Is it really being contrarian, or supporting multiple views in intellectually stimulating discussions?
A few days ago there was a discussion on CORS where some people defended the thesis it made sites less secure, and others stepped in and defended that CORS in fact improved security. Both sides posted their rationales. Arguably neither position was right or wrong. It just depends on perspective.
A glass can be half full and half empty at the same time.
Is anyone being contrarian to point out either interpretation?
IMO the line the author did not seam to make clear in his blog post, which leads to some confusion in the comment section, is that being contrarian in a _discussion_ format - where all parties agree it is a discussion - is something else entirely than being contrarian to proposals from random people in real life.
And it is absolutely toxic on certain topics, particularly anything economics related or that challenges capitalism and the "line go up" mentality of the VC culture. If you offer anything that criticizes that at all, you're in for an earful.
I just happened to write a long comment about this to a commenter who sees HN in just the opposite way to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30346954.
Who's right? Neither. It's exactly the same perception, just with opposite polarity, because the polarity is coming from inside the person.
More precisely, both are right in the sense that HN generates enough data points for everybody to run into whatever they dislike the most; and both are wrong in that they dramatically overweight that sample, because that's what the brain does with samples like that.
What makes this perception so common on all sides is that HN doesn't partition the site into like-minded siloes (e.g. follow lists or social graphs or subforums). Everyone is in the same big room, so everyone is frequently bumping into views they dislike and normally don't have to deal with as much, at least not in their home base. The irony is that this is actually a step closer both to reality (society is divided on divisive topics) and to genuine tolerance (bearing the presence of what one dislikes). There's more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
I do think that when it comes to politics and social justice HN is content to let people who aggressively hold certain viewpoints have an outsize role in the discussion, despite engaging in toxic behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated on other threads. This may be because the people running the show here are sympathetic to such views, or maybe they're just naive.
A particular user is aggressively confrontational towards every queer/POC person who makes a negative comment about the Midwest possibly not being safe for certain groups. In a conversation about a technical topic, this type of behavior wouldn't be tolerated. In this case, it was, and possibly valuable discourse was derailed.
For purposes of comparison, there's a critical discussion about MS Teams today with a hundred comments. I wouldn't expect posters who respond "what are you, some kind of Slack shill???" in such a thread to last long here without moderator action.
Seen this double standard consistently over the years and it's one reason myself and others keep their distance from this site.
If it seems to you like there's less moderation happening on that sort of comment than there is on comments complaining about corporate product, I can see how that would lead to resentment about how HN is moderated. I wouldn't want to be part of such a place either.
Because there's a degree of randomness in what we happen to see, and we can't moderate what we don't see, there are some comments on every topic that end up not getting moderated. If it's a topic that's particularly important to you (I don't mean you personally, but any reader), bad comments going unmoderated on that topic are going to make a more painful and deeper impression. This perhaps leaves the sense of a double standard because more pain has been caused by those comments than by others.
I don't know what to do about this other than remind people that we don't see everything, that the likeliest explanation for egregious comments going unmoderated is that we haven't seen them, and that we welcome heads-ups about egregious comments that we're missing. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
anyway man we made up our minds already that's kinda the point. hn has a lot going for it but it also sucks pretty hard, in some ways that are very difficult to quantify but nevertheless are real! I'm sorry that hurts to hear and I'm more sorry that you're so sure it can't be the case that you can't see it.
having a mod jump on you demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place is bad, even if they do it civilly.
hn surely does "take criticism seriously" in the sense that when any is detected, it is fully and publicly focused on. but in all the cases I've seen it comes with a hostile degree and intensity of interrogation that makes it hard to believe it is a good faith exercise in organizational-self improvement. it just puts such a high burden and consequence on publicly pointing out the faults that people don't want to do it.
shit I try not to do it on purpose because it's such a draining unpleasant experience to be the center of attention of dang and whoever has decided to be his crew for the day.
being civil doesn't protect you from these arguments! these things are bad, no matter how civil people are being about them. and I am sometimes not that civil about them, but that doesn't make me wrong, or a moral inferior to people who can keep their cool.
On the contrary, I think HN is trying its best to be a broadly appealing place for intellectually curious folks, especially those who might be interested in tech and the business environment around it.
HN demands other things beyond civility and respect for others of course; we're all well aware that civility alone does not suffice. But it helps enough that doing away with it is clearly unwise, most of all during the sorts of vigorous debates that arise quite naturally in any discussion-focused platform. (Including very mainstream ones like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) This is not a "moral" point of view, but one that's driven by solid observation of what happens to overall quality when incivility and personal attacks are allowed to fester. Many of us have been on Usenet after all, and can draw from that experience.
> demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place
This is not what has happened here, and long-time HN users should be well aware of that by now. No "demand" was made backed by mod privileges, least of all any sort of "hostile interrogation", what I saw was gentle pushback, most likely aimed at trying to find ways of making any criticism actionable and part of a potential "exercise in organizational-self improvement".
I also take some issue at the implication that I share dang's outlook on these matters, to the point of acting like his "crew". What I did was merely to point out that your comment was phrased in a way that may well have turned many HN users off from its relevant points, but that it did nonetheless have substantive points to make.
I'm curious how you'd tear apart the argument in the GP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351677 and its cousin, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30346954), because what I describe there is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I see on HN. Do your worst?
the point I guess I'd like to make here is that you can be either ruthlessly rational data-bound defender of hn's honor OR impartial mod who applies the rules as written. but not both. or if you have to try to be both at least use an alt or something because these really should be separate roles at this point.
"I find it odd that even when someone tells you the logical outcome you still deny it."
"It's baffles me and is so interesting to see someone behave this way even though it's not logical."
It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
Enlightenment ensues when the meta loop is closed. All criticism winds back on itself, including this comment and the next comment commenting on it...they keep wrestling to get outside or on top of each other.
The singularity of meta-commentary is a deep belly laugh.
For a community as diverse as Hacker News, I've found it to be anything but toxic. The quality of posts is generally high and the people who comment tend to keep things on topic and impersonal. Personal attacks and jabs are not common and people don't just say things for the sake of winning arguments.
Of course, I don't click on every single story - I stick to the things that interest me, which admittedly are narrowing as of late, unlike in my early 20s.