You've been breaking the site guidelines badly by arguing uncivilly, personalizing arguments, and using the site for political and ideological battle. We've had to warn you about this before.
I'm certain that there are valid reasons for your interest in this topic and your strong feelings about it, but it's not cool to let that translate into abusing Hacker News. Treating HN as a platform for an agenda, which you've been doing, with repetitive quotes and talking points and lists of links—that's off topic for this site. It's not driven by curiosity, and it makes discussion more repetitive, less interesting, and more nasty. Worse, firing off ideological rhetoric with both barrels (e.g. comparing the other side in an argument to the SS and claiming that HN users are full of intense hatred) is the flamewar style of comment that people here are expected to abstain from. Worst of all, making personal attacks on people who disagree with you is a bannable offense here, even if they are completely wrong and you completely right—and you've done that particularly aggressively.
We ban people for less than this. On the other hand, you've also posted interestingly and kindly about non-overheated topics, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and ask you not to do the above things on Hacker News any more. If you'd review the site guidelines and take them to heart, we'd appreciate it. I know that's hardest to do in areas where one has strong feelings, and that's also when it's most important to do.
I'm sorry. It was wrong of me to descend into direct personal attacks on others. I didn’t mean to reduce the quality of the discussion here.
I hope my original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19857878) in this thread was interesting/informative, and consistent with HN guidelines. (Please let me know if it wasn’t.) I acknowledge I made additional comments after that in this thread, which were rather nasty, and I wish I hadn’t made those comments. I had a feeling I shouldn’t make those comments, but at the moment, I was feeling very upset, and I let my emotions out on the keyboard.
The topic of U.S. immigration policy is a highly emotional and sensitive one to me—it’s been a hugely defining factor in my life for the past 12 years. It’s why I haven’t started my own company (and applied to Y Combinator). I found a lot of comments deeply hurtful and emotionally traumatic—it was like they were rubbing salt on my wounds. I felt like a Rosa Parks in the 1950s South.
I’ve honestly never enjoyed commenting on overheated topics like this one. It’s been emotionally draining and harmful for my mental health. It has ruined my mood and robbed me of my happiness and joy for multiple days. I honestly don’t know why I subject myself to this suffering.
I think I’m attracted to this topic because of how much it affects me (and continues to affect me)—and I’m tempted to commented whenever there’s a discussion related to it, in a rather-naive hope of informing people of the true nature of things, with a hope that it might cause people to care. The response has often been depressingly negative. (A case in point being SamReidHughes’ comment saying “There's no reason why our immigration policy should care about you.”)
Anyway, I concede that that’s no reason to shoot off incendiary comments. I don’t ever talk like that in real life, and rarely ever even in online life. Those incendiary comments are emphatically not representative of me. It’s just that this topic (U.S. immigration policy) has a way of pressing all the wrong buttons for me, and putting me in a very bad mental state.
I’m not sure if I should completely refrain from this topic on HN. I don’t know if there’s any benefit to me continuing to comment on this topic. (If you felt like my original comment on this thread was constructive and in line with HN guidelines, please let me know.) I could attempt to continue contributing to future discussions of this topic (with the depth of knowledge on it that personally experiencing it has bought me), and try to do so without letting my emotions get the better of me.
Alternatively, it might be good if discussions around this topic were generally discouraged. It would require the mods to make that a policy, but that might be healthier in the long run. The comments that are made on this topic often have a tendency to be emotionally-traumatic triggers for immigrants like myself. I suggest it might be better for the health of the HN community, if we could somehow generally discourage people from getting into long-winded (and often-heated) discussions on this topic. But that’s your call.
I appreciate what you wrote here and the courage with which you shared your experience—the actual experience underlying what you wrote, including what you feel and some of the reasons for it. It's so hard to do that. It's much easier to just argue, or hide in other ways. I'm a hider myself; probably we all are. Thanks for modeling something better.
I don't think we can reach a solution by discouraging conversations on these topics—they're too relevant to people. It would be asking people to exclude too much of themselves. That can never work. Even if it did, it would constrain conversation into an artificial space, too separated from what's coming up in life. That would make HN less interesting. But we do moderate how much oxygen hot topics are allowed to consume on HN. Otherwise they would take over completely, which also would make HN less interesting. And we try to steer so when topics do come up, it's in the context of a substantive article with new information, as opposed to just predictable points being repeated for the nth time. That has a regulating effect on how quickly and how hot the flames burn. New information means something else is available for discussion besides pre-existing thoughts and feelings, which tend to be intense and painful. Those will come up no matter what—they need to—but it helps if there's a context besides them. That has a moderating effect. It also increases the odds that something new can emerge in discussion, which makes HN more interesting, and may be (though it's better not to think too much about this) the only way to long-term resolution.
You asked me about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19857878. I don't think that comment broke the guidelines in the way that the later comments did, so it's on the right side of the most important line. However, it's problematic in a more subtle way, which I'd like to try to articulate (though I haven't found the best language for it yet). To me it reads too much like a list of pre-prepared points. Such comments feel more like speeches than conversation. We all know what it's like in conversation when someone insists on going through their list before pausing to hear others: it sort of stops the communicative flow. This often happens when there's an asymmetry in the room: one person feels more urgently than the others and knows more about the topic. They have a lot of good information, but they lose connection with listeners after the first bit or two, and there's no longer the sense of a shared discussion. It feels like they are determined to plough through their points irrespective of what others are taking in. That's a bummer and it reduces the chemistry of the conversation. Or, an opponent turns out to be in the room, someone with opposite strong feelings and opposite facts. Then the two go after each other and get stuck in a tit-for-tat that alienates everyone else.
What makes better conversation is when we react not only from pre-existing feelings and facts, but also from what's going on in the moment: what else has been said, who else is present, what sort of connection we can make with them. Then the comments have more resonance and are less one-sided. That draws others into making richer contributions.
The more in what others have said that I can really respond to, the more surface area a conversation has to stand on. Often we take in and respond to just the one bit of information in a statement that triggers our pre-existing feelings. That's low connectivity, even if we pour out a lot of information in response. Good conversation needs more connectivity.
I'm writing this for myself as much as anybody, since I've noticed this pattern in my own comments. And I noticed an interesting test to apply. After writing a long comment with many paragraphs, I go back and read the first paragraph and ask: could I just stop there? Have I actually made my real contribution to the conversation at that point? It's surprising how often the answer is yes. Sometimes I delete the whole rest of the comment; mostly I don't, but it's surprising how often I find I've been piling on, trying to get a bunch of stuff out, even though it probably weakens the communicative effect of what I'm saying.
Well, I could apparently have been more explicit about what I was saying, and made more clear that national quotas was crudely consistent with that goal (maximize EV for the existing population) because of particular ways in which having large unintegrated minorities in a country can affect that (extrinsic) metric.
