There are two factors here. First, nostalgia bias. HN was never apolitical and a lot of the stuff that used to appear here was just as intense. I wrote about this recently so I could regurgitate the link when this perception pops up. Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

The other factor is that society has been repolarizing ideologically. That's a massive macro trend and HN, alas, has no immunity from those.

We're probably in for rougher waters, which is why we're trying to set down stronger markers about what's unacceptable here. The idea of HN has always been that a place for substantive, thoughtful discussion on the internet is probably doomed, but let's try to survive as long as we can. We'll do our best, but Cnut cannot command the waves to stop.

I can see a possibility where manfredo's perspective is genuinely naive of context surrounding of his first three bullet points, and may not be acting in bad faith - and I can see a possibility where brainkim's real feelings aren't as hard-line as the shortened, perhaps understandably heated version.

To call these comments "inquisition level", and potentially ignorant of the catastrophic history of suppressing dissenting opinions, is a pretty wild attack based on what they said. Your hyperbole seems far more damaging and dismissive than their comments.

Regarding support of Trump, Facebook indeed had an overt internal tone of enmity toward Trump, to the point that admitting to having voted for Trump would have been a frightening prospect in most circles. (I can't speak to the specifics of Palmer Luckey's foibles, only to the general tone regarding Trump.)

Regarding "All Lives Matter", there was indeed inquisition-level blowback. I vacillated between abhorrence, anguish, and rage as I watched the drama unfold.

For context: I was a Facebook employee at the time, and although I tend toward liberal ideals (despite a very conservative upbringing), I was appalled at the level of intolerance toward conservative views. Though I could not in good conscience vote for Trump (nor even throw away my vote on a third-party candidate), I continue to respect other humans who voted for Trump. That felt like a dangerous view to espouse as a Facebook employee, and I saw other employees behave with unease regarding their personal political views. Intolerance is dangerous all around, and in my opinion Facebook's internal politics have fallen (mostly unwittingly) into the trap of "not tolerating intolerance", using a liberal (pun intended) -- IMO overly broad -- definition of intolerance.

Yes, even here on HN, in the fall of 2016 you'd recive massive downvotes for not hating enough on conservatives.

I ended up stating on most of my posts that I didn't like Trump and didn't want him to win but

- just tried to come up with an explanation for why so many others voted for him

- or tried to point out that the rules that allowed him to win had allowed democrats to win before

- etc

I still received loads of downvotes (I'd see my points rising and then falling sharply, seemingly when some part of the word woke up.)

All in all I came out positive wrt useless points but I still wondered about it.

And BTW: I still really don't like that man.

Naive how? Other than the 3rd, which I consider overly broad to pass judgement and the 4th which I lack the appropriate context, I do consider these points morally bad. That doesn't give me license - or anyone else - to fire someone over these views. Sure it may be legal, but I'd be aghast if it is has become socially acceptable to do so. Seriously, how is explicitly firing people over their choice of candidate a remotely defensible position?

Enable "showdead" in your profile and you will see that anything that moves beyond the left is promptly flagged and, sometimes, the account gets banned for "starting flames".

That's quite untrue. Anyone who looks through the moderation comments sctb and I post can see that we ban accounts that break HN's rules regardless of ideology. And you can read this very thread (or many others) to see plenty of comments which "move beyond the left", whatever that means, which are neither flagged nor banned.

But absolute freedom of speech IS A LEFT WING OPINION! Is no one here old enough to remember the fight over pornography or offensive language in art/music/movies? That was the right trying to shut down speech they disagreed with via corporate power! These people are _not_ liberals, they're something else that's new and terrifying

"The left" became "the progressive left" which became "progressives". The actual liberal left still believes in freedom of speech, the public perception of it has just been co-opted by militants with a different social agenda (conformity to progressive values, rather than liberal values).

I think you've convinced yourself of something horrific for reasons that I'm not seeing from what you're writing. "Absolute freedom of speech" is a satisfying way to describe a righteous movement like the one you mentioned, but it's not a real thing. Nobody is for "absolute" anything, though they may shout as much from a podium. I think it would not at all be a contradiction if many of the same people who fought against censorship of "offensive" material in the arts would opt not to fight for the right to incite direct violence. On the other hand, would they be against whatever it is these employees are upset about? Possibly - the details are fuzzy - but if it's general political workplace hostility, then that seems to happen just as much in conservative workplaces, where I've personally seen people express a shocking degree of public hatred for other people based on the perceived liberal nature of their opinions, to the point of destroying working relationships.

The things that scare ME are:

A. Some people seem to be practically unable to engage with dissenting opinions without claiming to have been "shouted down".

B. There seems to be less disagreement about the how to achieve what's right (i.e. we both agree on what's right, but disagree on how to get there), which can realistically be argued about in good faith, and more disagreement about what's right in the first place (e.g. person X thinks gay marriage, abortion, etc should be legally prohibited, and person Y does not), about which good-faith arguments are vanishingly rare for perhaps unavoidable reasons.

"But absolute freedom of speech IS A LEFT WING OPINION"

That only holds if you're willing to perform enough mental gymnastics to somehow transmogrify the gulags, mass graves, firing squads and famines that the USSR, Mao Zedong, Cuba, Pol Pot, etc. employed to deal with dissenters into features of right wing governance.

Or just pretend these things don't count...

One could argue they were "punching a nazi" of their time. The establishment of a dictatorship of the working class was a mission for which no human sacrifice was too great.

Obviously we're nowhere near that in modern US, BUT the hints of "violence in exchange for a dissenting opinion" and "what I don't agree with is Nazism" are unpleasant to say the least.

>the hints of "violence in exchange for a dissenting opinion"

I couldn't agree more. I've seen both actual violence and extreme glorification of violence against people of the opposite political affiliation more and more over the past couple years. Many people seem to dismiss the calls to violence as "trolls", which is actually probably true, but I have to wonder if there is much of a difference between a troll who calls for violence and loves to see people get attacked at rallies, and a person who would actually be happy about these things if they became worse than they are now. I feel like there used to be a solid distinction, but I'm not sure any longer that there's really a hard line between all "trolls" and people who would actually enact these things, given the power (and given no significant threat to themselves, of course).

In addition to the violence aspect, there's also total power asymmetry in bigoteering. Calling someone a Nazi, a white supremacist, a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a transphobe, a cultural appropriator, whatever other trendy moral shortcoming du jour, with no need for supporting evidence whatsoever, has no downside to the accuser. Accuse away. You're doing a service to society.

The entirety of the burden is always on the accused.

> One could argue they were "punching a nazi" of their time.

One could. One would have to forego any claim to "absolute freedom of speech," however.

Yep, at this point I, and I imagine many others, have experienced first-hand that HN is not the right place to be having this sort of discussions. There's a certain orthodox Overton window to the conversation here, and stepping outside of it is often punished with flagging.

Ultimately I don't care, I don't have a horse in the race of keeping HN a safe, civilized, good-faith neutral space for conversation. It just means this sort of dialogue has to be moved elsewhere. I'm happy to talk purely tech, but politics seeps into everything these days, so it's hard to avoid.

>Am I crazy, and the world has just moved on to be horrible?

Lol I got fired for making a joke after-hours over beers to a guy that wasn't politically aligned. It's wild. To mess with someones livlihood because of a political opinion.