Is there a place on HN for interesting yet flame-war inducing topics?

There are enough places where these topics can be discussed. I come to HN because it is sort of a sanctuary from the madness of other social media sites.

You seem to think that the civil discussion that occurs here would carry over to these hot button topics, but I assure you that the kind of people who enjoy dragging a discussion down into the mud and participating in “flame wars” as you said will be attracted here once they know there is a discussion about one of their favorite issues.

In short, the curation of HN is what makes it great. Relaxing it would ruin this place.

> these topics that seem fundamentally relevant to the HN audience

The way I see it, I don't think these topics are relevant to the HN audience. I know that they are probably de facto HN topics because so many readers live in the US, but HN is supposed to be about tech regardless of where you live. For that reason I would always flag an article about weapon laws in the US, and I would expect most of HN to think the same (except maybe on weekends, when things are a bit more relaxed).

I see where you come from, though: the discussion in HN is for the most part polite and informed, and it would be nice to have more of that in general. But I fear that if you started adding "topics" to HN you would dilute it and lose what makes it special.

Sounds like you basically want political debate, but only among smart and/or well educated people?

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.

I think what you’re looking for is a high quality conversation: where both parties invest effort in maintaining good faith and are self-aware enough to recognize what assumptions and biases they bring into the debate; where there is a mutual goal of learning, rather than winning; and where the participants are self-secure and mature enough not to need their tribal identity validating.

This is all much more likely to happen outside of the public gaze.

And so I think you are looking not for a website but for a person, or perhaps a website that helps gather such people - and somehow keeps out those who claim to be all of the above but are fooling themselves or the rest of us.

Where do you find good people? There’s probably a market for an “intellectual dating site”.

There was a community on Reddit created for the purposes of discussing these heated “culture war” topics in a rational manner. It’s called “The Motte” and largely grew out of other communities that had started banishing culture war topics.

And it’s universally terrible. It turns out when you dedicate a forum specifically to open debate of hot-button issues, you attract a lot of the participants who have been driven out of other communities for their views. Even when the discussion is dressed up in a veneer of formal discussion, the topics and comments are such that most people with moderate views have zero interest in being part of such a forum.

As someone who loves to discuss these topics, I don't think there's a place for them on Hacker News, and the quick flag-and-ditch act that happens when they arise is one of the reasons — along with excellent moderation, sensible rules, and a baseline pretty decent community — that HN has not descended into social-media Hell. I'd oppose any of the approaches that I've seen suggested in the comments here that would encourage these flammable topics.

People are likening this to "political debate, but among smart/humble/etc. people". I think this isn't quite right.

I think what people are looking for is political discussion among people who are generally bright but whose identities are not politically-focused. If you set up an internet forum for talking about politics, you would attract people whose primary interest is politics, and whose identities are wrapped up in politics. These people would be blinded by all sorts of biases and groupthink. The conversation would be largely terrible.

HN, on the other hand, has an audience that is mostly technical/startup-focused, and many of whom are quite bright. They also come from all over the world, though there is a clear US bias. Using these categories as filters, as opposed to "I care a lot about politics" as a filter yields relatively more interesting political conversations, at least for me.

>I've been on the other side of this as well, where I commented that I flagged a DEI-focused article because, while I thought the topic itself was interesting, it seems comment threads on DEI topics always devolve into uninteresting flame wars, and that I rarely learn something new from these threads.

You reference DEI and other hot-button issues: they are discussed here, usually in light of how they affect people building software / hardware. Those conversations are some of the best here. Those topics will always attract unenlightened and strong opinions because they are constructs of emotion, driven by emotion and forged by intensely emotional experiences. Most people's first experience with DEI come from experiencing discrimination or being accused of it.

This community does a good job of getting the balance right - and I've enjoyed being a part of the discussion.

I don't like the conversation that goes in circles with no seeming chance for resolution (nearly anything political). It's all very interesting however, Political Science is not the kind of Science I come here for.

As for how to host these topics without devolving into flamewars - I think you'd have to try a different species. Emotions get all of us.

