We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212528 and marked it off-topic.

Sigh.

This seems to be a common pattern on HN where users make very strong negative claims about some person/organisation without even attempting to justify it.

I wonder if this is a conscious tactic where people who don't like some person/organisation attempt to attach negative emotions to it.

Hoping that people unfamiliar with it would feel negatively about it, without really knowing why they feel that way. "I just remember someone saying that it is bad."

Don't try to get away with sarcasm.

Whether this is part of your secret masterplan, or a casual Sunday morning comment, is irrelevant.

You referred to Quillette's articles as, "bullshit in its most exquisite, hand crafted, artisanal form". If you aren't willing to even attempt justifying such defamatory claims, don't make them.

That is exactly the problem with Quillete and many sites/personalities across the sociopolitical spectrum: they carefully craft headlines and articles to tick all the bias boxes of their target audience. Making people stop, think, and maybe look deeper is a fine thing to do.

Progressive media outlets consistently publish false and dishonest articles pushing their progressive narrative. Bullshit in its most exquisite, hand crafted, click-baity form. Just the right mix of anecdotes and calls to emotions to make it a pain in the ass to refute unless you want to roll up your sleeves and have a Twitter mob refer to you as some sort of fill-in-the-blank-ist.

I mostly disagree. Saying "this should be like that" isn't a problem. When you are saying "this should be like that because it is proven by x" you have to actually prove your theory for it to be valid. Anecdotes and emotions can be valid in opinion, opinion can be valid in reasoning and reasoning can be valid when presenting facts. What you can't do is to mix together emotion or opinions with facts, at least not without bridging the gap. And that problem is in my opinion much larger in right wing discourse.

Edit: On second though it is very unlikely we will have a productive discussion here. People never seem to have been able to handle this type of discussion on HN and judging by the response this isn't the exception.

So since the quality of both the article and the comments are low I would instead recommend people to flag the story.

I know exactly what you mean. I still remember wasting an hour of my day once on a long read once, that started with a simple story about an autistic woman navigating tech spaces and took almost 3/4 of the piece to get around to the actual thesis of the piece, which was that male supremacy and harassment in tech isn't men's fault because they're all just autistic so leave James Damore alone, he can't help it.

Its very well crafted bullshit, but if you're already even vaguely sympathetic to it, it registers as "thoughtful", and even if you're not at all, it might take a minute to parse out that none of the pieces actually fit and the conclusion is both foregone and bad.

This is why I reflexively flag any articles I see from it on the front page. I tried taking the site seriously a few times and worked through all the assertions, but I came to the same conclusion you did. They have a certain way, and that way makes them not worth engaging with.

The way is too consistent to not have someone behind it carefully selecting writers and submissions. I think the writers think they're saying worthwhile things, and I think whoever's editing them is exploiting their good intentions.

It reminds me of how Gawker would exploit well-intentioned but inexperienced writers to drive ad impressions with poorly-argued positions on social justice. The writers didn't know they were dupes, and some of the editors probably didn't, but someone up the chain knew what was going on.