Thanks for the response. I see where you are coming from.
We don't really need to discuss it further, but, to clarify, I think the thing that caught my eye is when a reasonable discussion naturally starts to veer towards these more difficult, ideological topics.
Those topics aren't meaningless. It is just very hard to discuss them productively on a public internet forum, as you noted. However, it is also not unexpected for productive, intellectual discussions of other issues to meaningfully brush up against these "ideological tangents" on occasion.
The part that seems a little arbitrary to me is to say that the discussion can't proceed further purely based on content alone, as opposed to instead drawing the line based on content-neutral criteria such as civility, substantiveness, novelty, etc.
But I understand that this desire may be overly idealistic in a public internet forum, and certain pragmatic lines may need to be drawn. It sounds like might be the case on HN. Again, thanks for engaging with me on this.
We don't really need to discuss it further, but, to clarify, I think the thing that caught my eye is when a reasonable discussion naturally starts to veer towards these more difficult, ideological topics.
Those topics aren't meaningless. It is just very hard to discuss them productively on a public internet forum, as you noted. However, it is also not unexpected for productive, intellectual discussions of other issues to meaningfully brush up against these "ideological tangents" on occasion.
The part that seems a little arbitrary to me is to say that the discussion can't proceed further purely based on content alone, as opposed to instead drawing the line based on content-neutral criteria such as civility, substantiveness, novelty, etc.
But I understand that this desire may be overly idealistic in a public internet forum, and certain pragmatic lines may need to be drawn. It sounds like might be the case on HN. Again, thanks for engaging with me on this.