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Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

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Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#171

Post by jrumbut »

rubidium wrote: post #21

Let me answer a different question: where do you go for civil, insightful commentary? I recommend gathering a group of "morning cup of coffee" people with an intellectual bent. This works particularly well among more academic neighborhoods, but can be done elsewhere. Get 3-10 people you know (or get to know these people) that are generally aware of the world, from different walks of life/professions, and start meetin…

The great thing that happens sometines on the internet, but rarely (yet wonderfully) in real life is that when you have a good conversation about something it often brings in people directly involved.

That's the reason I still bother to scan comments, for those moments.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#172

Post by bmelton »

whybroke wrote: post #164
someone7x wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. This is where I have to disagree. I feel the civility comes from swift and brutal downvotes of low effort contributions. If there's a pattern that I see amongst grey/flagged/dead comments is that they are most often off-topic and/or low effort. Not to say that groupthink doesn't exist or come into play, just that it's…

I agree that vacuous comment are ruthless downvoted as they should be. But observations, even with high grade citations that criticize the libertarian narrative are also regularly down voted to oblivion. Likewise any criticism of Russia gets clobber very quickly no matter how much evidence is offered. [edit] likewise pointing out either of those two problems So yes, poor post are down voted very efficiently but there…

I'm trying to figure out how "The city should be building affordable housing" is considered a libertarian ideal, and I can't get there from here. Can you help me understand why you feel that it is?

I'm having an equally hard time finding the libertarian angle in the top comments to the other threads you referenced.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#174

Post by noiv »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #55

From what I've seen, any place that claims to be "civil" also tends to be the most closed minded communities, especially ones that have upvote downvote systems. Unless you happen to agree with the specific set of ideas that a majority of that community happens to agree with, your contribution is meaningless

It takes time and effort to construct a lasting narrative. For sure there are some defense mechanisms in place.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#177

Post by felipeccastro »

I think it's easier to find such kind of comments on specialized communities, i.e. where users have a common ground. For example, looking for insightful comments on politics and economics, I usually like to follow the discussions on the Mises Institute site - since there is a common ideology to most visitors there (libertarianism), they don't spend time hating each other and disagreeing on basic views, and can contribute with constructive arguments instead.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#178

Post by eevilspock »

gkya wrote: post #166
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

I mostly stay here. The amount of political and economic discussion here is what I personally consider enough in my life; I don't think looking for more sources would improve SNR for me. I sometimes like to peruse Reddit for some well-defined topics - the trick is to find an appropriate subreddit for it. So, for instance, when I want to follow SpaceX news, I'll tune in to /r/spacex, because quite a lot of people ther…

HN is where I follow the tech news. For discussions, if we take civility as politeness and elaboration of one's points, HN is quite good. But if we take it as convivance and proper productive discussion of different, potentially opposite ideas, HN is not all that good. Here there are some certain and strong biases and dogmas, and the moderation is oligarchic. I've learnt to not post on political stuff and philosophic…

Your comment under the thread I link below is a case in point. You make a reasonable counter argument, but it still got greyed out. In this case, Upton Sinclair best explains why: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330325

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#179

Post by wazoox »

I've been using Google+ for that since the beta. If you remove all of the "hot", "recommended for you" and similar torrents of stupid from your circles, you can create a vast circle of people with whom you can discuss politics, science and other things. My "politis" circle is a few hundred people, and a few thousands follow my politics (rabid infrared leftist) collections.

Re: Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?

#180

Post by smsm42 »

eevilspock wrote: post #106
eevilspock wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with HN for politics and economics is its decidedly Silicon Valley, libertarian and white male slant, often self-servingly pedantically amoral. The civility here is often arrived at by burying comments that challenge this self-serving slant. Or by an algorithm that systematically buries articles and users (whose accounts accrue ranking penalties) that generate any heated debate by challenging the slant. W…

Silent downvotes right on schedule! I think civil and honest discussion would be better served without the anonymous down-votes. One can still retain privacy with a pseudonym. I find it ironic that Hacker News is not Hackable! The most important thing about HN, its ranking algorithm and reputation system (karma), is closed and not hackable in any way. I know HN wishes it could come up with a better algorithm, and eve…

So let's consider the alternative - forcing people to comment on downvoting.

Let's say I see a post that is clearly not contributing to the discussion (on my personal opinion of course, not that I have any other one :) or is too misguided to even argue with, or lacks any redeeming merit, etc. Now, I want less of this on HN, so I am going to downvote it.

Now, let's say I'm forced to comment on it. I can't really say anything useful about it, and maybe even if I could I don't want to bother - if it was worthy discussion-wide, I wouldn't want to -1 it in the first place - so I'd say something like "this is just stupid". Or "-1 for not presenting a sane argument" or something like that.

Now, what happens when the comment author sees it? He comments "no, your face is stupid!" of course. And so we get a whole mess we wanted to avoid.

And now people see this whole mess and want to bury it so it doesn't stink up their nice discussion. But they are forced to comment too, so instead of removing the mess they are making it worse and make people hate each other for no reason but disagreeing on who started this mess.

Does not look like an improvement to me.

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