Remix clone Hacker News

I draw a distinction between posts and comments here.

Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's going on.

Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also usually be active in the discussion about the article, and their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that, then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda as well.

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bee_rider 2 days ago | parent [-]

Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that you often don’t get to really know anybody. Realistically most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3 or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting hidden after a point, right?

I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.

Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.

So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.

	▲	AnimalMuppet 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		All right, here's an example. X makes a post on one side of a position. Y makes a thought-provoking reply on the other side. X replies with "So what's your point?" X either fails at reading comprehension, or X is trying to make it look like Y didn't have a point, because X doesn't have a good reply to Y's point, and X wants everybody else to not notice that Y actually had a good point. I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines. No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN. Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.