You seem to think that the civil discussion that occurs here would carry over to these hot button topics, but I assure you that the kind of people who enjoy dragging a discussion down into the mud and participating in “flame wars” as you said will be attracted here once they know there is a discussion about one of their favorite issues.

In short, the curation of HN is what makes it great. Relaxing it would ruin this place.

The reason I asked my question in the first place was specifically because wherever else these topics are discussed, they are even exponentially more of a shit show than when they are discussed on HN. I wanted to see if there were any suggestions on getting HN-quality debate, but on more sensitive topics.

And the general consensus from responses is, basically, "no". And that consensus actually made me arrive at a fundamental conclusion I think: That it is indeed impossible to have a respectful debate on sensitive topics if commenting is pseudo-anonymous and open-ended.

Thus, I guess it may sound dumb, but it just clicked for me that it actually makes a lot of sense. It's difficult enough having discussions about sensitive topics when done in a face-to-face manner with people that have mutual trust - why should we think it's possible to have these conversations with faceless strangers on the Internet without it turning into a cesspool?

I feel like the opposite. This 'curation' creates and harbours one sided conversations at best and what's the point? 1 sided conversations are not conversations, you are playing tennis with a wall. The wall will always win.

The first and most obvious topics are going to be the more controversial topics.

So look at climate change, covid/vaccines, US politics especially anything pro-trump or election fraud, and well anything touching on religion.

Here is today's climate change article, right on time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546875

Haven't quite read it yet but I'd bet there's only 1 side talking there.

There are quite a lot of members here who will flag any reply to them as they don't agree or simply don't like what they are reading.

Power abuse is just a casualty of cleaner boards.

I wish it were just agreements, sadly it's not.

The way I see it, I don't think these topics are relevant to the HN audience. I know that they are probably de facto HN topics because so many readers live in the US, but HN is supposed to be about tech regardless of where you live. For that reason I would always flag an article about weapon laws in the US, and I would expect most of HN to think the same (except maybe on weekends, when things are a bit more relaxed).

I see where you come from, though: the discussion in HN is for the most part polite and informed, and it would be nice to have more of that in general. But I fear that if you started adding "topics" to HN you would dilute it and lose what makes it special.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

But I put it to you that some topics -- such as US politics -- are less likely to gratify one's intellectual curiosity than to provoke reaction and negative emotion.

Already sometimes seemingly less-incendiary topics get a bit distracting, which is not too bad within limits but it's probably not an improvement to go that direction intentionally.

No mater how good their skillz, the best hackers don't troll.

I disagree here - I'm the one who posted the California using Texas' abortion law tactics against assault weapons, and I've never been to the US.

Nonetheless i find topics around history, human rights, laws, political systems interesting, hence the submission ( i have to admit i hesitated though).

It's an interesting idea for sure, but I'm not sure how or if such a thing can exist. Moderation becomes a headache, and well, a lot of truly brilliant people I've met in life have zero interest in debating it. How do you keep out the YT commenters, Fox News or r/politics commenters, etc?

It would be interesting if HN had some bucket like /offtopic, for things that are flamebaity and removed from the main view, but I fear it would attract the aforementioned people who only ever troll there, and dang probably having zero interest in mod'ing it.

Not OP, but it's not smart/educated that I like to have these conversations with. It's humble, polite, open minded people. For the most part these two axes are usually orthogonal and independent. The one correlation I've found is that if one's lack of education is approached in a way that contributes to them feeling insecure, then they move into survival mode, become defensive, and thus less open minded.

HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking. Even if the user has a degree in the liberal arts, the application of their mind in technology forces their thoughts in a way that pushes them to think critically and not just accept what is given to them without question - I would think. As with all thoughts and theories, this is a general rule and a hypothesis, I might be way off the mark.

Generally speaking, though, people who have learned critical thinking skills seem more willing to discuss an issue in a reasonable manner and drill down to the truth of it, rather than "dig in" and just decide they're right with whatever information they might have on hand.

