And honestly, uninformed people talking about a law without doing an iota of research won't make a single difference in the world. Hacker News armchair amateur lawyers are not fighting for anyone, not even for themselves.

This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."

How is that compatible with a democracy? Don't voters have to be able to understand what their legislators are doing on their behalf? Are we all just permanently screwed?

It's not as if these criticisms don't come to fruition. People said DMCA 1201 would be a bad law from the beginning, and it still is. Sex workers objected to SESTA even though they were the ones it was supposed to protect, politicians passed it over their objection, and the bad things predicted to happen then happened. It is the calls to "reform" CDA 230 that seem to lack any understanding of the law, the reasons for it, or even what it does.

The most common flaw in new legislation is the failure to account for unintended consequences from bad edge cases and perverse incentives. It is actually really hard to create a law without these things. The discussion of how to avoid them, or even if they can be avoided sufficiently to cause the proposed law to be a net positive in the world, is really important.

Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/supreme-court-reins-cfaa-van-bur...

This is your system working, right? But the CFAA was passed in 1986. We lived under that uncertainty, and it caused much turmoil, for thirty five years. That's bad. We should want for that not to happen.

It's not. It's more "these [otherwise very intelligent people] can't possibly understand the law because they haven't bothered to read it, as they're merely reacting to the description of it by another poster" and just posted their first reaction to it on a HN post. This is visible when the answers to their posts is "yeah... the law covers that".

People publicly criticising laws with informed articles (or even people repeating talking points from those) is very healthy, but VERY different from armchair commenters who use their own ignorance about a law as fodder for criticising it and for advocating for their own position (normally to dismiss the law altogether).

We are clearly talking about two very different things here.

Unlike you're implying, I also don't want to censor anything and I'm not advocating for anything. Discussion is healthy, uninformed discussion backing radical opinions is noise.

> Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:

I also don't see how this has anything to do with what I'm saying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my first post, but I'm pretty sure I was in my second.

I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction.

And they're not always wrong.

Constructive feedback: the first sentence isn't necessary. People will only see the anger and not the actual point. The second sentence stands on its own.

And it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens on HN. Programming has taught me to specifically pay attention to edge cases and evaluate how likely they are and what kind of consequences may follow. This same pattern of thinking then gets applied to other things in life. Laws are one of the closest analogues to programming.