zlacker

There definitely is something I'm not understanding if this comment crossed the line. I'm sorry, it's still not my intent to negatively affect the quality of this site.

This may seem pedantic, but what do you consider ideological? I said what I said because I saw it as a fundamental flaw of the community. I don't believe fighting discrimination with discrimination is productive, and I believe a woman-only community is discriminatory. Would it have avoided the genericism if I had tied it directly to the thread by saying "I believe this community is wrong because you can't fight discrimination with discrimination?" Or would mentioning discrimination genericize the conversation as well?

>>TheAda+(OP)
By ideology I mean something like predictable clusters of ideas around large questions. On HN it doesn't much matter which ideology people subscribe to or battle against—it's all more or less off topic here. There are two reasons.

First, all of it is predictable. Each time something gets repeated, its potential to gratify curiosity diminishes. In the case of ideological squabbles, the repetition is so entrenched that there's no curiosity potential left at all. What is has instead is strong conflict potential, meaning that such discussions not only add no value here, they burn up and destroy what does have value.

Second, it's all generic. The larger a question is, the harder it is to say meaningful things about it. Signal/noise ratio goes down as topics get more generic.

I don't doubt that it's possible for people to find new, meaningful things to say about large generic questions. But internet comments are not the right genre for expressing them. Someone who truly has such ideas would write a book or an essay, for the same reason one wouldn't excavate the foundation for a house with a thimble.