> I said, "why can't you handle a little incivility"
I echo PG when I say that it's a slippery slope. There's no value N for incivility that someone won't take to N+1. Besides, why are you the person to measure how much incivility should be allowed? Just be civil. Not hard.
> self-righteous whiners
> tight ass stifled pedants who contribute nothing
> anal retentive
> douchebag
> some fucking idiot
> Boy Scout
> holier-than-thou
> passive aggression
Is that a little incivility? That's just a bunch of angry attempts at belittling others, based entirely on your perspective and zero facts. We can fill HN up with that, but I'm not sure it would improve the place.
> I would much prefer a forum full of passionate hackers with strong opinions who express original ideas in an uncivil way
1) Doesn't compute. HN is full of passionate people. Raganwald seems to be one, but you reject what he's passionate about. So must people only be passionate about your ideas, or others?
2) You've told me various times how you would prefer this or that. It's not about you.
So, summary:
Your points are all about what type of boy-scout-god-fearin' bad men are restricting your self-expression, and how you'd prefer a forum which was a free-for-all. There are many fora for self-expression and ranting and just sticking it to the man. But rather than posting there, you stick with the one with a stated civility policy and alter it to suit your preferences. I think that's what you accused Raganwald of. You're doing what you despise.
It's okay to follow some rules. These ones are so easy to follow and it doesn't affect my day at all to do so. I'd rather find the real issues in the world and fight those, or break rules that really matter.
Don't assume you know me, my background, my religious beliefs (or lack thereof), why I'm doing something or anything that has no basis in fact. It sounds nice and angry, but all you're doing is arguing against some picture in your head, but diluting your core argument about the facts. Besides, you might find I'm closer to your opinion on most of the issues you post about. Just not this one.
In any case, this is my last post on the issue. Bigger fish to fry.
This whole discussion is about personal preference and opinion. The original post and all of the posts that followed. If you think there is any objective fact to be had here, you're crazy.
I'm a long-time user of HN, reporting my experience, and so it is about me, just as much as it is about raganwald's desire for people to be even more civil than they currently are.
P.S. I'm not literally calling anyone Christian. Equating a behaviour to Puritanism is a rhetorical device to illustrate a point. I think you and I may be communicating on completely separate dimensions...
> If you think there is any objective fact to be had here, you're crazy.
FACT: PG asked us to be civil.
FACT: the dictionary defines civil.
FACT: you're not being civil according to that definition. A moral relativism escape attempt doesn't change that.
FACT: Raganwald's post requesting more civility got 650 votes and stayed on the front page for ages. There are many who would like more of that.
FACT: many other websites don't mind how aggressive you are.
FACT: you're resorting to name-calling and generalisations rather than arguing the point.
FACT: you said this:
>> Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?
> No.
Well, I think I can claim as a fact that we can have a debate while I remain significantly more civil than you have. I don't think it would have been a better one if I hadn't.
Those are so NOT facts. You're such a bean counter. Civility is totally in the eye of the beholder. It's defined as politeness, which is a disgustingly relative concept.
Perhaps there is some gradation of civility, where you are holier than I am, but the question for HN is not who is the holiest, the question is where the threshold is, and what action to take.
My argument is that censorship is far more objectionable than the problem it supposedly solves.
Let's grant that you're more civil than I am. Does that make you RIGHT? Does that make you BETTER THAN ME? What is your payoff for that? Are you going to Heaven and I'm going to Hell?
pg asks people to be civil, therefore civility is more important than intellectual contribution, civility is more important than quality content? Civility becomes a higher value than the PURPOSE of the forum? No.
Civility is at best a 3rd order value. The primary value of the forum is interesting content, and lame ass Wikipedia editors DO NOT provide that.
I'll take 1 tptacek, who is passionate enough to tell complete idiots to STFU, rather than 100 perfectly civil but dry and worthless unoriginal pedants who quote the Bible and worship rule books.
"NEENER NEENER I'M MORE CIVIL THAN YOU!" Congratu-fucking-lations. That's really not much of an accomplishment is it?
I'm counting beans because you've made so many stunning logical errors it just makes sense to call you on them.
