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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Because HN can't be seen to discuss the military take-over of the seat of government of one of the most powerful countries on earth. It would be unseemly. The coup will not only not be televised, it won't even be discussed.

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It’s more likely that users are flagging these posts because of the Reddit-tier commentary

Most of the commentary on this forum approaches Reddit-tier. People will flag political content because it's political, and for no other reaon.

The discourse on HN has always been held to a much higher standard than Reddit, and the unfortunate truth is that if we want to maintain HN as a center of intelligent conversation, we have to often flag the topics that lead us away from it. I'm not saying every political thread should be flagged, but I think most of them should be.

The pretense is that the discourse on HN has always been held to a much higher standard than Reddit, primarily by comparing the worst of Reddit with the best of HN, which is specious. If you compare the average comment of HN to the average comment of any programming subreddit, the only real difference is that humor tends to be verboten on HN. But that comes at a cost of increased performative cynicism and rancor.

You've been here since 2012 and are an active contributor. You really believe that the quality of discourse is the same as Reddit on average? Maybe you don't spend enough time on Reddit. It is literally a cesspool of humanity. Hacker News has little in common with it.

Hacker News has more in common with Reddit than you'd think. Plenty of people who post here also post there. A lot of the content that gets posts here gets posted on Reddit first. You won't believe it but there's an intersection between HN and 4chan as well. I've never seen people gas up 4chan anywhere as much as I've seen them do here.

Yes any technical subreddit averages out to the average HN thread. In some specialized subreddits like /r/AskHistorians the quality far exceeds HN because you're required to know what you're talking about to even state an opinion.

Here's an illustrative example: the thread for "LLMs aren't world models (https://yosefk.com/blog/llms-arent-world-models.html)"

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854518

/r/programming: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1mnc9qf/llms_a...

I don't see a qualitative distinction between HN and "literally a cesspool of humanity" here.

I won't belabor the point because I know it's futile and diverging far from the topic.

Well put.

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