zlacker

>>apsec1+(OP)
>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.

I don't understand how those two sentences are related. I've never heard a political or ideological battle explained as being "curiosity destroying".

>>x86_64+V2
Plus I don't understand why curiosity is the value of the community. Is it? There are so many kinds of values, and even a nuance between learning and mere curiosity. Recently black American experiences have been a conversation here on HN — if this conflicts with curiosity, then which is more valuable?

Or are we talking about the values prescribed by the proprietors of HN?

>>threat+j7
Curiosity is the value of the community because that's how it got started and that has always been its mandate. It's simply a question of being one kind of site rather than another. Does such a site have a right to exist? I think it does; the alternative would be that all sites must be the same, and that can't be right.

If so, it needs to be operated in a way that preserves it for that mandate. The default outcome is certainly not that, so we expend a lot of energy trying to stave that off, as one must when trying to escape entropy.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The idea of "black American experiences conflicting with curiosity" strikes me as a bizarre formulation.

>>dang+qp1
> The idea of "black American experiences conflicting with curiosity" strikes me as a bizarre formulation.

BLM and its concerns for justice is considered a very political topic. Black issues in America aren’t about to become an unpolitical issue.

An oft repeated argument is that political activist speech kills curiosity. There’s no transparent line to know when political speech is curious enough not to violate site rules.

Also, where does the mandate of the site come from? The president of YC? My worry is that the prescriptions of the site don’t seem to have any story for evolution.

>>threat+0G1
There have been many threads about those topics (the situation as of a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962) and related topics. I particularly liked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188 because it got so many comments from black HN users sharing their experience. Similar examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540162

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23564048

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23772359

There's plenty of curious conversation there. There's also plenty of flamebait and flamewar, unfortunately, but that's unavoidable when the society at large is divided on a topic—or rather societies, since we have the added dimension of being a highly international community to deal with. The HN guidelines are written in such a way as to encourage the former and discourage the latter, but there are limits to what's achievable.

HN's mandate comes from how it was created. It has its particular niche. I think it's a good niche that is worth preserving, and I'm pretty sure the bulk of the community agrees, since that's why people come here. In a way, I like that you're questioning it, though. If the argument becomes "HN should have a different mandate", this suggests that it's doing an ok job of fulfilling the existing one.