It's an interesting idea for sure, but I'm not sure how or if such a thing can exist. Moderation becomes a headache, and well, a lot of truly brilliant people I've met in life have zero interest in debating it. How do you keep out the YT commenters, Fox News or r/politics commenters, etc?
It would be interesting if HN had some bucket like /offtopic, for things that are flamebaity and removed from the main view, but I fear it would attract the aforementioned people who only ever troll there, and dang probably having zero interest in mod'ing it.
formalized highschool and college debate is pretty much this
Not OP, but it's not smart/educated that I like to have these conversations with. It's humble, polite, open minded people. For the most part these two axes are usually orthogonal and independent. The one correlation I've found is that if one's lack of education is approached in a way that contributes to them feeling insecure, then they move into survival mode, become defensive, and thus less open minded.
What if, along with the '/offtopic' bucket there were participation criteria that could be moderated by other /offtopic participants? Not my wheelhouse, but something like '/offtopic' threads are only readable by HN members, only editable by members in good standing, presence of an 'evict the troll' button that disallowed further comments on a thread if enough users press it about a given comment/user.
I mean, maybe, although I think there is substantial non-overlap between "people able to have a good-faith, respectful debate" and those traditionally considered "smart and/or well educated".
As a lot of comment responses attest, it seems the answer may just be "it's human nature, it's not possible", but given that I just see these kind of topics more and more and more (i.e. interesting but where the debate ends up getting more vitriolic and going in circles), I'd hope it's something beyond just human nature at work.
Heck, maybe even the possibility to keep interesting upvoted articles without any comments would be worth trying.
Have clear written criteria for what constitutes virtuous and unvirtuous conduct, and make it clear that commenters can be banned for the sort of angry, low-quality discourse that's the norm on those platforms. Then enforce it, with temporary bans at first and permabans for repeated or particularly egregious offenses. Most people won't want to be mods, but hopefully enough will.
I'm not speaking hypothetically here; I'm describing how moderation works on /r/TheMotte. I won't comment on any of the opinions expressed there since that's not the point: the point is that it can be done. It's existence proof that you can have a large discussion forum talking about controversial topics without it turning into an ideological monoculture or a cesspool.
HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking. Even if the user has a degree in the liberal arts, the application of their mind in technology forces their thoughts in a way that pushes them to think critically and not just accept what is given to them without question - I would think. As with all thoughts and theories, this is a general rule and a hypothesis, I might be way off the mark.
Generally speaking, though, people who have learned critical thinking skills seem more willing to discuss an issue in a reasonable manner and drill down to the truth of it, rather than "dig in" and just decide they're right with whatever information they might have on hand.
I only bring this up as I have a fine arts degree, but shifted into programming as I wrote scripts for different art applications and the transition was natural as I had a background as a script kiddie from my high school days. A large amount of the people I went to school with, however, are absolutely unwilling to apply critical thought to specific subjects even though some have masters degrees.
Such features will be abused by trolls, and that sooner than later. Case in point: Twitter's recent new policy about doxxing, that was instantly (as in, not even 24 hours after release) abused by a bunch of far-right mobs to silence BLM, antifa and feminist accounts.
Systems that ban people without a human (with decent training, context awareness and time to properly judge) in the loop should be straight out banned because of the abuse potential.
One thing to keep in mind; the moderation on HN is absolutely designed to steer the conversation in a direction (one in line with YCs mission / vision). Most political topics that veer from centrist make-nice are not in line with that direction.
YCs moderation is a paid, editorial position. This ain’t Reddit, and to the degree that HN has regular users in the mod loop, it’s usually in a democratized way (flagging / vouching comments, the way up/downvotes work, etc.) The goals are different, and HN absolutely becomes a cesspool on any political topic when it’s left to simmer (lest you think the commenters here are of any higher quality than elsewhere on the Internet — in my experience HN tends to have more user crossover with Reddit than anywhere).
But yes, this also happened on, e.g. Facebook where activists were blaming "color blind" application of the rules for flagging a lot of things as "hate speech."
I couldn't disagree more.
HN is one of the few places where you will get people who have no idea about a topic expounding at length on that topic. The psychology of this place is fascinating.
It is unrelated to education and, for some people, education is deleterious. Engineering is, in my experience, definitely one of the worst subjects for teaching false confidence. I worked in finance, sometimes client-facing, and worked a lot with individual investors in a business I started...any kind of engineering background was a red flag because, time after time, they rarely accepted the limits of their knowledge (doctors is another one, I don't think anyone who has met a doctor would dispute this either). Engineering backgrounds also seem to the cornerstone of most modern authoritarian states (the CCP and Singapore's fetish for engineers as an example).
