zlacker

Intellectual curiosity is HN's essence. To change it to no longer be about that would be to kill it. If it's going to fail, let that be because we tried our best and fell short, not because we folded prematurely. People have been saying that HN is degenerating and and dying since shortly after it started; that's the sort of thing people say on the internet. Meanwhile HN is still here, and so are many of the users who posted those complaints. So there must be something curiosity-gratifying about it.

> The fact that such benign incidents resulted in large flamewars [...] indicates a greater rot growing inside HN's culture.

Such incidents result in flamewars because society is polarized on these topics and getting more so. Is there a single place on the open internet at HN's scale or greater that is any different, or indeed isn't worse? HN can't be immune from macro trends. (For example, there have lately been more nationalistic flamewars, especially about China. That's plainly related to shifts in geopolitics.) If HN is a ship, the sea is stormy. We can't control the waves, or how much vomiting the passengers do. If we focus on what we're actually able to affect, maybe we can prevent the ship from sinking.

I took another look at the threads you linked to and don't see what you see. The balance of the community there is clearly supportive. Most of the indignant comments are from people protesting against the negative reactions, which were clearly in the minority. Those don't represent the community, although (as always) the community is divided. So I come back to what I said in my first reply to you: if you're judging the community by the worst things that appear here, that's a fallacy. (Actually, I'm talking about your links #1 and #3. #2 was worse.)

Perhaps my standards are lower than yours? That's possible. On the other hand, sometimes when people post complaints like yours I have the impression that what they really want is for us to take their side on every issue and ban everyone on the opposite side. We can't do that. The community would not allow it, and trying to force it would destroy it—what good would that do? There's a deeper reason too: enforcing homogeneity would be incompatible with intellectual curiosity, and we're optimizing for the latter. The price of that is a certain turmoil on divisive topics—enough to convince ideologically committed users that the site is dominated by the other side (see "hostile media effect" above). If you don't think people on the opposite side of the issues have just as "starkly negative" a view of HN as people in your circles do, I have a long list of links I can share. In fact I almost unearthed them to post here, but decided to spare you.