For example:
> Let's grant that you're more civil than I am. Does that make you RIGHT? Does that make you BETTER THAN ME? What is your payoff for that? Are you going to Heaven and I'm going to Hell?
Well, no. There's no relationship between civility and being better/worse/heaven/hell/correct/incorrect. Why would you even ask that unless you're casting about for a strawman?
> "NEENER NEENER I'M MORE CIVIL THAN YOU!" Congratu-fucking-lations. That's really not much of an accomplishment is it?
A worthy accomplishment would be a more rational discussion, which might be easier to find if there was less bile to wade through. Are you sure you speak to people in real life like this?
You're counting beans because you have no faculty for grasping nuance.
>Why would you even ask that unless you're casting about for a strawman?
It's called making a point. My points fly way over your head. I'm making a point through insinuation, suggestion, and demonstration.
>A worthy accomplishment would be a more rational discussion, which might be easier to find if there was less bile to wade through.
If you wade through the bile you're doing it wrong. The bile is part of the message. You have to drink it.
How does one communicate an abstract intuition to a robotic mind?
You are the type of person who reads Heraclitus and says, "He's contradicting himself!" Or you read Kierkegaard and say, "This is logically offensive!"
My whole point is that there is more to Hacker Culture than dry, trite, known knowns that can be widely agreed on as objectively correct. When you try to make a culture or community fit into some dictionary definition you strangle it.
I was also trying to communicate that civility is not the highest value of Hackers. Who really gives a shit if you're civil? That is very minor compared to whether you are original, interesting, right, or even wrong. Even having wrong comments here is more important than having civil comments. Wrongness is therefore a higher value than civility. An HN without people saying things that are wrong would be a terrible place.
The death of community happens when only the known knowns are allowed to exist. Tolerance for creativity must include tolerance for cultural creativity and novel emotional expression that is often judged heretical or ugly by the mass mind. When the mass mind ceases to tolerate the ugly and works to stamp it out, the mass mind ceases to grow.
There is no excuse for someone who comes to HN and just insults people in a really derivative way. That is not a contribution. These posts get downvoted quickly. But if someone stimulates thought and outrage by skirting the rules and is even able to get upvotes, why should she be censored because she fails to conform to some guy's interpretation of the dictionary?
I don't want a free for all. I want a curated experience that censors unoriginal thought. I want to censor people who are intellectually dishonest, who are trite, who are repetitive, who are pedantic in an unoriginal way. I want to do this because I believe this activity is a higher expression of Hacker Culture than the expressions expressed by reganwald.
The faction in my camp may be a minority. You may still want to burn us like the witches we are for--omg--being uncivil. Afterall, pg said incivility is bad and pg knows everything right?
In conclusion, when I said "congratu-fucking-lations" I was trying to communicate that being civil is not a contribution. It's not a worthwhile accomplishment or anything to be proud of. Getting 600 upvotes by echoing this sentiment is also not an accomplishment and also does not induce civility. In the example of myself, this "Tell HN: Be civil" comment actually induced incivility because I find this kind of trite shit offensive.
The bile is not someone who tells an idiot that he's an idiot.
The bile is the Jehovah's Witness who comes to your door and tries to convince you to be a holier-than-thou douche bag.
After being preached at I feel so dirty that I have to go buy a Bible just so that I can tear it up, light it on fire, then douse the flames with my urine.
Get that creepy moralizing away from me and from HN.
The discussion that surfaced the supposed incivility was about consumer electronics. Maybe there's a time and place to cast off our robes, wail at the moon and set fire to the castle, but...iPads? The counterculture is getting naked because of gadgets? I understand that we seek modern proxies for long-gone tribal battles, but I stopped arguing about whose toys were the best when the Amiga didn't take over. I'm still sad about that.
Civility doesn't exist in a hierarchy of which values are most important. It's orthogonal to originality, like choosing to wear shoes. You can do the same job whether you're civil or not. No relationship, so stop trying to link it. You keep bringing up irrelevant issues, creating links where there are none and fighting strawmen, all so you don't have to explain your supposed incapacity to argue a point (or even rile someone up) using less inflammatory language. I understand you think your language is the secret sauce of your message, but you're probably capable of using different language to similar effect.