So learning critical thinking is something that is totally distinct from attending university or even the job you do. People who are totally ignorant of something are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge. Not always, they are probably more prone to irrational or emotional reasoning but, again, I don't think critical thinking is something that can be taught in every case.
On the original post, I think people believe that it is difficult to have conversations about politics because of the behaviour of a small minority of people. In some online places that minority is very large. And in many communities, moderation is also aimed at limiting disagreement. The result is inevitable. HN has the community it moderates for.
Since then, I've been seriously pondering how a community would feel like that would simply enforce humble, fact-based discussion by technical means. FWIW, I'd be curious to try it out.
I've found out the hard way that social problems are usually a really terrible fit to technical solutions, but I'm curious anyway.
This idea might be a great one to try to go together with that idea.
Given how often Twitter has had issues with "AI" (like people getting shadow banned or blocked for posts years old coincidentally timed with PR releases about "how to combat xxx"), I don't trust that statement at all.
Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and Google/YouTube are widely known to use AI as first stage of content moderation for years (want to try it? post a picture of genitalia on Twitter, and your account will be set to NSFW in a matter of seconds, or post something with a "copyrighted" audio part on YT), and people have exploited that for just as long. We've seen various complaints about unjustified bans on all services made #1 here on HN simply because the affected people don't have any other way to contact a human support resource.
I do get that this might be necessary out of scale - if fifty people flag something for abusive content or spam, it likely is abusive content... the problem is the 1% that are the target of organized reporting/trolling campaigns, and for these people, that really really sucks.
My net experience on HN, is overall positive. But, most of the discussions are about software/tech things.
When not trying to put a ding in the universe for irrigation automation, I also enjoy a life as a father/husband/grandfather, budding pilot, active faith community participant, water ski enthusiast, snow skier, Lego enthusiast. I have noted that on the occasions when discussions on HN overlap some of these areas, that the “I’m educated so I must intuit more than your life experience informs you” is off putting. I don’t think I would enjoy any but the most tangential discussions about family, romance, marital relationships, religion, engagement in the environment, or child rearing in the HN forums. There are places I can go and discuss some of these with humility and open mindedness and politeness, but it would be a while before I felt that way about these topics in these forums.
Which is not a diss on HN at all. I just think we all have areas in our life where we can find cohorts and feel secure and have polite open minded discussions (if we’re so inclined). And other areas where the context/cohort doesn’t align with the premise of the cohort well.
It was really boring for me, and at times a lot of work. However, one thing I appreciated about it is that at times you'd obviously be arguing a side you don't necessarily agree with, and learn a ton in the process. Also surprise yourself a bit in how convincing you can be. In a way, I wish everyone had the time and effort to research a POV they don't agree with, but as if they did.
Probably great training for a lawyer or paralegal, perhaps even public speaker, but I personally didn't find a lot of joy in it.
What do you mean by this? I did a few different forms of debate in highschool and this seems like a really surface level characterization of just a few of these sub-types.
So in ours, it was a 1v1 and basically you just spoke for 2 or 3 minutes to a judge, wrote down notes from the other speaker to make rebuttals, then it was over.
What I meant is it very much isn't a back and forth discussion of any sort. In fact, you were never really speaking to each other at all, just to the judge or moderator. Speak for a couple minutes spewing facts and references, listen, do it again, etc.
Apologies if I overgeneralized all debate based only on my experience.
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The jargon in the community for speaking really fast to win] is “spreading” and it was a dominant strategy by the late 1990s. Serious debaters expect to learn to read, listen, and talk that fast. There is widespread acknowledgement that it is tactical, and many sniff “against the purpose of debate” (while speaking at 200+ words per minute), but debate is a sport like football is a sport and if you want to play football without running or losing to people better at running than you, you may be selecting for a high friction lifestyle.
(There are several debate communities with some overlap, given that there are several styles of debate with different rulesets, organizations, and microcultures about performance. At least when I was doing it in 2000-2004, spreading was hegemonic in Policy debate and less effective (and beatable) in Parliamentary debate.)
Spreading is not intelligible to the layperson, and to the extent to which debate is about presenting ideas in a way that convinces a layperson, it is a failure. But there really is only so much that one can say in short 6 minute speech times. Talking faster, provided people can follow what is happening/read quickly, allows oftentimes for a more in-depth discussion than what was previously possible.