"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
I'm seeing lots of comments like that in your feed. Examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31384784
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31381302
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334684
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31286305
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31243595
This is not cool.
In addition, you're using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is a line at which we ban accounts, regardless of what they're battling for. If you don't want to be banned on HN, we need you to stop that as well. Note that this is a different line than the one I'm describing above. For more explanation about it, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... HN is definitely not a place for political or culture warriors, regardless of which side they're on or have a problem with. It's a place for intellectual curiosity, and those things are profoundly incompatible.
On the other hand, I come here hoping for tech articles, and I'm pretty sure I only veer-off into ideological territory in response to other ideological comments/posts, which, for one reason or another, were not graced with a visit from the moderator.
Let me take these one-by-one:
Commenter called me a nutjob. That wasn't very "thoughtful or substantive," and was actually very flamewar-ey, yet he didn't get a dang visit. I responded politely, and here we are!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31384784
Commenter politely suggested Marxist economics. I politely suggested Bible economics. Where's mmastrac's dang visit?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31381302
Not ideology. Factual case of the Rolling Stone getting caught, red handed, recycling someone else's (false) story without verifying it. Pointing out that Gell-Mann Amnesia has progressed to full-blown Gell-Mann Dementia isn't ideology or flamewar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334684
The internet getting in the middle of a beef between total strangers. We have an entire legal tradition built upon this being a bad idea. Absolutely nothing "thoughful & substantive" in this tweet. If I'm curious about the bowels of windows terminal, I go to github, not twitter. If I was the first to flag it, shame on HN, not me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31286305
Have you read that 2nd wikipedia page? This is also not an ideology post. It is a facts of life one. My dear country, like previous great civilizations of the western hemisphere, likes its human sacrifice rituals. This was not a pro or anti abortion post, since I lack a womb, and fence-sit on that particular subject. I was just pointing out that a diminution of one ritual will only be offset by the increase of another. The Florentine Codex has been beautifully translated into English.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31243595
I am just an old man trying to drop a little hard-won wisdom in the hope that it will save some of the younger people from a few scars. But it's your board. If you don't want that kind of wisdom, I'll just have to take it elsewhere.
For people to receive your wisdom, you need to go about sharing it in a different way. Arguing culture-war points is guaranteed only to excite anger and the opposite culture-war points in others. Zero sharing occurs when that happens.
In any case, HN has rules about this sort of thing and we need you to follow the rules if you want to keep posting here. Above all, that means using the site for intellectual curiosity, not flamewar (ideological, political, cultural, or any other kind of flamewar). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html