Flagging is necessary to keep the site on-topic in my opinion. People will happily upvote controversy that has little value or importance to this site.

I agree that flagging has value, but it is grossly misused to suppress discussions that are on topic but are outside of the overton window.

Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin (that's a problem on all sides by the way).

Individual comments are rarely flagged for anything other than outright spam or harassment. I browse with "show dead" turned on.

I have seen entire heated topics killed but that kills both sides of the argument equally. What value is a 500-comment talk-over-each-other argument, fundamentally about politics even if on-topic, on this site? I doesn't seem like something we should waste time on.

I agree with you, my opposition is actually regarding posts. I have been active on a number of posts over the last couple of years that were very much on topic but were on controversial issues, and they will get flagged to death after being on the front page for a few minutes, and at that point further conversation is dead and the post sinks into irrelevance.

The fallacy here: when you're only exposed to stuff that everyone agrees about, you're missing out.

I have recently found a whole lot of value in figuring out what everybody agrees about. A lot of the time that is right. And when it is wrong, it is good to know, and encourages (me at least) to really figure out why the fence is there before I remove it.

Rarely does anyone ever comment to agree on something. And merely being contrarian is not valuable in of itself.

If a few things are over-moderated I might be mildly missing out. So what? Humans are fallible. There is no perfect system. You're not arguing that HN is so moderated that it's completely worthless. You're not even getting close to that.

So what do we do about a system that isn't perfect but is doing a pretty fine job?

That's a weak statement, because it's easy to demonstrate that popular opinion can be misguided.

> if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship,

The rules to stay on topic is not the same as censorship. Often I noticed people talk (write) past each other and get into misunderstandings; it happens to me I'll admit.

> controversy that has little value or importance to this site

What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.

> Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.

And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has different niches :).

You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.

> HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.

That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom.

HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker would find interesting, but who is to say what that is? The guidelines basicly say that what's on topic is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Again, what I think is that the "good hacker" is us. We shouldn't nitpick topics. We should take care to have good discussions. We consider technology important and relevant, so we discuss it. Same for everything.

I think we don't differ all that much. I also find the people and quality of discourse the most valuable thing on HN. However, I also claim that these things are not orthogonal to the topics of discussion!

Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discourse gets, and the faster good people leave - it's a feedback loop that quickly grinds a community down to the lowest common denominator.

That's why stable, quality communities either expel (like HN) or contain (like plenty of forums limiting politics to only the Offtopic board) such topics. And it's not like it's a new invention - a lot (possibly most) societies have a long-standing custom that says not to bring up politics and religions in typical conversations between strangers (or at dinner with extended family).

I sympathize. I used to actually choose technologies (up to a point) based on what kinds of discussions were to be had in their IRC channels.

I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.

When I see that a conversation is going south, I try to bring coolheadedness to it, or point out how it could be made better. I think that's the way to a good forum.

I spent a lot of time in my teenage years on IRC, talking about technology until late hours, so this resonates :).

I think I see what you're getting at, so let me reassure you a bit, and correct for any miscommunication I may have caused:

> But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.

HN doesn't strictly forbid controversial topics. The guidelines[0] outline what is and isn't considered on-topic, provide heuristics for good behavior and pleas to avoid certain bad patterns. They don't say, "these topics will be automatically removed", or "these topics will get you insta-banned". They're just guidelines, a description of what this place should strive for. They work as a Schelling point[1] for individual participants.

So what happens in practice is, when you post a clear-cut intellectually stimulating hacker topic, it'll get upvoted. If it's boring, it'll get ignored. If you post a completely garbage submission, it'll get flagged faster than you can refresh the site. If a topic is on a fence, the balance of upvotes, flags and vouches will lean one way or the other. It's an organic system, but the direction it's leaning is strongly shaped by the guidelines - the one thing everyone knows everyone is expected to know :).

It's also easy to observe that whether or not a given topic stays on the front page or gets quickly flagged out of it isn't just a function of the topic and the source - but also the context (and I think sometimes the timezone). For example, political news aren't very prominent on HN, except when something really big happens, and HN briefly turns into a 24h news station.

And on the controversy itself, the general principle is - it's not the topic being controversial itself that's the problem. The problem is if the discussion around it decays into low-quality bickering. For some topics this is almost a law of nature, so people flag them on sight. But others only get flagged down if and when they evolve into actual flame war.

All in all, I think it's a decent system.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

> HN has a different focus,

This needs to be expressed more often, too bad often people do write that but not in a friendly way and some threads go on with countless bickering.

Participants want to discuss politics, current events, sports, etc. But this site is Hacker News and it is for specific subject matter.

If you want to discuss off-topic controversies, there's an entire Internet full of sites to have that discussion on.

I've expanded about what I think about this in the neighboring comments. I'd like to ask this though. When you feel that a thread is going off-topic, to the detriment of the forum, please post a comment pointing that out. Others might disagree with you, or they might see your point. What I find really problematic is when a discussion that I care about is flagged without any input. I perceive it as spiteful, because usually it's me having a controversial opinion, and I'm more likely to be spiteful in turn, though of course I try not to be. I don't mind people questioning the quality of my contribution. I actually welcome it, because I care. Just don't reject it off-hand.

You might not mind peopling posting about quality of your contribution but it's a terrible discussion for everybody else. Nobody cares.

I've seen purely technical discussions being removed from page 1 just because some people really wanted that stuff to go away, and had the power to make it happen.

Where's this technical discussion? Lets see if I agree with you.

Because I've seen people totally make up stuff to make a point.

It makes for a nice beige set of topics for sure.

It's funny you say this, because the topics on HN are actually quite broad. If flagging weren't a thing, all we'd be talking about is Trump this, guns that, free speech this, trans that, racism here, racism there. Now that would be quite boring.

> Flagging

Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it. It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting down discussions for everyone.