I only bring this up as I have a fine arts degree, but shifted into programming as I wrote scripts for different art applications and the transition was natural as I had a background as a script kiddie from my high school days. A large amount of the people I went to school with, however, are absolutely unwilling to apply critical thought to specific subjects even though some have masters degrees.

I couldn't disagree more.

HN is one of the few places where you will get people who have no idea about a topic expounding at length on that topic. The psychology of this place is fascinating.

It is unrelated to education and, for some people, education is deleterious. Engineering is, in my experience, definitely one of the worst subjects for teaching false confidence. I worked in finance, sometimes client-facing, and worked a lot with individual investors in a business I started...any kind of engineering background was a red flag because, time after time, they rarely accepted the limits of their knowledge (doctors is another one, I don't think anyone who has met a doctor would dispute this either). Engineering backgrounds also seem to the cornerstone of most modern authoritarian states (the CCP and Singapore's fetish for engineers as an example).

So learning critical thinking is something that is totally distinct from attending university or even the job you do. People who are totally ignorant of something are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge. Not always, they are probably more prone to irrational or emotional reasoning but, again, I don't think critical thinking is something that can be taught in every case.

On the original post, I think people believe that it is difficult to have conversations about politics because of the behaviour of a small minority of people. In some online places that minority is very large. And in many communities, moderation is also aimed at limiting disagreement. The result is inevitable. HN has the community it moderates for.

My net experience on HN, is overall positive. But, most of the discussions are about software/tech things.

When not trying to put a ding in the universe for irrigation automation, I also enjoy a life as a father/husband/grandfather, budding pilot, active faith community participant, water ski enthusiast, snow skier, Lego enthusiast. I have noted that on the occasions when discussions on HN overlap some of these areas, that the “I’m educated so I must intuit more than your life experience informs you” is off putting. I don’t think I would enjoy any but the most tangential discussions about family, romance, marital relationships, religion, engagement in the environment, or child rearing in the HN forums. There are places I can go and discuss some of these with humility and open mindedness and politeness, but it would be a while before I felt that way about these topics in these forums.

Which is not a diss on HN at all. I just think we all have areas in our life where we can find cohorts and feel secure and have polite open minded discussions (if we’re so inclined). And other areas where the context/cohort doesn’t align with the premise of the cohort well.

Have clear written criteria for what constitutes virtuous and unvirtuous conduct, and make it clear that commenters can be banned for the sort of angry, low-quality discourse that's the norm on those platforms. Then enforce it, with temporary bans at first and permabans for repeated or particularly egregious offenses. Most people won't want to be mods, but hopefully enough will.

I'm not speaking hypothetically here; I'm describing how moderation works on /r/TheMotte. I won't comment on any of the opinions expressed there since that's not the point: the point is that it can be done. It's existence proof that you can have a large discussion forum talking about controversial topics without it turning into an ideological monoculture or a cesspool.

One thing to keep in mind; the moderation on HN is absolutely designed to steer the conversation in a direction (one in line with YCs mission / vision). Most political topics that veer from centrist make-nice are not in line with that direction.

YCs moderation is a paid, editorial position. This ain’t Reddit, and to the degree that HN has regular users in the mod loop, it’s usually in a democratized way (flagging / vouching comments, the way up/downvotes work, etc.) The goals are different, and HN absolutely becomes a cesspool on any political topic when it’s left to simmer (lest you think the commenters here are of any higher quality than elsewhere on the Internet — in my experience HN tends to have more user crossover with Reddit than anywhere).

I mean, maybe, although I think there is substantial non-overlap between "people able to have a good-faith, respectful debate" and those traditionally considered "smart and/or well educated".

As a lot of comment responses attest, it seems the answer may just be "it's human nature, it's not possible", but given that I just see these kind of topics more and more and more (i.e. interesting but where the debate ends up getting more vitriolic and going in circles), I'd hope it's something beyond just human nature at work.

Heck, maybe even the possibility to keep interesting upvoted articles without any comments would be worth trying.

