HN has all potential (the participants) to make clash fruitful; unfortunately, it lacks systems to prevent dead ends. (It is a pity though: well thought and mature ideas lost diluted in the space, and not meeting their natural matches in strenghtening, refinement, correction.) It is not "perfect" as a debate platform (it's not built to be a perfect debate platform as a goal - that would require proper exposure of different ideas and ingenuous organization of the confrontation spaces and methods).
Even worse. So much of it is digital lookism. Failing to use the right words or not genuflecting appropriately. People don’t even engage with thoughts. They haven’t any.
What I find most interesting is that on HN, the Correct Thought depends on the time of day. I have seen quite a few comments that either didn't get any votes or even got a few upvotes in the European morning. Then, later that day, when the US folks start reading it, the upvotes disappear and the comments got downvoted. Seen that several times...
It's a cultural thing (if you meant that "Correct Thought" was different depending on the platform). I'm pretty ure this came from the US, and to be more precise, from McCarthyism, and bled through the cultural dominance to other western countries.
Actually "Correct Thought" is a Gene Wolfe reference =>
> Although Ascian is their mother tongue, adult Ascians don't understand plain Ascian sentences, unless they are direct quotations from governmental propaganda materials (called Correct Thought). So, in order to communicate, an Ascian has to know by heart thousands of these quotations (sentences) on many different topics.
