HN can be pretty horrible if it's talking about anything connected with diversity.

Good one! That said I don't know any place that I don't find horrible when that topic is on. Except places where everybody agrees of course.

I think the internet is a horrible place to talk about diversity.

I agree.

I find toxic subthreads from time to time but they are mostly flagged or already dead.

>I find HN to be one of the least toxic places on the internet

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.

> 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.)

You say that like verbal toxicity is bad. I like a good civil argument, there's nothing better for insight that thought-provoking discourse. And nothing worse than everybody repeating how much they agree with each other (nothing wrong with agreeing, it's just pointless in this context).

toxicity is bad in all forms.

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.

Another HN hater is jwz.

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 )

It's status signaling, a way of saying that you're better than other people. Same as acting superior to the masses who like a popular band.