Re: 2 and 3.

I am old enough to remember the anti-M$ days. And how Slashdot childishly posted the Gates-Borg image on a lot of articles about Microsoft. Slashdot was a far unhealthier community than HN.

Like some of those views are silly, but I find it hard to get worked up when someone is passionately expressing one of them.

If I feel my buttons are regularly being pushed, then that is a sign of an unhealthy community. That's why I quit twitter.

There's also racism, sexism, occasional anti-semitism and nationalistic antagonism.

Just about any thread that mentions China, India, certain "politically incorrect" tech luminaries, race or gender politics tends to devolve into passionately expressed cesspools of toxicity and vitriol. Follow dang's account for a bit, he has to talk people down from the crazy ledge all the time. He's done it to me a couple of times, because this place just gets under my skin sometimes.

I consider those the more political posts, and pretty much any of those is guaranteed to be bad because modern society's political discourse is miserably bad. One thing I think is good about HN is that if you can filter those out, it becomes a pretty good place. My experience on twitter is that it is basically impossible to filter out the political stuff (I tried many things, its too hard). That, to me, makes it a lot less healthy.

The unhealthy part in both cases is the inability of erstwhile professional adults to have a civil and productive conversation about things that matter, and like as not, politics does matter. It matters a lot more than many of the topics that get discussed here, despite being sorted into the "mainstream, therefore off topic" bucket by most.

It's particularly unhealthy in HN's case because this community has the pretense of holding itself to a standard of intellectual merit and civility above the internet mainstream. We can have intellectually stimulating discussions about compiler design or type theory all day long but wander outside the "technical" box and suddenly people are screaming about white genocide and cultural marxism or spouting QAnon or anti-vaxx conspiracy theories.

Thanks, I'm fascinated that you bring up the 'inability...to have civil and productive conversation about things that matter, and like as not, politics does matter', what makes this the case here at HN, in your perspective? Also, can you say more about the how 'this community has the pretense of holding itself to a standard of intellectual merit and civility above the internet mainstream'? How do you think the this 'pretense' came to be held? why 'intellectual merit and civility'? and makes you say it is 'above' the internet mainstream?

Thanks for this, can you tell me more 'if you can filter those out'? what does that look like in practice, based on your own experience?

How is this really different from your average hallway conversation between co-workers?

Honest question. Worked in a big building.. sat in the kitchen area in the morning while people got coffee, this feels like how people converse.

And if that's the case, why is it so much harder to tolerate that in an online forum? It's less ephemeral than speech? We don't actually know each other?

Didn't say it's different / better / worse. Stated my perception

What I find interesting about some of these topics is that they vary by time of day. Which likely means they vary by region. E.g. you can make a comment critical of Google and during the night (in the US) get a ton of upvotes, and then during the day get downvoted to hell. There is more than one hivemind in play on HN.

I think there are views that are contrary to this in people who regularly browse it (like myself for example), it's just that they aren't held so vehemently that they have to announce or comment on it whenever it comes up, so you don't see as many comments contrary to these.

Hi, I'm not sure I follow - would you elaborate on these metaphors?

Voldemort/Sauron are the main bad guys in Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings respectively. He is just saying a common viewpoint here is Google/FB are evil.

Thanks for clarifying :)

This is correct