What if, along with the '/offtopic' bucket there were participation criteria that could be moderated by other /offtopic participants? Not my wheelhouse, but something like '/offtopic' threads are only readable by HN members, only editable by members in good standing, presence of an 'evict the troll' button that disallowed further comments on a thread if enough users press it about a given comment/user.

But yes, this also happened on, e.g. Facebook where activists were blaming "color blind" application of the rules for flagging a lot of things as "hate speech."

Given how often Twitter has had issues with "AI" (like people getting shadow banned or blocked for posts years old coincidentally timed with PR releases about "how to combat xxx"), I don't trust that statement at all.

Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and Google/YouTube are widely known to use AI as first stage of content moderation for years (want to try it? post a picture of genitalia on Twitter, and your account will be set to NSFW in a matter of seconds, or post something with a "copyrighted" audio part on YT), and people have exploited that for just as long. We've seen various complaints about unjustified bans on all services made #1 here on HN simply because the affected people don't have any other way to contact a human support resource.

I do get that this might be necessary out of scale - if fifty people flag something for abusive content or spam, it likely is abusive content... the problem is the 1% that are the target of organized reporting/trolling campaigns, and for these people, that really really sucks.

Since then, I've been seriously pondering how a community would feel like that would simply enforce humble, fact-based discussion by technical means. FWIW, I'd be curious to try it out.

I've found out the hard way that social problems are usually a really terrible fit to technical solutions, but I'm curious anyway.

This idea might be a great one to try to go together with that idea.

formalized highschool and college debate is pretty much this

---

The jargon in the community for speaking really fast to win] is “spreading” and it was a dominant strategy by the late 1990s. Serious debaters expect to learn to read, listen, and talk that fast. There is widespread acknowledgement that it is tactical, and many sniff “against the purpose of debate” (while speaking at 200+ words per minute), but debate is a sport like football is a sport and if you want to play football without running or losing to people better at running than you, you may be selecting for a high friction lifestyle.

(There are several debate communities with some overlap, given that there are several styles of debate with different rulesets, organizations, and microcultures about performance. At least when I was doing it in 2000-2004, spreading was hegemonic in Policy debate and less effective (and beatable) in Parliamentary debate.)

Spreading is not intelligible to the layperson, and to the extent to which debate is about presenting ideas in a way that convinces a layperson, it is a failure. But there really is only so much that one can say in short 6 minute speech times. Talking faster, provided people can follow what is happening/read quickly, allows oftentimes for a more in-depth discussion than what was previously possible.

It was really boring for me, and at times a lot of work. However, one thing I appreciated about it is that at times you'd obviously be arguing a side you don't necessarily agree with, and learn a ton in the process. Also surprise yourself a bit in how convincing you can be. In a way, I wish everyone had the time and effort to research a POV they don't agree with, but as if they did.

Probably great training for a lawyer or paralegal, perhaps even public speaker, but I personally didn't find a lot of joy in it.

What do you mean by this? I did a few different forms of debate in highschool and this seems like a really surface level characterization of just a few of these sub-types.

So in ours, it was a 1v1 and basically you just spoke for 2 or 3 minutes to a judge, wrote down notes from the other speaker to make rebuttals, then it was over.

What I meant is it very much isn't a back and forth discussion of any sort. In fact, you were never really speaking to each other at all, just to the judge or moderator. Speak for a couple minutes spewing facts and references, listen, do it again, etc.

Apologies if I overgeneralized all debate based only on my experience.

This is all much more likely to happen outside of the public gaze.

And so I think you are looking not for a website but for a person, or perhaps a website that helps gather such people - and somehow keeps out those who claim to be all of the above but are fooling themselves or the rest of us.

Where do you find good people? There’s probably a market for an “intellectual dating site”.

First, you start by agreeing on the axioms which is necessary to even think about a meaningful discussion. Already at that stage you can discover you have different set of axioms (e.g. one party has an utilitarian world-view and the the one doesn't). The subject of the discussion is secondary, because it all boils down to your set of values. You can discover it by having several discussions with the same people: you will quickly realize you get stuck on the same fundamental issue (e.g. the value of life having precedence over one's personal choices).

