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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

> please don't post flamebait, including ranting against monarchy or railing against "the nobility" like it's 1770

> Positive-empty comments aren't substantive either, but as pg pointed out way back when HN was getting started (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html), those are benign

Pro status-quo bias. Monarchy isn't as relevant as it used to be but trusting the judgment and leadership of the elite is as relevant as ever and allowing positive-empty comments just reinforces that belief here. I guess that's just the sort of bias HN is ok with.

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I just meant that if people post things like "RIP" or "That's sad", it's void of information and therefore unsubstantive, but doesn't contribute to destroying the site. I just meant to repeat the point pg was making 15 years ago about "empty comments", and I'm sure the queen was the last thing he had in mind (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html).

I was not making a case for royalism! just a case against tedious internet battles, and boy is monarchism one of those. (I mean, "Good riddance. The world is rid of a horrible person who has done horrible things" - ? Good grief. At least give us something amusing.) (that was a random example I just ran across)

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771818 if anyone cares.

This thread is full of people who are ignorant of the crimes against humanity committed by this individual, and the war crimes and war criminals she protected during her reign.

Is it not substantive to point this out?

That's still implicitly making a pro-royalist community, at the cost of making a less flame-baitey community.

Pro-status-quo comments are inherently going to be less divisive because they don't challenge people, and seeing this thread full up of folks commenting on how personally meaningful the queen was to them without ever really being involved in their lives is a testament to that.

That said, I think it may also just go to show that's why royalism discussions shouldn't be the bread and butter of this community.

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Thanks for the response by the way. I disagree with some things here but I also talk with a number of people from wildly different viewpoints. A true testament to y'alls work.

The monarchy is still politically relevant in the UK[1]. But it seems dang prefers to have pages of saccharine platitudes than allow any discussion of the desirability of monarchy in the modern world or any critical discussion of the Queen's legacy. Curiosity is only encouraged if it doesn't put wealth and power under it's microscope. Then it becomes tedious.

As I wrote here three years ago[1]:

> Indignation isn't shallow or boring, it's the driving force behind social progress. Indeed, lack of indignation indicates either the inability to imagine a better world or perhaps the natural satisfaction with the status quo of someone who finds themself sitting on the upper rungs of society as currently structured. The latter no doubt describes many of us here.

Indignation isn't the arch-enemy of intellectual curiosity; apathy and bovine conformity are. This status-quo bias is what you would expect of a forum run for the benefit of a Silicon Valley for-profit institution, but it's still disappointing.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/14/secret-papers-roy...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831016

>saccharine platitudes

This is a very common criticism when one happens to disagree with the target of some positivity. Sometimes it's a reasonable criticism, but usually it's an oversimplification we allow ourselves to indulge in. Positivity can have intrinsic value even in the absence of some accompanying objective substance.

On the other hand, and similarly to my first point, I agree that indignation too is not inherently value-less. However, there are miles between useful indignation and snarky tangents.

I don't see how the GP was arguing that any kind of positivity would be bad. The problem is more having different standards for positive and negative comments on the matter and apparently forbidding any kind of criticism. That doesn't seem very much in the spirit of free speech of this site.

That being said, an important person died I can understand that it's generally not good style to start with the negative comments right away.

Yes, and it is detrimental to the espoused value of intellectual curiosity. Sincere disagreement is fertile soil for productive discourse. It gives each side an opportunity to test and refine their beliefs and learn from one another. If you suppress one side or the other, no one is forced to be rigorous in their thinking or reexamine their priors. Everyone gets trapped in an intellectual local maximum. The result is threads like this, full of comments nearly identical to each other and devoid of anything interesting.

But this isn’t a criticism of “saccharine platitudes,” it is specifically criticizing a policy that considers such platitudes as benign while censoring negative comments of equal intellectual value. You can’t claim a high horse of “intellectual curiosity” when this thread is full of positivity fluff. If that remains, so too should the low-effort indignation.

Obviously dang is free to moderate as he sees fit, but this attempt to rationalize bias as some philosophical ideal of fair high-quality moderation is worth criticizing. This all stems from the insistence that HN remain “politically neutral,” which is a mythical concept for comfortable people who want to be insulated from conversation that threatens their comfortable lives. Politically neutral is always politically defensive of the status quo, and moderation to that effect always ends up with threads like these that end up skewed in favor of the position deemed to be politically “neutral.”

This!

It might be an interesting historical event for people who don’t live in the UK

But some of us have to live with this… a family that have got immensely rich from being head of state, a family that have interfered in laws to their advantage, a family that we have no choice over whether they continue to be the head of state

> This status-quo bias is what you would expect of a forum run for the benefit of a Silicon Valley for-profit institution

I wanted to reach a broader audience with my phrasing so I didn't call that point out, but I completely agree.

Positivity does not need to be empty, nor does disallowing a certain amount of negativity imply an encouragement of emptiness.

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