The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible

This is a group selection based argument.

It seems that altruism can be explained without resorting to group selection. Statistically speaking over history, your group is overwhelmingly likely to be your kin. So gene selection / kin selection seems sufficient explanation for the evolution of group-altruistic behavior.

It shouldn't need to be said that the distinction between the community of use, (and how users consent to be engaged) and the provider of the forum, (and how they consent to have the forum used) is always present.

HN is not present in my mind, when I write things here. What people do, flagging me up or down, voting, responding, ignoring, is what I consider to be community engagement.

If somebody working (paid or unpaid) in a meta-god-like state in HN technology can remove me, or my writing, thats distinct from the disdain others have for what I chose to say.

I take the community rebukes as I find them. Sometimes, they hurt, sometimes, they feel valid. Sometimes, they hurt because they are valid.

Shadowbanning is possibly kinder? But none the less, something has to be done to keep a tone. Thats what editorial is.

I was actually just thinking earlier today that HN's great strength is its focus on quality of discourse, and it would be great if it leaned into that even more. I would love if it were made extremely clear at signup and whenever possible afterward guidelines such as,

1) Comments should be well thought-out, politely written, and supported by facts 2) Down-votes should be used for comments that are uncivil or unproductive; even if you disagree with the point made, a comment has value if a good-faith effort has been made to engage in constructive conversation.

These are similar to the existing guidelines—and I'm sure they could be fleshed out and worded better—but I feel the site would really benefit from even more emphasis on points like these. At signup, and then at convenient parts later on—when the user's karma unlocks the downvote capability for instance. There could even be a sort of "self-moderation" triggered by things like excessive down-voting or flagging, where it would remind the user of the guidelines and show them several of their votes, then just ask them to review and make sure they're using the buttons appropriately. Another possibility would be, whenever a user down-votes, require them to choose one of several categories of justification, like with a flag. That would quickly make it clear that the down-vote is for poor comments, rather than ones you personally disagree with. It might even be useful to have a similar—but probably optional—choice for up-votes; one nice options would be something like, "I disagree with this, but it's well argued." That kind of thing would give the ranking algorithms more variables to play with, hopefully improving results over time. Those are just some possibilities, and I'm sure there are many other options including by moderators when necessary.

The main thing though would be to make the guidelines very clear. My hope would be that a focus on quality of discourse, rather than on the types of content that are allowed, would allow more controversial topics to be discussed productively, as well as prevent unpopular opinions (when presented productively) from being drowned out. Ideally, the specific "off-topic" subjects could even be removed from the guidelines, since there are intellectually interesting discussions to be had on many different topics. Of course we wouldn't want to be overwhelmed with political topics to the extent that nothing else makes it to the homepage, but if that were to happen perhaps a dedicated subsection could be used, rather than an outright ban. Perhaps that would be preferable regardless, since many HN'ers come here to enjoy stimulating content and discussion outside strongly polarizing topics. Regardless though, I feel the site should double down on its focus on rationality and civility, and take every opportunity to influence new and existing users in that direction.

HN has never been a purely technical forum. Its DNA is in the overlap between "anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity" and "anything that good hackers would find interesting": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The word 'anything' appears twice in the 'On-Topic' section. HN's early years amounted to "anything that pg would find interesting", and he finds a lot of things interesting. So when I read your comment, what I hear is that HN is staying true to its original mission. That doesn't seem like a tragic place for the site, nor a new one.

For example, people sometimes have the perception that HN has grown more political over time. The opposite is true, as I tried to show here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. Such perceptions are externalities that exist for other reasons.