Re:Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
by dang on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @12:55PM
(#29797656)
I'm sure it was unintentional, but your comment here is where the thread went haywire. Maybe it would be helpful to explain why.
The discussion about disgraced-public-figure memorabilia was certainly offtopic, but it was offtopic in a whimsical and unpredictable way. That's ok on HN because it's interesting. What's not interesting, and is the bad kind of offtopicness, is turning the thread into a generic argument about some inflammatory thing that has already had countless flamewars. If you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you'll see that we have several rules that are intended to act as flame retardant against this kind of thing:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
The high-indignation, high-repetition flamewar topics are like black holes that suck in threads that swerve too close to them. Since they're so repetitive (and generally so nasty), they're definitely not what HN is for, so we should all try to steer clear of them.
The discussion about disgraced-public-figure memorabilia was certainly offtopic, but it was offtopic in a whimsical and unpredictable way. That's ok on HN because it's interesting. What's not interesting, and is the bad kind of offtopicness, is turning the thread into a generic argument about some inflammatory thing that has already had countless flamewars. If you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you'll see that we have several rules that are intended to act as flame retardant against this kind of thing:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
The high-indignation, high-repetition flamewar topics are like black holes that suck in threads that swerve too close to them. Since they're so repetitive (and generally so nasty), they're definitely not what HN is for, so we should all try to steer clear of them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...