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Comment by gaudystead | Hacker News Reader

Although I normally loathe pedantic assholes, I've found the ones on HN seem to be more tolerable because they typically know they'll have to back up what they're saying with facts (and ideally citations).

I've found that pedantic conversations here seem to actually have a greater potential for me to learn something from them than other forums/social platforms. On other platforms, I see someone providing a pedantic response and I'll just keep moving on, but on HN, I get curious to not only see who wins the nerd fight, but also that I might learn at least one thing along the way. I like that it's had an effect on how I engage with comment sections.

View on HN

And the worst of it gets flagged and even dead-ed so most skip it after a bit, as I assumed would happen recently

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649771

Yes, flagging mechanism on HN is evil.

It’s a blunt tool, but quite useful for posts. I read most dead posts I come across and I don’t think I ever saw one that was not obviously in violation of several guidelines.

OTOH I don’t like flagging stories because good ones get buried regularly. But then HN is not a great place for peaceful, nuanced discussion and these threads often descend into mindless flame wars, which would bury the stories even without flagging.

So, meh. I think flagging is a moderately good thing overall but it really lacks in subtlety.

Agreed, flagging for comments seems to function pretty well for the most part, and the vouch option provided a recourse for those that shouldn't have been killed.

On stories however, I think the flag system is pretty broken. I've seen so many stories that get flagged because people find them annoying (especially AI-related things) or people assume it will turn into a flame war, but it ends up burying important tech news. Even if the flags are reversed, the damage is usually done because the story fell off the front page (or further) and gets very little traction after that.

Just imagine this comment of yours would get flagged. Was it something very valuable and now the discussion is lacking something important? Surely not, but how would you feel? So what that you have some not so mild and not so "pleasant" opinion on something - why flag the comment? Just let people downvote it!

I have showdead on, and almost every single flagged post I've seen definitely deserves it. Every time it wasn't "deserved", the person simply took an overly aggressive tone for no real reason.

In short, I've never seen somebody flagged simply for having the wrong opinion. Even controversial opinions tend to stay unflagged, unless they're incredibly dangerous or unhinged.

I've seen a few dead posts where there was an innocent misunderstanding or wrong assumption. In those cases it would have been beneficial to keep the post visible and post a response, so that readers with similarly mistaken assumptions could have seen a correction. Small minority of dead posts though. They can be vouched for actually but of course this is unlikely to happen.

I agree that most dead posts would be a distraction and good to have been kept out.

> I've found the ones on HN seem to be more tolerable because they typically know they'll have to back up what they're saying with facts (and ideally citations).

Can you back this up with data? ;-)

I see citations and links to sources about as little as on reddit around here.

The difference I see is in the top 1% comments, which exist in the first place, and are better on average (but that depends on what other forums or subreddits you compare it to, /r/AskHistorians is pretty good for serious history answers for example), but not in the rest of the comments. Also, less distractions, more staying on topic, the joke replies are punished more often and are less frequent.

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