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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit confused: are we going to get more similar posts (which is tangent to some proselytism, under the premise of well wishing?) for each and every religious faith major event around the globe?

I am saying this as a former believer (and holding no grudge), definitely aware of the fine line between sharing and pushing cultural items, and balancing the two rather equally in a diverse team.

EDIT: actually, it's a topic in itself in a matter of company/team management. I saw a similar concern grow in one of my older team in a previous job, because the company "inclusion and diversity" department held a _very_ unbalanced and awkward take in this regard, talking a lot about some religious/cultural items, and ignoring quite a few others (from different equally present countries of origin and faiths), actually resulting in a fracture in the self-perceived image of the team. That's really a delicate matter.

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It's going too far to interpret this as "tangent to proselytism". People can wish each other well without coming close to that.

The occasional celebratory post is fine on HN. If it were to become repetitive, it would get tedious quickly and we would downweight such posts in keeping with standard practice (see [1] and [2] about that).

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Well noted, makes sense this way, thanks for the feedback!

Humbly suggest that HN converts these types of temporal event posts into megathreads a la reddit so there is one root to the discussion, and down-weights one line replies that are simply repeating the sentiment of the original poster ('happy X to you too', etc).

Don't know if that is possible of course. I think the HN readership would welcome a way to use a post to explore cultural aspects, ask respectful questions, etc, but dont need a slurry of one line celebrations.

I agree that they can add up to a lot of noise but at the same time their spirit is nice enough that it feels churlish to try to negate them. In cases like this we usually go by what pg wrote 15 years ago:

Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

For my part, I did interpret it as clear proselytism:

> A note on Ramadan. To those interested in intermittent fasting, longevity, and coming back to a more human experience not drowning in technology, food and consumerism I would say check it out! After over 20 years of doing it I'm still learning something new every year, or I should say, unlearning bad habits we've created for ourselves as a society through abundance.

You could also have interpreted it as advice: "been there, learnt something" is what is clearly written. Guidelines: «Assume good faith».

I see what you mean but I read it as more of an enthusiasm for a general category of practice and not a call to convert to a specific religion or cause.

The post was just a nice thing, a complete change of pace, and an opportunity to have an interesting conversation about something we normally wouldn't. That's on topic for HN. It doesn't mean the same thing would be on topic tomorrow—in fact it wouldn't, because avoiding repetition is one of the main functions here.

It was also a garish opportunity for flamewar, which plenty of commenters unfortunately took advantage of. But that's how the internet, and human nature, work.

I disagree; this is a clear case of "Proselytism" since there is no actual need for it in this forum. Nothing of value has been presented to discuss/debate/argue/etc.

If the only criteria for allowing posts like these is "People can wish each other well without coming close to that" then HN can easily be flooded with junk posts from every single Religious (and any other) group (Real/Imaginary and Bonkers) for every single day of the year.

There has always been a place for a certain amount of such posts on HN, going all the way back to the beginning. It has always been fine as part of the mix and I don't see why it should be restricted to one religion or culture.

If people start posting too many of them, we'll downweight them the same way we would any other repetitive pattern—not because we have any problem with their particular topic but because repetition quickly becomes tedious. (And users would flag them increasingly heavily in any case.)

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