Is there a place on HN

Probably not HN but you could set up a forum, set some guidelines and see what you end up with. With topics that evoke emotion there will always be people that are offended or outraged so I think you would be starting from a losing position. The world is a big place with many cultures beliefs and values. The internet makes that big world much smaller. From my own experience doing this I can tell you that your site will get DDoS'd when people get upset. They can't attack the other person so they will take it out on your site instead. They will also try to get your domain taken down. Do not allow uploading multimedia content. If you want to practice defending against such things and take on moderating emotional content then it might be an interesting learning experience for you. Register the domain through the DDoS/CDN provider and don't use that account for any domains you care about. Same goes for your server provider. Keep it separated from accounts you have anything important on. Expect to be doxxed by angry people. Avoid doing any of this if you have children.

Some forum software will let you configure ranks by post count or admin trust so that a message posted by anyone below a certain trust level will require moderator review before anyone other than that person or a moderator can see it. I would strongly recommend doing this if you plan to set up such a discussion site. This won't solve all your issues but it may extend the lifetime of your domain a little bit. Get some good moderators that you can trust from multiple timezones.

My guess is that the answer will be "not on HN" but I'm curious where such questions could be discussed/debated as well. I get banning flame-bait questions so that the forum/website doesn't become know as the Hackers' Fight Club. Maybe a clone/similar kind of site -- perhaps called HackersFightClub.com? -- could be created where topics that are NOT flame-bait get flagged and removed.

No.

Although the argument could be made that heavy manipulation of public discourse (by a few) is why flame-war inducing topics even exist in the first place, and that if one wanted to block progress/discussion on a particular topic one could just turn the topic into a flame-war at every opportunity.

Also, any posts about the Python programming language should be flagged as well because Python is pure garbage.

No, the ground has been salted since 2015, if not before.

I flag a good third of the front page stories every time I visit, because they are topics that are not business or tech related that have beaten to death so badly that they are just tiresome.

I don't think it is possible. Any topic on here that is about politics, sexuality, gender, or hell even covid gets overwhelmed with comments that are full of fallacies and closed minds.

The https://news.ycombinator.com/active front page has a listing of "active" topics, where active sometimes correlates with controversial. I'm not going to pretend that everything in there will be "interesting" in any real sense, but it's a place you might want to look at.

This would be simple enough to flag and separate into a hot/controversial section. I imagine for it to work reasonably well that there would need to be active members serving as moderators whether official or not to keep things on-topic and objective.

HN is best when at least some of the commenters have domain expertise or experience that is relevant to the main topic of that thread.

A topic might seem interesting, but if everyone here is just coming at it with whatever random facts and biases they’ve picked up in normal life, then the discussion has a low chance of being valuable. It’s just going to meander until it scrolls off to deep pages and everyone gets tired of fighting.

I don’t think HN needs a discussion on every topic that hits the zeitgeist. There are plenty of other places on the Internet to power discovery. My personal favorite is Twitter, but Reddit is good too. (Both require curation, though.)

I've seen healthy debate on hot-button issues at places like /r/politicaldiscussion: in fact, I think that sub avoids the flame-throwing devolution better than HN does. There might not be a place here for it, but there certainly are places that exist function as you're describing. It won't be a technology-catered audience, but you don't need to be a technologist to respectfully discuss these topics.

Maybe Reddit's r/ChangeMyView. It normally has a decent level of discussion, but you'd have to frame the question in a way to drive discussion.

The right way to think about the kinds of discussions you want to have is that they come at a cost. As you note in your own title: they're flamewar-inducing. HN is open-access and pseudonymous; there's no way to bar participation in threads to only those people who will follow the site guidelines. So, to host them, HN has to expend energy, both from the community and from moderators.

It's for that reason that hot-button political topics generally have to earn their place, by being more-than-usually interesting not just to people who love to debate politics (hey, it me!) but also to people who are on HN to gratify their curiosity more generally. Most hot-button topics can't pay their way this way, and get flagged off the site.

No, arguing about political topics online is an unproductive use of your time.

If you care about politics (and you should, that's how society decides who does and doesn't wield power!) then do something about it. Call your congressman. Join or organize a rally. Knock on your neighbors doors and convince them to vote in the next election. Even just talk to your coworkers about DEI or some other topic you care about.

