outside of harder tech.

Didn't keybase work like this? The downside is that it leads to lower quality posts just to get to a certain karma.

I’m of the opinion that no one in power wants to see people having good, honest, political discourse.

This is because if you got the majority of Americans into a room together, and you let them talk about things in peace, without constraints, but also without the trolls and the aforementioned people in power (and their misguided agents), these people would find that they actually agree on most issues.

That sounds crazy in 2021 but I believe it’s true.

The majority of people, regardless of education, are reasonable and good human beings.

They’ll find that the person that voted for Biden isn’t a sheep, that the Trumper isn’t a moron, and that everyone is just another person trying to make it through the day.

If more people realized this it would be very bad for the ruling elite, because they would be vastly outnumbered by a united populace.

If the moderators kept everything else the same but bifurcated into hn-tech and hn-polisci you might think it would work.

But hn-tech would have a strong tendency to want hn-vi and hn-vim and hn-emacs, and hn-polisci would want -left and -right and -libertarian and before you know it, you've made reddit.

Reductionist, but I suspect you'd break the golden goose.

We could break topics into a hierarchical namespace like comp.editors.vi and comp.editors.vim and alt.politics…

you were doing so well until you brought alt into it. I miss mod.* -The great renaming brought its own growing pains.

lesswrong.com is a high quality community that's a lot more open to controversial topics.

/r/TheMotte is probably the closest you will find - it's the spin-off subreddit of the SlateStarCodex "Culture War" discussion threads.

Reddit itself censors opinions they don’t like. I do not trust them as a place to have meaningful political debate.

I hope not.

I just got tired of posting on Hacker News. So I stopped for about under three months. I'm not the type of person that should be on here anyway, and I think dang had made that clear multiple times. I don't think what you're asking for is even specific to controversial topics.

I want to say what I want to say; I've always been that way, and I think people should not self censor. I'm "disgusted" by it and that's the word I want to use. I don't want to sugar coat it. But these feelings occur before even getting to controversy. They exist beyond myself here even in hacker topics.

I get tired of trying to have a deep conversation about subjects I have expertise on here about only to be armchair responded to by an amateur who has a casual understanding of the topic.

I think HN should do away with public karma and the karma system all together. It reminds me of Reddit, and it causes the same sort of behaviors to exist. I think there's great value in allowing valuable posts to percolate up, but I also think there are adults here who can read.

The real world doesn't work like a numerical karma system and it makes no sense anyway. Why should some shmuck who got karma for talking about how great templating is in Rust be able to silence someone who has something opinionated to say about RPC protocols or the difficulties of bootstrapping a company? How stupid is that? What an idiotic concept.

I think the issues that exist with HN today are common to all online communities, though. There's no "fixing" it, it just is what it is. Once they get large enough, this sort of thing just happens. I don't think there is a fix.

People rave about dang's moderation, but I'm not a fan--it's about on par with any moderation I've seen in the last 20 years. He frequently stamps out opinions that don't need to be reprimanded. This place is an echo chamber. But he does a job that isn't enviable, so good for him and the people that enjoy his work. It's still important.

I'm sure there are really cool communities out there today where interesting smart people are building things and talking about things that are interesting, but it's not here.

I saw it on a gaming forum years ago in which the members of that forum created fun, silly, and useful things ranging from 2048 to Babel, and those people went on to work for large orgs like Cloudflare and GitHub.

I'm sure there's a forum out there right now with some kids working on stuff that will put a little dent in our world tomorrow or some day soon, but I just don't see it here. My guess is it's in a place you don't expect, but where young developers hang out, and so probably another gaming or Internet interest forum--maybe Roblox's forum.

This place is ironically even hostile to people creating things they want to show off, and as you would expect, it's usually comments from people who create nothing at all.

> I get tired of trying to have a deep conversation about subjects I have expertise on here about only to be armchair responded to by an amateur who has a casual understanding of the topic.

This is basically the problem with political topics (or one of them), for the most part its to easy to have an opinion. But its based on weak information or some intuition but it feels right. So these discussions don't include facts, they get emotional because the basis of people's side is emotional and feelings.

> I want to say what I want to say; I've always been that way, and I think people should not self censor. I'm "disgusted" by it and that's the word I want to use. I don't want to sugar coat it. But these feelings occur before even getting to controversy. They exist beyond myself here even in hacker topics.

Sugarcoating tends to be a euphemism for being rude though. This tends to evoke an emotional response back and down we go. Even if it's not a euphemism there is a big advantage imo. It's an efficient way to rein in your own emotions because it forces you to write a thoughtful response, this leads to a higher chance of getting a thoughtful response back. I think sugarcoating posts is a borderline necessary requirement to have any meaningful discussion.

HN's format is not the best for discussions, if we want discussions, then it must be moved to forums as you even mentioned.

Forums go way deeper into the topic, here once something drops from front page, then it's basically dead, also no notifications(?)

I have been here for over 5 years and sadly have to agree with OP. HN's content is very heavily moderated up to a point where the front page contains only dang-approved items.

If you don't believe me - here's a quick experiment.

1. Find an article in the new section that is getting really popular

2. Observe as it either gets taken down from the front page or never makes it there even though it beats other submissions in popularity.

3. Ask dang how it's possible that this submission never made it to the front page. He'll say it was a moderation mistake [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894047

Reading your comment, one thing that stands out is:

> I, I, I, I

A conversation is a 2-way street (N-way in a group setting). Ask yourself the basic question that is relevant in any dialogue:

"What is in it for the person I am talking to?"

Someone reading your comments has to decide if it is worth his/her time to respond. So ask yourself: Is it? Why should someone engage with you? What will they get out of it?

I'll cautiously recommend tildes.net.

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