Hacker News Guidelines

Interesting how having intellectual curiosity as the goal, rather than the ubiquitous 'an inclusive space where everyone can feel safe', has ended up in a forum that's much 'safer' and less toxic than most places on the Internet.

And how the HN code of conduct (well, these guidelines being the nearest thing to) doesn't describe or even mention "hurtful or harmful conduct", nor "gender" or "behaviour".

Unlike more turgid efforts: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part...

Yes, but/because many subjects are off-topic here. It's easy to avoid lots of kinds of internet drama if you blanket prohibit the topics.

I'm glad this place exists how it is, but it can also be a bit stuffy.

Most of the norms of spaces that are deliberately inclusive are norms here too, but they're common law norms: they're stated very generally in the guidelines, but the real binding norms are in Dan's comments.

One point of view is that it does, by requiring the opposite:

> Be kind.

It also lists specific hurtful or harmful behaviors that the community tends to use, which is often just as effective. Certainly I have had no trouble reporting harmful conduct, because it’s covered by the collection of guidelines addressing it — and when a new kind of harm becomes prevalent, they’re updated to reflect that.

Gender is an interesting problem for HN, because with explicit misbehavior prohibited by the guidelines, the tech-male gender biases in the community are primarily expressed through voting, flagging, and starting “plausible” flamewars. I don’t think altering the guidelines would have any effect on those behaviors, and would probably encourage them. It’s definitely possible to witness ‘probable’ bias effects and report your perceptions of them as such; the mods have a lot of flexibility to evaluate a concern in context of a potential bias. I really encourage speaking up to them when concerned.

I wish more community guidelines were just this block:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says

> Avoid generic tangents.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.

And one modification of my own:

> Avoid generic tangents. Generic negative comments that can be copy-pasted into other posts are noisy and uninteresting. Be substantive and relevant when sharing your concerns.

Moreover, pretty much all the turgid clauses of Mozilla's conduct code apply here as well; they're just not written in the guidelines, but rather in mod comments. That's deliberate; if you write them in the guidelines, people make a game of coming as close to the line as possible without crossing it, and there are huge meta squabbles over what the guidelines mean.

I don't think this is so, as demonstrated by people usually quoting the guidelines themselves, almost biblically, when chastising someone else on HN. I don't often see people quoting Dang's comments.

I prefer to think instead that HN has crystallised down the lofty goals of civilised dialogue into a handful of wonderfully tangible rules - but unfortunately, rules that can only be followed by somewhat thoughtful people.

This works on HN because HN content (stuff that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity) naturally drives away non-thoughtful people.

For example:

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

At this risk of sounding elitist, if you don't know what fulminating means, or you actively seek out conflict online where you can sneer at others, then you are not the kind of person who will be able to follow the guidelines, and you will quickly be downvoted, which on HN carries a very visible stigma as your comments literally fade into obscurity.

Instead, you will be quickjly driven back to the safe echo chambers of Facebook or wherever, where you can find like minded-people who will sneer alongside you.

This is a website for people in the tech industry, with additional focus on business. There are also subjects that simply cannot be discussed here (which is good). It’s those limits that constrain the conversation which makes this place “less toxic”. If it was a free for all where you could post anything, well, the place would go to shit immediately.

I feel like you’re attacking attempts at inclusivity in general with your comment, which seems misguided. Inclusivity and trying to accommodate people is not what causes toxicity.

+1 to your modification. It wasn't obvious what the word tangents meant, so that modification may do well as it explains it a bit.

HN is only safe and nontoxic when the subject is something the commenters are insulated from.

Even then it only appears so to those commenters, any thread talking about healthcare, legal rights etc etc has the same festering underbelly of hatred you'll find on any comment section from a newspaper.

The major reason you can have this perspective is that a lot of these contentious subjects are blanket banned, the inevitable firestorm in the comments can't happen if the thread isn't allowed.

Precisely. HN's posters aren't any more sophisticated than other forums. It's simply that polarizing topics like current affairs and politics are essentially banned here. Because other forums do not ban them, they have to have rules about not abusing other members, doxxing etc.

The commentariat's genteel reputation also evaporates once you step into the "political" threads HN does allow, namely immigration, outsourcing and of course, crime in San Francisco.

A former head of state in Ycombinator's home country is headed to trial, and a coup plotter in the world's current largest military conflict is apparently dead. Both of these are historic events, but you'd never know that on HN.

Stories dominating coverage elsewhere mostly shouldn't dominate HN. That's not a particular political position—it just follows from the type of site we're trying to have here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Plenty of stories with political overlap [1] still get discussed on HN. Your list seems cherry-picked to me - presumably because those are the topics you dislike, and mostly people overemphasize, and are more likely to notice, the data points they dislike [2].

I'm not sure where you got the idea that HN doesn't have rules, but it does, and they certainly exclude abusing other members [3], doxxing [4], etc.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...