Note that the axioms might not seem that obvious and you might discover them only in the last stages of discussion, when one party says, "Of course X" and the other party responds, "Of course not!" Especially all kinds of discussions between the so called religious and non-religious people are completely useless as the axioms in both cases are usually very different.

So in my opinion discussions should be not so much about convincing someone (as this is hardly possible as it's related to one's beliefs, not facts) but about how to coexist in the optimal, most harmonious way while having different - and sometimes conflicting - views.

The sparring and point scoring that charaterizes a lot of spirited debate depends on a kind of collegiality that I think is an artifact of a former time. You can't engage in that with (or even near) someone whose recieved identity is founded on being a reaction to that specific collegiality, but even still I've come to think it's not even the "Them," that ended it.

Debate itself is a kind of intellectual leisure that you don't want to flash around too much because what social media did was put us all all in an arena that was previously reserved for elite level competition, where players play and commentators comment. The way people signal their membership in the players' club is by not commenting. If you're talking, you probably aren't in the game, and if you are you're probably losing. I have been writing almost as long as I've been in tech so public discourse is my idea of fun, and the choice to take on that player/commentator opportunity cost was personal, but the reason you aren't seeing great online debate is because what it comes down to is, for the people you want to hear from most, it just isn't worth it.

And it’s universally terrible. It turns out when you dedicate a forum specifically to open debate of hot-button issues, you attract a lot of the participants who have been driven out of other communities for their views. Even when the discussion is dressed up in a veneer of formal discussion, the topics and comments are such that most people with moderate views have zero interest in being part of such a forum.

One of the most intriguing things about HN (to me) is what a big Rohrschach test it is. There are enough data points for people to read in whatever they choose to see for whatever reasons. I'm sure the rest of the internet is like this too, but when it's your job to focus hard and long on one corner of it, you become aware of this phenomenon much more acutely.

I think what people are looking for is political discussion among people who are generally bright but whose identities are not politically-focused. If you set up an internet forum for talking about politics, you would attract people whose primary interest is politics, and whose identities are wrapped up in politics. These people would be blinded by all sorts of biases and groupthink. The conversation would be largely terrible.

HN, on the other hand, has an audience that is mostly technical/startup-focused, and many of whom are quite bright. They also come from all over the world, though there is a clear US bias. Using these categories as filters, as opposed to "I care a lot about politics" as a filter yields relatively more interesting political conversations, at least for me.

You reference DEI and other hot-button issues: they are discussed here, usually in light of how they affect people building software / hardware. Those conversations are some of the best here. Those topics will always attract unenlightened and strong opinions because they are constructs of emotion, driven by emotion and forged by intensely emotional experiences. Most people's first experience with DEI come from experiencing discrimination or being accused of it.

This community does a good job of getting the balance right - and I've enjoyed being a part of the discussion.

As for how to host these topics without devolving into flamewars - I think you'd have to try a different species. Emotions get all of us.

In one breath you say there are people going around trying to upset others, and then in the next breath you blame a completely different group of people for the predictable outcome of this.

Also I dare you to name even a single example of scientific progress that has resulted from an online flame war. Everyone I've seen simply consists of people shouting the same talking points back and forth with no one changing their mind, let alone learning anything new

Probably not HN but you could set up a forum, set some guidelines and see what you end up with. With topics that evoke emotion there will always be people that are offended or outraged so I think you would be starting from a losing position. The world is a big place with many cultures beliefs and values. The internet makes that big world much smaller. From my own experience doing this I can tell you that your site will get DDoS'd when people get upset. They can't attack the other person so they will take it out on your site instead. They will also try to get your domain taken down. Do not allow uploading multimedia content. If you want to practice defending against such things and take on moderating emotional content then it might be an interesting learning experience for you. Register the domain through the DDoS/CDN provider and don't use that account for any domains you care about. Same goes for your server provider. Keep it separated from accounts you have anything important on. Expect to be doxxed by angry people. Avoid doing any of this if you have children.