I think people like myself have throwaway accounts for this purpose. For example, I use this account to say things I think might end up with negative karma. However, right now this account has positive 78 karma. Just a hack I and probably others use to get around 'reasonable-ey' filters like the HN karma system.

Sounds like there isn't; you 'd have to build it. Reddit is not suitable - too lopsided and abused. Twitter is kind of better, if you can ignore everyone else you can actually get interesting insights, although the format is limited.

Random idea: make a new HN-like site, but only allow signups by publishing a public key to your HN profile (and have a minimum karma limit).

You’d get some karma portability to filter for the nerds here, but could focus outside of harder tech.

I’m of the opinion that no one in power wants to see people having good, honest, political discourse.

This is because if you got the majority of Americans into a room together, and you let them talk about things in peace, without constraints, but also without the trolls and the aforementioned people in power (and their misguided agents), these people would find that they actually agree on most issues.

That sounds crazy in 2021 but I believe it’s true.

The majority of people, regardless of education, are reasonable and good human beings.

They’ll find that the person that voted for Biden isn’t a sheep, that the Trumper isn’t a moron, and that everyone is just another person trying to make it through the day.

If more people realized this it would be very bad for the ruling elite, because they would be vastly outnumbered by a united populace.

If the moderators kept everything else the same but bifurcated into hn-tech and hn-polisci you might think it would work.

But hn-tech would have a strong tendency to want hn-vi and hn-vim and hn-emacs, and hn-polisci would want -left and -right and -libertarian and before you know it, you've made reddit.

Reductionist, but I suspect you'd break the golden goose.

lesswrong.com is a high quality community that's a lot more open to controversial topics.

/r/TheMotte is probably the closest you will find - it's the spin-off subreddit of the SlateStarCodex "Culture War" discussion threads.

I hope not.

I just got tired of posting on Hacker News. So I stopped for about under three months. I'm not the type of person that should be on here anyway, and I think dang had made that clear multiple times. I don't think what you're asking for is even specific to controversial topics.

I want to say what I want to say; I've always been that way, and I think people should not self censor. I'm "disgusted" by it and that's the word I want to use. I don't want to sugar coat it. But these feelings occur before even getting to controversy. They exist beyond myself here even in hacker topics.

I get tired of trying to have a deep conversation about subjects I have expertise on here about only to be armchair responded to by an amateur who has a casual understanding of the topic.

I think HN should do away with public karma and the karma system all together. It reminds me of Reddit, and it causes the same sort of behaviors to exist. I think there's great value in allowing valuable posts to percolate up, but I also think there are adults here who can read.

The real world doesn't work like a numerical karma system and it makes no sense anyway. Why should some shmuck who got karma for talking about how great templating is in Rust be able to silence someone who has something opinionated to say about RPC protocols or the difficulties of bootstrapping a company? How stupid is that? What an idiotic concept.

I think the issues that exist with HN today are common to all online communities, though. There's no "fixing" it, it just is what it is. Once they get large enough, this sort of thing just happens. I don't think there is a fix.

People rave about dang's moderation, but I'm not a fan--it's about on par with any moderation I've seen in the last 20 years. He frequently stamps out opinions that don't need to be reprimanded. This place is an echo chamber. But he does a job that isn't enviable, so good for him and the people that enjoy his work. It's still important.

I'm sure there are really cool communities out there today where interesting smart people are building things and talking about things that are interesting, but it's not here.

I saw it on a gaming forum years ago in which the members of that forum created fun, silly, and useful things ranging from 2048 to Babel, and those people went on to work for large orgs like Cloudflare and GitHub.

I'm sure there's a forum out there right now with some kids working on stuff that will put a little dent in our world tomorrow or some day soon, but I just don't see it here. My guess is it's in a place you don't expect, but where young developers hang out, and so probably another gaming or Internet interest forum--maybe Roblox's forum.

This place is ironically even hostile to people creating things they want to show off, and as you would expect, it's usually comments from people who create nothing at all.

I'll cautiously recommend tildes.net.