Where did I do that? I tried to discredit an example of that which you are lamenting. Seems odd to reply this to my comment, though I understand flagging it.
What was the correct behavior when the notion I replied to is posed? Report it? Ignore it? Is there any reply to that comment you would not have flagged? Earnest questions.
As anyone can hopefully see from my follow up comments in this thread, I have no desire to be nasty nor any intention to degrade the quality of discussion here.
The GP was definitely starting a generic ideological tangent ("boo socialism", basically) and by pushing back on that ("nuh-uh", basically) you perpetuated it.
Yes the correct behavior would be to not feed it by replying, but instead to flag it as off topic.
I definitely believe you that you don't intend to be nasty and I don't think I saw any nastiness in your posts, so that's great! But your comments (in this thread at least) have definitely been in the "generic ideological battle" category. Examples:
I'm not saying you're wrong or disagreeing with you—it's just that this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here, and we can't have both.
> this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here
Do you have a concrete advice on how to deal with ideological tangents like the "late stage capitalism" meme? Flagging obviously doesn't work. Answering it is frowned upon (it's "feeding it").
Finally just ignoring it would leave a HN full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark. They are already here, heavily upvoted. Is that something you want? HN is a gathering place for hackers but it also educates and inspires. An HN where businesses are the bad guys and capitalism evil is not an HN that inspires startups and founders. So my question is: what do you want and recommend?
I want and recommend that people focus on interesting, curious conversation, motivated by the desire to learn about the world and relate to others. This requires letting go of the feeling that you need to battle opposing positions that are wrong and bad. (Why? Because the two states are mutually exclusive.)
I know it's super hard to disengage from the latter, but we should, because (a) it spoils this site for its intended purpose, and (b) it's an illusion. It's not true that the world will be a worse place if you don't engage in ideological battles on internet forums. In fact it will be a better place and HN itself will be a better place.
Don't worry about the effect on HN of focusing on the delights of curious conversation. The distribution of commenters who come to that (happy) choice is random across the ideological spectrum, in my experience. You needn't worry about ceding HN to the socialists or whoever.
The distribution of commenters who get stuck in the embattled state is also randomly distributed ideologically, in my experience. I don't know if it counts as ironic or not, but the commenters who argue with each other most fiercely resemble each other more than they resemble anyone else.
Of course, if other commenters continue to break the site guidelines by posting generic ideological battle-style comments, you can downvote and/or flag those comments and move on. In egregious cases, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look.
But please don't just flag or report the cases you disagree with—people tend to do that (i.e. report cases where their enemies are misbehaving), which is really just a way to weaponize the HN mods against their opponents. That's not using the site as intended, either—it just shifts the same problem to a different level.
Guess we're using different measures of "success" - in my book any govt program that nets more revenue than than it costs taxpayers or provides more value than it costs (harder to verify) (irs and usps respectively, for instance) is a "successful" program - Thus the irs is a "successful" govt program that is not getting its budget cut because it's successful, and socialist systems would still have an irs... That's kinda where I was coming from
Thanks for the reading recommendations. Sunkara's manifesto for me is the best put case with the most brevity.
I haven't read those, I've mostly read stuff like Piketty and Sunkara, or smaller more focused stuff like Zuboff's surveillance capitalism or Rifkin's green new deal , caste, Harvey's history of neoliberalism, or Hannah Arendt's work that generally rebukes capitalism more than it does fundamentally bolster the ideas of socialism - You do make me reflect I haven't read much that's meant to be anything other than stuff from my side though
