Hacker News Reader

Comment by crystal_revenge | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this logic is that it is very, very easy for even a small number of people interested in silencing a topic on any issue they're concerned about "divisive" just by intentionally flooding the comments with knowingly inflammatory responses.

This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".

View on HN

It's not some theoretical 'divisive', you can read how these threads go yourself, including this one. The meta discussions also make these a lot worse so it's hard to blame this on some 'small number' of people.

A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone.

I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.

>I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides."

The brinksmanship card of HN is the reverse of this framing: There must be level-headed discussion. To wit:

>The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.

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

It's better to link the things you want to use as examples because otherwise we aren't really talking about anything concrete. The thread on this submission is awful, for instance - so that's my first link.

I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.

Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.

The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them

I don’t disagree. I’m just afraid it’s a hard problem to solve, at least an automated one.

At one point, I proposed a read-only option for (well-reported) divisive articles to help raise awareness without resulting in flame wars.

But there are downsides to that, too — either they can still get flagged away, there’s a risk of garbage remaining on the FP if you disable the flag feature, and/or HN gets accused of bias if they manipulate certain articles this way (by disabling flags and/or commenting).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com