Some forum software will let you configure ranks by post count or admin trust so that a message posted by anyone below a certain trust level will require moderator review before anyone other than that person or a moderator can see it. I would strongly recommend doing this if you plan to set up such a discussion site. This won't solve all your issues but it may extend the lifetime of your domain a little bit. Get some good moderators that you can trust from multiple timezones.

1. A higher bar for comments based on age of account and karma.

2. A limit on the number of comments from any individual account, e.g. each account would only get one or two comments. The idea being "get out your point as clearly as possible in one message", because you won't have the option for endless back-and-forth (and potentially escalating) debate.

Watching any post that touches on Covid over the past year and a half -- which should at least have aspects that are not inflammatory, unlike your examples -- I've become convinced that the answer is simply "no". It may be better here than other places, but it still isn't good. And it's not what I come here for. I don't engage with them anymore and I would prefer a world where they weren't submitted here at all.

But I've also personally used a couple new separate accounts to comment my experience & knowledge on topics that I wouldn't want to be google able to myself, even if I share that with my IRL friends.

Maybe there could be an option for 'private post' that you can still use your main account so mods can still look at coordination across accounts etc but the public facing handle is not tied to your public profile.

Probably would still encourage the type of comments most in this thread are against though that's a hard problem.

To be fair the corollary is that you already know what you are getting from this place so probably sticking to purer tech topics on a tech accelerator's forum is fair enough. Interesting the these things overlap of course as I suspect will become ever more common.

You may already know this, but you can turn showdead on in your profile, which lets you see dead posts easily.

I will say that 95+% of the time the dead comments I see have earned their status, but I could see a case for decreasing the grayness for downvoted comments or making it a configurable option.

Although the argument could be made that heavy manipulation of public discourse (by a few) is why flame-war inducing topics even exist in the first place, and that if one wanted to block progress/discussion on a particular topic one could just turn the topic into a flame-war at every opportunity.

Also, any posts about the Python programming language should be flagged as well because Python is pure garbage.

I flag a good third of the front page stories every time I visit, because they are topics that are not business or tech related that have beaten to death so badly that they are just tiresome.

Another way to think about it is: my average comment quality, if I commented on everything I read, would be very low. For most things I just don't have that much to add. So, for most things, I don't comment. Nothing to add? I just move on. The nature of hot button issues though is that they are more likely to elicit comments. They're lowering that innate "Do I have anything to add?" threshold. The result is that average comment quality declines - but their still could be good comments.

Writing this makes me think about a different approach than I'm seeing suggested in other comments here. Less rules and moderation based, and more sorting based. Up and down votes aren't quite right, you get reddit and echo Chambers. But, they aren't entirely wrong either. You need a way to elicit lots of comments (hot button issues) and mitigate the bad ones.

Ultimately a large part of this problem is a total lack of diversity and heavily cis male white perspective here. Tech in general suffers from lack of diversity and it shows. Fixing this would help at least balance the threads a bit and maybe open some minds. I'm cis white male too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . we need other voices.

It might not be possible, or pointless, to have a conversation when people live in alternate realities or hold plainly racist, sexist, non factual views.

I do think these topics are important though.

Gender, race, & immigration are great examples of 'political' topics that also tie into what most in this thread feel HN should focus on: tech/startups. These topics are important in discussing hiring, company culture, human rights etc.

A topic might seem interesting, but if everyone here is just coming at it with whatever random facts and biases they’ve picked up in normal life, then the discussion has a low chance of being valuable. It’s just going to meander until it scrolls off to deep pages and everyone gets tired of fighting.

I don’t think HN needs a discussion on every topic that hits the zeitgeist. There are plenty of other places on the Internet to power discovery. My personal favorite is Twitter, but Reddit is good too. (Both require curation, though.)

It's for that reason that hot-button political topics generally have to earn their place, by being more-than-usually interesting not just to people who love to debate politics (hey, it me!) but also to people who are on HN to gratify their curiosity more generally. Most hot-button topics can't pay their way this way, and get flagged off the site.

