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Comment by coconuthacker42 | Hacker News Reader

As a young person who has often been exposed to reddit and the rest of the internet's political flame wars, HN has really taught me how to communicate respectfully with people who I don't agree with, which often leads to better understanding of a topic. Thank you, mods

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As an old person that's also seen political debate polarise into either flame wars or ideological echo chambers, I also highly value HN as one of the few remaining places where meaningful political discourse is possible.

Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly, and where I can even ask questions and get useful responses.

Sometimes I realise a flaw in my thought process when trying to write a HN comment, something that almost never happens on twitter and reddit. And i think its because the community has decided that curiosity is the prime virtue of HN, I really like that.

> Even when I completely disagree with my fellow HN, it's valuable to me to have a forum where I can see those views articulated clearly ...

Yes, this.

"one of the vices of those who would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves the rights and the means of changing them."

- a comment by Christopher Hitchens, referencing a Thomas Paine commentary on a John Milton pamphlet, in a 2006 debate about free expression. Full transcript (v long):

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-freedom-of-expr...

Could you link to an example HN thread of "meaningful political discourse" in your opinion.

Most of them, honestly. We obviously don't come to a mutual consensus, but for me the value is in an opportunity to understand why other people think differently, and to explain why I think the way I do.

Of course there's a lot of straw man-ing and snide comments. Every now and then though I strike up a conversation with someone I disagree with in a comment chain and I learn something new.

My 5 cents on HN's civility is that people want to have an impact with their posts.

On large forums (large subreddits, Twitter) you have to be very loud to be heard. Being outrageous, knee-jerk reactions easily get eyeballs, and don't require much effort or time, hence those who spend effort and time on a post that takes effort and time to understand are outcompeted. Finding content like that becomes a discoverability problem. There is also bandwagoning, adding your vote to the tally doesn't require much effort, but can feel like having an impact by identifying with the collective impact. Apes together strong.

On small forums it is relatively easier to have an impact, so because you are guaranteed to be discovered you want to increase the quality of the impact. On a large forum the opportunity to be seen can make you ignore the risk of being judged, and bandwagoning is risk-free, on a small forum the focus is on how you are being seen.

On HN specifically most people want to be seen as an insightful, constructive individual. Taking different stances is an established norm here, so the risk is not being upvoted (not discovered, or insightful), or being too downvoted (not constructive). Normally downvotes would also discourage you from taking too different stances, but HN made some smart decisions (you have to have a certain number of upvotes to downvote, can't downvote people replying to you, upvotes and downvotes are not publicly visible, your comment is only greyed out if it has too many downvotes) to encourage different stances and constructive behavior.

Even though you shouldn't post/comment for karma, I really enjoy how easy it is to get up voted comments on HN. Makes it feel like people are actually reading your stuff and that it's a community. Reddit lost that ages ago, unless you join niche subreddit. You can comment on the top voted front page post on HN and still get replies.

Regarding the last paragraph: I wonder whether anyone has done any game-theoretic studies about self-moderated online discussions and which voting mechanisms work most effectively.

> HN has really taught me how to communicate respectfully with people who I don't agree with

What HN is good at is preventing or limiting discussion so that it doesn't turn into a flame war by any side. Whereas today's reddit and much of social media/tech only allows one side to flamebait.

Reddit and most of the internet 10 years ago was a far better place for discussion. It's why reddit became so much popular than HN. If you genuinely wanted to understand a topic better ( whatever it was and however controversial it was ), you'd get all sides of it. Today, it's just one side. Sure, it was wild, but everyone got their say and you could read up on everyone's position. Now, sadly, most of tech is just corporate/media/establishment propaganda.

As an older person who's been exposed to the web and IRC for several decades, I've seen all kind of places, some of them well-moderated, and others where verbal violence was recurrent or moderation abusive.

The moderation in HN is good, but the success of the site in a increasing problem. As the audience widens, the Guidelines are less respected. Nowadays, I almost never follow a link posted in HN, and rarely glance at the comments. For the past weeks, I hid one third to one half of the frontpage posts, because I thought they are off-topic. Quoting the Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I expect to find on HN what most non-hacker sites would not include.

I think HN needs to figure out how to expand the moderation team in a transparent way. The risk of course is introducing all the reddit-esque drama around moderator selection, abuse etc. Stackoverflow has had similar issues, though somehow stumbles along better than reddit. Regardless, there have been some huge thread recently that would have benefited from moderation.

Stackoverflow is completely different. It prioritizes the experience of readers over posters - being the one who asks a question is not a good experience at all, but being the one who searches and finds an answer is really good. What they do have worked really well for this goal, and I have great respect for their initial decision.

I rarely read the articles, but thoroughly enjoy...even the occasional slightly ott political comments...and certainly all of the others. Sometimes i feel it's a shame that the USA is so predominantly: choose 1 or 0, there is no nuance; whatever you criticise means you're 100% for the other. But then again, that's all part of the deal, and I'm grateful for it, not against it.

I like how HN walks the fine line between moderation and censorship really well.

On the other hand:

>anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

That casts a wide net, and something that a segment of HN would find intellectually gratifying and produce good conversation shouldn't be avoided just because traditional media happened to stumble on it too. I try to keep in mind the "probably" modifier, and that other people may be gratified by different content. Generally speaking I only flag clickbait or things that are divisively partisan and probably won't produce any actual conversation.

Then on things like politics... Well, just consider this headline currently on the front page: "Crypto, the Left & Technofeudalism"

Crypto is a massive bit of emerging technology, but it is virtually impossible to separate it from some of the politics and social values involvde. It's pretty much baked to the motivations behind many proponents as well as the people directly working on the tech.

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