The interesting discussions are not one-dimensional back-and-forth such as this one. It is when participants weigh multiple arguments against eachother and try to reach new insights.
Discussion of value-systems are just hopeless, as there's no common ground.
“Interesting” is not a property of the discussion in itself but created between the reader and the discussion. Maybe the reader is also culpable for the perceived dimensionality reduction?
To me heavy disagreement usually makes more interesting of a discussion than mere conformity, and HN is one of the few places where it can take place without bans, kicks, brigades.
I can stand all but the arrogance of projecting one’s perspective as a conclusive “quality” to the entire discussion. It is an insult to the efforts of the well meaning commentators, it is an insult to the intelligence of the readers and their capability on deciding what is relevant or interesting to them on their own.
At the risk of being repetitive, “finding common ground” cannot be a one sided action, else it is seeking mere conformity. And the reader is a side to this; if the reader is stuck at a perspectival narrowing, they will feel like the argument is not working towards common understanding with them while it might as well be their narrowness preventing them from being receptive.
Also common ground is not a geometric mean; eg in an imaged conversation for and against capital punishment, common ground is not killing the convict just a little. It is about showing the work that lead to people to their own conclusions, which usually tend to have more in common than people expect.
Not being conclusive is OK for such discussions, and people have a right to defend their positions, as long as it doesn’t degrade to name calling and other conversation killers.
The most dominant name calling in this thread right now is from people that condemn all participants for not being sophisticated or conciliatory enough. That is the performative contradiction I’ve been talking about.
That’s a really solid rule for productive discussions. The great difficulty would lie in actually enforcing it on HN.
Maybe some sort of cool-down timer for posters, who are otherwise polite, getting too agitated? Some kind of rate limiting for new comments on a controversial submission?
Hacker News actually already has that to a first approximation (though if I understand correctly, rather than being applied to heated or controversial threads, it's applied to users who have difficulty consistently adhering to the site guidelines. Their accounts are flagged as not allowing more than a certain number of posts per hour).
Much better: bots insert fake responses that are calming and neutral. If you want to tailor/manage discussions (manipulate might be a better word), it seems like adding to the discussion is far better than censorship (or rate limiting as you call it). People being shadowbaned or rate limited or whatever just aggravates the problem because it makes people more hostile in general. Don’t censor bad speech, promote what you believe to be better speech.
> Discussion of value-systems are just hopeless, as there's no common ground.
It boils down to freedom vs. safety, period. It's just that simple.
In a free society, you have to sacrifice safety. The safety people are fine to feel they way they want to feel, but they need to understand that argument is antithetical to American values. America is founded on the ideals of freedom; it was not founded on the ideals of safety.
Neither safety nor freedom are absolute, or are intended to be. It's treating them like they are that makes the discussion unhelpful.
We have structures to keep you safe from murder, or from breathing cigarette smoke in your workplace. Where your freedom can hurt others, we value finding a middle ground. That's not new.
Vaccines are already mandated in some situations and we don't fight about it. This topic is only controversial because some have found they can profit by turning it into a culture war.
But we're talking about nudging the freedom/safety line a slight bit one way or the other. It's already in the middle. Losing one right doesn't mean that we're not qualitatively as free as we were yesterday.
Discussion of value-systems are just hopeless, as there's no common ground.