Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics

http://www.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by rms • 17 years ago

88 37 17 years ago

rms5• 17 years ago

"Classic flamewar topics" is interesting enough to define further. Is it a small list of banned arguments? Is it more a set of behaviors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28Internet%29

My favorite of these topics (edit: I meant "classic" on the internet as a whole, not specifically to Hacker News. How many classic flamewar arguments do we really have?) is the discussion about .999 repeating equaling one. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692338 links to a physics forum discussing it for 400 forum pages. It goes on because no one ever gets the right answer because both sides are correct and wrong at the same time and it's completely an issue of definition. The answer is to define the problem more precisely which allows you to argue that the naive perspective is ultimately correct for the hyperreal number system.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

.999 wasn't really a flame topic is it? Some people learned stuff they didnt know about infinity. Others presented fairly good arguments for .999... != 1 and we spent time disproving that. ANd others introduced Hyperreal numbers whihc some hadn't heard of.

No one got angry or passionate or flamey as I saw it... the topic never made it much onto the main page and was a nice discussion.

Im not disagree with the sentiment "avoid flame topics" - I just dont think that is a good example.

A better one would be the current TC article on the main page (and all the boring meta discussion on "ban techcrunch" and flaming about pg & ma being buddies).

rms5• 17 years ago

Right, it wasn't a flame war here, I was referring to the 400 page version on PhysOrg. We could handle the topic -- by the end of the PhysOrg thread (I only read the last page) they're calling each other retards over the definition of continuous for limits.

A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Meta discussion is a very different type of flame topic. It's also been extremely important to defining the character of this board so seperating it MetaFilter style is a drastic step. How can we discourage metatalk when it is annoying but allow it when it is interesting?

delayclose• 17 years ago

In general, a discussion that revolves around the exact definition of pretty much any concept is more or less sure to lead to retarded internet raging.

rms5• 17 years ago

That's unfortunate because many of the most difficult and interesting discussions, philosophical or otherwise, boil down to the meanings of English words.

csbartus• 17 years ago

I was a bit disappointed with the Zed Shaw flame war. On a good technical article people started to express their feelings about Zed, avoiding to discuss the technical issues raised.

Still the subject remains shady even it is affecting seriously the hacker world.

[UPDATE] A separate thread was made to discuss the shady issues: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709583

Devilboy• 17 years ago

Instead of restarting flamewars just link to the original flamewar?

cturner3• 17 years ago

That's an interesting idea. Imagine a wikipedia-like site that aimed to be the definitive guide to known flamewars. I'm just trying to comprehend the carnage that such a system would cause between the people who cared about the site for what it represented vs the people who just cared about their varying legs of the debate.

feuerkrieg.com is available.

gabrielroth• 17 years ago

It would be great if, instead of posting the same arguments over and over, people were editing and strengthening a canonical version of that argument. At least you'd get higher-level flamewars.

The difficulty would be preventing people from deliberately weakening the other side's argument.

philwelch• 17 years ago

I've had this idea several times, because there are a lot of discussions (not just flamewars) that end up being repetitive from iteration to iteration, forum to forum, including the classic online beer discussion (a combination of making-fun-of-American-beer, the counterargument that America has several good microbrews, and a friendly discussion about which microbrews and imports people like.)

rbanffy• 17 years ago

Obviously the Apple II is far superior to the TRS-80 family for any serious computing task. Ataris are good for gaming and the Commodore 64 has a disk-drive that's too slow for any practical use. As for the MSX machines, they have no soul.

I am sorry. Could not resist.

Note: This post is best viewed at 300 bps.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Well the C64 disk drive was good enough for gaming, I can tell you that for sure.

bcl• 17 years ago

The Atari wasn't just for games!

Oh, my. Now we've gone and done it...

jacquesm• 17 years ago

I agree with this very much. Slashdot suffers greatly from this (or it thrives on it, depends on your point of view I guess).

Apple vs Microsoft, Republicans vs Democrats, GPL vs BSD license, RIAA vs the world etc the discussions are always the same and nobody learns a thing.

It's a mindset problem, a flamewar does not do anything to advance the topic it just causes everybody to dig in just a little deeper.

billswift2• 17 years ago

Only to the participants. I actually find many of the arguments interesting, if repetitive. After you have seen the SAME arguments many times though it does get wearing.

Actually, the arguments can be useful to help get newbies try different programs/environments and you explore WHY you agree or disagree with various viewpoints. The emacs vs vi flames I read when I was first getting started caused me to keep trying to use vi, until I was finally able to understand why I found it so difficult. (I just cannot get used to its modes; I continually forget whether I am in insert, append, or command mode and have to go back and fix the goofs that causes.)

EDIT: I should have read down a little further before commenting; the idea of a wiki exploring the differing opinions is excellent from my POV.

billswift2• 17 years ago

The above was actually talking more about the "religious" wars than flaming as such. The best flaming site I have seen was Panda's Thumb back several years ago; they often had hundreds on comments with atheists, creationists, and religious-apologist atheists screaming back and forth at each other, but it was very entertaining, I've rarely read Panda's Thumb for the last few years since they've quit the flaming.

rms5• 17 years ago

>Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

is the entire guideline, too long for a title.

duairc• 17 years ago

I know this is off-topic, but your username is slightly misleading. :)

rms5• 17 years ago

Yes, it's something of a joke. :D http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124391

stonemetal• 17 years ago

I don't know when ever I see it I always think root mean square.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

While we are at it, please avoid FUD, payperpost, PR submarines and tabloid gossip.

cnlwsu• 17 years ago

Perhaps one of the recurring topics that I think introduce flame wars on here is all of the Mac-PC articles that keep popping up. They never introduce anything new or provide anything beyond attempting to justify fanboydom.

nathanwdavis• 17 years ago

I really like cute animal pictures.... it's a shame I have to post those elsewhere. :)

biohacker42• 17 years ago

I complain here about inappropriate stuff a lot, and I you know you're kidding but: As far as fluff goes I'll take cute animal pictures over all the other fluff that shows up here.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Would it be fair to say that all topics explored in Paul Graham essays,

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

which includes my favorite topic of education reform, are not classic flamewar topics?

jjs2• 17 years ago

It would be fair to say, "use your discretion". Any topic can be presented in an inflammatory manner.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

That's an interesting response. That implies that something that is very much a core topic of HN discussion could be nothing but flame bait if the treatment of it in the submission is sufficiently inflammatory.

radley• 17 years ago

like... Flash?

DougWebb• 17 years ago

God told me that if you interpret the bible correctly, it proves that Man's fingers were designed to use vi, not emacs. But only on Windows. Discuss.

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics

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