At some point you'll find the bad people you're wailing at live in your own head, not on HN. You're still making personal appraisals based on an impossibly thin stream of information, and therefore drawing vibrant (but wrong) images of who you think you're talking to. I mean, go for it if it helps you work stuff out, but you're arguing with a mirage.
Since you insist that you're incapable of conducting a discussion without insulting the (imagined) other, all I do by continuing is offering you more opportunity for that. Or as Raganwald said:
"The same is true when we see someone else violating these precepts. The downvote (and flag, where available and appropriate) are the right tools for the job. Most of the time, calling someone out for diluting the discourse simply adds to the noise while simultaneously feeding the troll."
- original / trite
- civility / rude
- correct / incorrect
leading to 8 kinds of people
1. original, correct, civil
2. original, correct, rude
3. original, incorrect, civil
4. original, incorrect, rude
5. trite, incorrect, civil
6. trite, incorrect, rude
7. trite, correct, civil
8. trite, correct, rude
6 and 8 are acknowledged as non-issues on HN, since they get downvoted and ignored.
7 is the most destructive force of all, because trite things get automatic upvotes. So if we must have these "Tell HN" posts, we should direct our attention to people who are civil, technically correct, trite, and miss the forest for the trees.
The greatest enemy of 7 is 2, and so if you outlaw rude people you outlaw 2 causing 7 to proliferate like a catchphrase on reddit.
2 may be somewhat objectionable, but since originality and correctness are higher values than civility for Hackers, their presence should be tolerated. Tptacek is arguably one of the most valuable HNers around and if 2s were suppressed he would no longer be here.
3 and 4 drive discussion and so are basically valuable. While 4 can be obnoxious and you wouldn't want to have a beer with him, at the very least his inaccurate but original sayings do simulate interesting discussion and provoke 1 and 2 to post.
A lot of very tremendous posts were motivated by the horrible statements of a 4. So 4s do have a kind of value.
Anyway, the worst thing this forum could do is encourage 7s and outlawing rude people would basically give the forum over to 7s. All the 1s and 3s would flee--civil people don't fight back against the invading zombie horde.
That's quite a lot of conclusion from a little theory. I'd like to think that civil, thoughtful people will continue regardless, maybe that's naieve.
There's a space-time component to this, so like most logic diagrams it throws a monkey wrench into the works. Suppressing rude comments may actually coerce folks (like me) into trying to be more civil than they might. This can actually breed more 3's from 4s for instance.
I echo PG when I say that it's a slippery slope. There's no value N for incivility that someone won't take to N+1. Besides, why are you the person to measure how much incivility should be allowed? Just be civil. Not hard.
> self-righteous whiners
> tight ass stifled pedants who contribute nothing
> anal retentive
> douchebag
> some fucking idiot
> Boy Scout
> holier-than-thou
> passive aggression
Is that a little incivility? That's just a bunch of angry attempts at belittling others, based entirely on your perspective and zero facts. We can fill HN up with that, but I'm not sure it would improve the place.
> I would much prefer a forum full of passionate hackers with strong opinions who express original ideas in an uncivil way
1) Doesn't compute. HN is full of passionate people. Raganwald seems to be one, but you reject what he's passionate about. So must people only be passionate about your ideas, or others?
2) You've told me various times how you would prefer this or that. It's not about you.
So, summary:
Your points are all about what type of boy-scout-god-fearin' bad men are restricting your self-expression, and how you'd prefer a forum which was a free-for-all. There are many fora for self-expression and ranting and just sticking it to the man. But rather than posting there, you stick with the one with a stated civility policy and alter it to suit your preferences. I think that's what you accused Raganwald of. You're doing what you despise.
It's okay to follow some rules. These ones are so easy to follow and it doesn't affect my day at all to do so. I'd rather find the real issues in the world and fight those, or break rules that really matter.
Don't assume you know me, my background, my religious beliefs (or lack thereof), why I'm doing something or anything that has no basis in fact. It sounds nice and angry, but all you're doing is arguing against some picture in your head, but diluting your core argument about the facts. Besides, you might find I'm closer to your opinion on most of the issues you post about. Just not this one.
In any case, this is my last post on the issue. Bigger fish to fry.