I'm guilty of this. There is a certain way to write HN comments that won't get you banned and have the appearance of being a well-reasoned discussion but which at the core are no more substantial than 2000-era flame wars. HN taught me how to write discourse in a particular style and voice, but it's the same process that's behind other stories like "Google Search Is Dying"[1]. Incentives for well-reasoned discussions tend to result in the appearance of being well-reasoned[2], rather than actually being so in the same way that SEO results in the appearance of good search results more than actual good search results and in both cases they modify authorial behavior to superficially produce content aligned with these incentives.
It's still fun though if you put on the airs of intellectualism knowingly so, then every post becomes a bit of performance art. You can subvert the expectations of the medium in subtle ways that say things without necessarily spelling them out. Treating it as a role-playing exercise detaches things just enough for me that I don't really take things to heart anymore.
the new yorker did a profile of HN and its mods a few years ago and I've never been able to get this description out of my head:
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own.
It's just such an accurate accounting of the 'house style' around here and its limitations.
There was a great comment a while back that I can't find now along the lines of "Hacker News might not have people screaming obscenities at each other but it turns out of you dress things up in polite words you can get away with saying some truly awful things here". And, while I trust the moderation here, they are invariably drawn towards the more obvious examples of toxic behavior, making it very easy for people to continue to advocate for trans erasure, genocide, repealing disability rights, etc. all under the banner of civil, "rational" conversation.
I've been sealioned here, I've read the transphobic, genocide-supporting, and misogynistic takes, but those are not the worst encounters. There have been some utterly spooky encounters here. One in particular stands out as being like a conversation with an otherworldly being. This individual clearly had some amount of speech&debate practice and was equipped to take whatever was said in the worst possible interpretation, but framed in the most detached unaggressive manner. It was the conversational equivalent of quicksand. It keeps me up at night that some people out there roam among us.
These claims should really come with proof. Trans erasure, where? The most I've seen is people complaining about the latest fad of requiring everyone to state "what is your personal pronoun" and to sign with their personal pronouns. I'm sure that slacktivists like that sort of thing, but I doubt it addresses actual needs of trans folks.
The mod team is incredibly good at removing them, but next time I see one I can clip it and send you a link. They typically last 30mins to an hour before getting flagged.
Flagged comments can be read and even linked to, if users set the special 'showdead' option. (If you don't want to link to a comment and give them exposure, just pointing to a broader discussion would be enough to do the trick.) Then again, it's kinda weird to evaluate HN by looking at content that only the worst trolls post to the site, and that disappears basically within minutes.
I would rather not get into that discussion here because it could quickly turn into a "that's not really trans-erasure" argument. However, if you are interested in a link to a flagged&dead comment, I can work with you to send you one that I saw just six days ago.
I see troll flagged & dead comments all the time, just like I see flagged & dead spam. Normal users will never see the stuff, and it dies within minutes - the 'showdead' feature has been put in there to keep everyone honest about how the site is being run, not specifically to give exposure to whatever kind of awful comments. So it seems that we just disagree about whether trolls posting their intentionally provocative crap here tells us anything worthwhile about the actual HN userbase.
It's still fun though if you put on the airs of intellectualism knowingly so, then every post becomes a bit of performance art. You can subvert the expectations of the medium in subtle ways that say things without necessarily spelling them out. Treating it as a role-playing exercise detaches things just enough for me that I don't really take things to heart anymore.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
2 - Such as sprinkling in footnotes like this one.