Ask HN: Is there a place on HN for interesting yet flame-war inducing topics?
9 by hn_throwaway_99 | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I ask this (as truly an open question, without knowing the answer) because of 2 recent posts on HN that got flagged, one a thought-provoking article by a Yale student titled "Abolish Yale", and the other about the California proposal to use the recently-novel "citizen deputization" legal techniques pioneered by Texas, but this time to restrict assault weapons. The reason I ask this is because there appear to be a growing collection of topics that are interesting and deserving of debate, but because they are hot-button issues they often devolve into flame wars. I've been on the other side of this as well, where I commented that I flagged a DEI-focused article because, while I thought the topic itself was interesting, it seems comment threads on DEI topics always devolve into uninteresting flame wars, and that I rarely learn something new from these threads. I didn't feel that about the 2 topics today that got flagged - indeed, there were a bunch of comments that let me to going down Wikipedia rabbit holes and I learned a ton, and for both of these topics the first I heard about them was on HN. So my question to the HN community is whether you think there is some way (e.g. feature changes, "sub topics", etc.) to host these topics that seem fundamentally relevant to the HN audience, but which are so difficult to have debate about without getting flooded by low quality comments?
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