The normal critical thought displayed by HNers seems to evaporate when the subject is politics or finance. Post titles that would otherwise be called link-bait, like "Goldman Sachs has engineered every US crisis" and "investment banks have caused world famine" (paraphrasing the title of 2 recent posts), are accepted as truth. Another example is any post dealing with HFT.
Subjectively, these discussions appear to have a lot more of downvoted (grayed out) comments. Either they're bad comments, or they're reasonable comments that are downvoted for going against the "hivemind". In either case, it's a bad sign.
This sort of post, while interesting, should be treated as articles about electoral politics and hence off-topic. But the only apparent solution is via moderation.
Can you give examples of reasonable comments that are grayed out on finance threads? My impression is that this happens from time to time, but I haven't noticed it happening any more on HFT/Finance threads than in general.
The normal critical thought displayed by HNers seems to evaporate when the subject is politics or finance. Post titles that would otherwise be called link-bait, like "Goldman Sachs has engineered every US crisis" and "investment banks have caused world famine" (paraphrasing the title of 2 recent posts), are accepted as truth. Another example is any post dealing with HFT.
Subjectively, these discussions appear to have a lot more of downvoted (grayed out) comments. Either they're bad comments, or they're reasonable comments that are downvoted for going against the "hivemind". In either case, it's a bad sign.
This sort of post, while interesting, should be treated as articles about electoral politics and hence off-topic. But the only apparent solution is via moderation.