Wow that's the sort of comment that usually gets removed. An unnecessary slur on an entire group of people with no supporting argument. Being disagreeable for the sake of being disagreeable. I'm disappointed.

It's partly strategic. The presence of a moderation comment like that in a thread often seems to evoke higher-quality comments. I'd bet that it such had an effect in this case—the thread improved almost immediately—but who knows.

You're right that I should have written something longer and not in haste. But I'm a bit surprised by the strong reaction to that one; it's atypical. Perhaps to some readers it felt like a disparagement of their own view on religion—which of course it was not.

Sorry if I was catty. It was a bit of cold water in the face, is all.

Personally I like to avoid such threads. You can't really be understood, whatever you contribute.

I don't think you were catty, and you were far from the only person who had an adverse reaction to my comment. I've learned something. So thanks!

Yeah a really disparaging comment coming from a mod. What is the problem. Sure there is some bickering, but it's falling to the bottom.

A lot of bickering falls to the bottom because moderators downweight it. I wish that weren't so, because it's a lot of work.

I'm sorry your comment confuses me. Isn't it us users that downweight comments with our votes? I thought you reacted on flags and heavy downvotes.

I know you do a lions share of work dang, but I think you were a little to fast here. Good comments were being posted (and pushed below you comment) as you wrote that.

For sure, users downweight (and up-weight!) comments. That's the most important factor. But moderators also downweight subthreads, for example if they're off topic. It's a combo of the two.

Same for stories: the ranking is determined by votes, flags, software, and moderation. Users are the most important factor, but alas not a sufficient one. Without moderation, the system gets into unstable states and can't stay within its mandate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This community doesn't have the capacity to discuss a lot of things, yet it does.

Actually, there is almost no topic that degenerates into flamewar and (frankly) inanity as rapidly as the topic of religion does on HN, and probably anywhere on the internet. Can you think of one?

Even if it does descend into a flame war at some point, I feel that it's interesting to observe people's viewpoints.

Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.

At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.

This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.

i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.

Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.

> Even if it does descend into a flame war at some point, I feel that it's interesting to observe people's viewpoints.

The problem is that, just like fires in a city, flamewars aren't cost-free. It only takes so many before users don't want to be here anymore—except users who like flamewars. That's how internet communities destroy themselves, so trying to contain that risk is a big part of what we do.

True, religion is certainly the worst offender, but it's clearly not a one item list.

At the moment, anything related to Richard Stallman seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. And anything related to a particular gender isn't likely to go well.

And to be fair to HN, what tends to happens is that the initial set of low-value comments gets replaced over time by better ones. Even the worst of threads can have good conversations in them, it's just sometimes difficult to find.

Should people really be able to discuss things they don't have the discipline to understand? Should average Americans be able to discuss race relations or economic matters or should they simply... rightly receive superior accounts from those who engage in empiricism?

Those who "engage in empiricism" might want to look empirically at the effects their "superior accounts" tend to have on others. It's not so clear that this approach is working.

To be specific about this site: on HN we have a clear mandate—intellectual curiosity—and a set of principles based on what serves that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Discussion that stays within those guidelines is welcome, and conversely, when it isn't able to stay within those guidelines, we intervene. There are different degrees of intervention depending on how badly the guidelines are being violated. But intervention, or moderation, or whatever you want to call it, is indispensable. The system doesn't reliably stay within the guidelines on its own.

1. Which community does? The Christian community? If so, do you have an intuition over the proportion of HN people who were raised in Abrahamic faiths? Do you presume that the voices which monitor the conversation aren't personally experienced?

2. Or the academic community formed by the Abrahamic faiths? Did you reserve some expectation that secular scholars in academia are about to pop in?

3. And if people cannot discuss these matters, are they to receive the truth from a better source? Which source should we receive it from?

4. If most discussions never reaches into data-driven conversation, does that put them all in the same bin for you? Aspirational speech, perhaps?

I don't know which community does, but I suspect there's no large public internet forum that does. The topic is too activating.

To get substantive discussion of religion, you probably need smaller groups that have a certain amount of cohesion. A group can be cohesive even if it disagrees. But a large group with weak cohesion discussing a provocative topic is probably always going to plummet to lowest-common-denominator quickly.

You wrote that after a mere twenty minutes. Compared to how you've treated other inflammatory topics, one can't help but wonder if this is a sore spot for you. In any case, it's amusing because I'm in that set that would prefer Hacker News to actually discuss computer topics and not those such as this. My computing related articles usually go ignored, since you need to read more than the headline before you vomit forth your personal opinions, though, and the topic means not everyone is equally underqualified to give their opinion to start with.

Alas, twenty minutes is plenty of time for a flamewar to get going. When I posted that, the thread consisted of comments like these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284379

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284381

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284266

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284355

You're right that there's a sore spot for me, but it isn't religion—it's long experience with how wretched HN threads become as soon as religion is mentioned. But I should have been more careful and not posted hastily and vaguely.

If I hadn't intervened by posting and doing other standard moderation things, though, the thread would likely have become more of a flamewar. These things don't self-correct; would that they did. I made this case more complicated by posting in a way that stirred up additional waves—it was not a splash-free dive, like we usually try for. I was distracted and my irritation managed to grab the steering wheel.