I truly wonder, without judgment, why the author thinks that HN is toxic. I doubt he reads this but maybe some people who don't share my impression can guess?
I find toxic subthreads from time to time but they are mostly flagged or already dead.
I love it here but sometimes it can be very negative. Any discussion of Bitcoin for instance used to bring out the worst of people.
Same goes for messaging networks (surprised me) and politics (not all that surprising after all.)
discussing different opinions doesn't need to become toxic however, so a civil discourse is possible even on polarizing topics. But having said discourse be civil is important, as otherwise both sides of the argument just get frustrated with no real progress in sight.
Perhaps partly because Peter Thield is a "fascist"?
https://refererhider.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/02/n...
(An argument that holds very little water. Fascism/national socialism promotes mixed economies and is very far from libertarianism, which is Thiel's actual political ideology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definitions )
I've never once found HN a toxic place in the last 4 years. A place to meet people with different opinions and have discussions about those opinions, yeah, but that's beneficial -- literally the opposite of toxic.
- HN is generally favorable than many other websites, but only because those websites are hopelessly toxic.
- Voting system works well for filtering non-informative contents out, but it does prefer some kinds of informative contents than others.
- Conflicts in HN are not common, but once started they are hard to control. HN is not a good place for managing conflicts; it's only good for mild discussions and it has no effective measure to stop discussions from becoming conflicts.
- Of course there are many different opinions less represented in HN. Some of them can be considered as to an inherent bias of HN.
I've got plenty of nits worth picking. I think most people do.
It depends on the topic. Recently, many topics have laid bare the groupthink attitude of the HN community. Any comments even questioning those views, much less actually expressing an opposite view, are instantly downvoted and derided in replies. This attitude is pervasive, all the way up to management. I am currently rate-limited, for example, because I was against GDPR. I was told by @dang:
”I'd be happy to lift the rate limit after these repetitive GDPR controversy threads have died down.”
In other words, as soon as my opinion is irrelevant because there are no threads about it, I can speak again.
That’s pretty much as toxic as it gets.
What if, perhaps, they are deservedly [1][2].
[1] https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150515011238/https://nodejs.or...
But every community has some sort of bias. Otherwise, it's not really a community.
Yes, my comments about issues with NN are disagreed with and downvoted to oblivion, but there's very few verbal attacks, and generally well-reasoned arguments.
> If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
That's exactly what he did, and I guess I don't blame him. The internet can be too much for some people.
If HN flags this article, then I might be slightly more inclined to agree with the author.
Here's an archived copy of the page anyways: http://archive.is/sXaEz
So I got the message too.
On the other hand, I know we are on HN, but I know hundreds of technical people, but only few of them installs privacy extensions, just the adblock. People don't care I think. I care to the extreme and I have installed uMatrix on desktop. No sane person would do that.
Btw as "soon to have" startup business I need people to inform me where they came from.
Edit. Found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17414652