I've been here for several years and one of the things that initially drew me here was the way people were respectful, on topic, and focused on the issues in a dispassionate way. If you want passion, there's plenty of it on the internet. The people with self control and an analytical bent are hard to come by and are thusly valued.
Calling pg an ass is crossing the line for this community. Not because he's privileged, though we do owe him a bit of respect for hosting this community in the first place, but because we shouldn't resort to name calling ever. The appropriate response is to dissect his ideas and actions and demonstrate why they would be ineffective in achieving his purpose, or showing why that purpose is wrong. That's the only way you're going to convince anyone. Calling people names won't get your message heard by the person it's directed at, it'll just piss them off.
While I understand your problem with the fluffy padding, it's what allows for a respectful conversation. Look at the rest of the internet, the comment threads there are a terrible shouty mess filled with ignorance, with half the participants yelling into the wind. HN has standards, they're there for a reason, and they aren't respected, then in the immortal words of Chef Ramsay, "I've eaten here! You're going to kill somebody!"
That somebody is this site.
Edit: removed 'you' from next to last sentence to make it more impersonal.
Everything you say is correct, but there's a middle-ground between "youtube comments" and "lifeless group-think".
There's still interesting discussion on HN for me (otherwise I wouldn't be here), but I'm finding it's drifting towards the latter. Now recently with a monthly meta-discussion bemoaning its own demise.
Name-calling is obviously not the way to go. But the immortal words of Dr. Strangelove aren't either: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
This is very true, but I feel that the group think isn't so much mediated by style as it is by what people are actually saying; this is a harder problem to solve. :-(
Respectful discussion prevents people from flying off the handle and getting distracted from the main topic. Me-too'ers and yes-men are too agreeable, but still on topic. I wonder if it's possible to analyze a paragraph for agreeableness and automatically reduce its visibility if it's too extreme on either end. That might force people to post a more balanced view (assuming that the people gaming the system are down-voted by human moderators).
This actually seems like something a machine could reasonably do. Agreeableness is vague enough that it wouldn't need domain knowledge of the conversation, and there are probably enough key words and phrases to train it.
Calling pg an ass is crossing the line for this community. Not because he's privileged, though we do owe him a bit of respect for hosting this community in the first place, but because we shouldn't resort to name calling ever. The appropriate response is to dissect his ideas and actions and demonstrate why they would be ineffective in achieving his purpose, or showing why that purpose is wrong. That's the only way you're going to convince anyone. Calling people names won't get your message heard by the person it's directed at, it'll just piss them off.
While I understand your problem with the fluffy padding, it's what allows for a respectful conversation. Look at the rest of the internet, the comment threads there are a terrible shouty mess filled with ignorance, with half the participants yelling into the wind. HN has standards, they're there for a reason, and they aren't respected, then in the immortal words of Chef Ramsay, "I've eaten here! You're going to kill somebody!"
That somebody is this site.
Edit: removed 'you' from next to last sentence to make it more impersonal.