If you care about politics (and you should, that's how society decides who does and doesn't wield power!) then do something about it. Call your congressman. Join or organize a rally. Knock on your neighbors doors and convince them to vote in the next election. Even just talk to your coworkers about DEI or some other topic you care about.

You’d get some karma portability to filter for the nerds here, but could focus outside of harder tech.

This is because if you got the majority of Americans into a room together, and you let them talk about things in peace, without constraints, but also without the trolls and the aforementioned people in power (and their misguided agents), these people would find that they actually agree on most issues.

That sounds crazy in 2021 but I believe it’s true.

The majority of people, regardless of education, are reasonable and good human beings.

They’ll find that the person that voted for Biden isn’t a sheep, that the Trumper isn’t a moron, and that everyone is just another person trying to make it through the day.

If more people realized this it would be very bad for the ruling elite, because they would be vastly outnumbered by a united populace.

But hn-tech would have a strong tendency to want hn-vi and hn-vim and hn-emacs, and hn-polisci would want -left and -right and -libertarian and before you know it, you've made reddit.

Reductionist, but I suspect you'd break the golden goose.

I want to say what I want to say; I've always been that way, and I think people should not self censor. I'm "disgusted" by it and that's the word I want to use. I don't want to sugar coat it. But these feelings occur before even getting to controversy. They exist beyond myself here even in hacker topics.

I get tired of trying to have a deep conversation about subjects I have expertise on here about only to be armchair responded to by an amateur who has a casual understanding of the topic.

I think HN should do away with public karma and the karma system all together. It reminds me of Reddit, and it causes the same sort of behaviors to exist. I think there's great value in allowing valuable posts to percolate up, but I also think there are adults here who can read.

The real world doesn't work like a numerical karma system and it makes no sense anyway. Why should some shmuck who got karma for talking about how great templating is in Rust be able to silence someone who has something opinionated to say about RPC protocols or the difficulties of bootstrapping a company? How stupid is that? What an idiotic concept.

I think the issues that exist with HN today are common to all online communities, though. There's no "fixing" it, it just is what it is. Once they get large enough, this sort of thing just happens. I don't think there is a fix.

People rave about dang's moderation, but I'm not a fan--it's about on par with any moderation I've seen in the last 20 years. He frequently stamps out opinions that don't need to be reprimanded. This place is an echo chamber. But he does a job that isn't enviable, so good for him and the people that enjoy his work. It's still important.

I'm sure there are really cool communities out there today where interesting smart people are building things and talking about things that are interesting, but it's not here.

I saw it on a gaming forum years ago in which the members of that forum created fun, silly, and useful things ranging from 2048 to Babel, and those people went on to work for large orgs like Cloudflare and GitHub.

I'm sure there's a forum out there right now with some kids working on stuff that will put a little dent in our world tomorrow or some day soon, but I just don't see it here. My guess is it's in a place you don't expect, but where young developers hang out, and so probably another gaming or Internet interest forum--maybe Roblox's forum.

This place is ironically even hostile to people creating things they want to show off, and as you would expect, it's usually comments from people who create nothing at all.

This is basically the problem with political topics (or one of them), for the most part its to easy to have an opinion. But its based on weak information or some intuition but it feels right. So these discussions don't include facts, they get emotional because the basis of people's side is emotional and feelings.

Sugarcoating tends to be a euphemism for being rude though. This tends to evoke an emotional response back and down we go. Even if it's not a euphemism there is a big advantage imo. It's an efficient way to rein in your own emotions because it forces you to write a thoughtful response, this leads to a higher chance of getting a thoughtful response back. I think sugarcoating posts is a borderline necessary requirement to have any meaningful discussion.

Forums go way deeper into the topic, here once something drops from front page, then it's basically dead, also no notifications(?)

If you don't believe me - here's a quick experiment.

1. Find an article in the new section that is getting really popular

2. Observe as it either gets taken down from the front page or never makes it there even though it beats other submissions in popularity.

3. Ask dang how it's possible that this submission never made it to the front page. He'll say it was a moderation mistake [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894047