PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

I don't think YC really has "good discussions" as much as "A large group of people that already agree on most topics, communicating about those topics." And this site breeds just as much outrage as the next.

This is a pretty textbook look into a very unreflective echo chamber.

And, I would add, you can't have any significant discussion about topics which this group of people disagree on. For example, you can't say:

* The "free market," even suitably regulated, is not a good allocator of resources.

* Anything about the actual accomplishments of the Soviet Union or China, such as the USSR going from a purely agrarian society to putting a rocket in space in under 50 years, even while criticizing them for their failures (Uyghur concentration camps, etc.)

* Capitalism is not the best economic system, because it leaves too many people behind.

I could go further, but then I'd be accused of "nationalistic flamebait."

I think you can say those things and rightly expect to be challenged.

Downvotes are what they are. For me the discussion is more interesting than Internet points. There's also a polite way to say something and a more provocative way to express the same idea. HN doesn't value snark the same way other forums do.

People say things in buckets 1 and 3 all the time. You've got a stronger point in bucket 2 - that one is a lot harder.

The trouble with 1 and 3 is that people often want to make big generic ideological arguments about capitalism or whatever, and the medium of a large, public internet forum is simply not capable of sustaining interesting threads about that. They inevitably become predictable and nasty, the two things we most seek to avoid here. So I spend a lot of time asking people not to do that, as you know. But that's not because of an ideological disagreement, either at the moderator level or at the community level. It's at the level of the medium itself. McLuhan was right.

It's still possible to say things in more specific contexts though.

I don't think that's an HN-specific attribute. That's how political correctness rears its head from the right side of the US political spectrum. I've long noticed critical responses to ideas like you described and many others. It's an unfortunate way discussion is suppressed. This is equally true of political correctness from the left side of the US political spectrum.

As someone who started reading HN specifically because outrage tired me out on other sites, I have to disagree on the "just as much outrage" point. I would say markedly less outrage on average than other popular social media platforms