> hn has a bit of a positivity bias

Interestingly, it also has a bit of negativity bias. This means that any story, however anodine or ground-breaking, will have:

- a group of people using some motivated reasoning to show how obviously terrible the thing is and how clever they are;

- a group of people arguing that the thing is the best since warm water and is going to solve everything (if only reality would behave).

This makes a lot of discussions simultaneously very interesting and utterly depressing.

Problem is that due to the bullshit asymmetry principle, explaining why takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing the bullshit in the first place.

If you unconditionally accept bullshit but require an explanation in order to reject it, then you're going to wind up believing a lot of bullshit.

The same thing applies to people yelling bullshit. Its a lot easier to just falsely yell bullshit than it is to explain why something is not actually bullshit.

Generally i go with the imputus is on the person making the claim. I want the original person to back up their claim before i will care, but i also want anyone counterclaiming BS to also back up their claim before i care.

In reality most people tend to back one side or the other based on their "gut" and if they've had a similar showerthought before and it backs up their own ego, while requiring extensive proof to change their mind.

Also in an ideal world you shouldn't just passively consume arguments on the internet, but do actual reading on the subject. Neither side on an internet debates actually owes you anything.

> Neither side on an internet debates actually owes you anything.

I disagree, the person trying to convince you of something always owes you an explanation.

Actual reading on something, while a good thing, never resolves an argument because you can't replace the person you are arguing with's premises with a generic premise from somewhere else and come to a reasonable conclusion.

> I disagree, the person trying to convince you of something always owes you an explanation.

Oh definitely not. I’m happy to make one post explaining my position… then walk away.

I discovered and internet superpower… it doesn’t bother me if you are wrong.

I mean, i think we agree here. One post explaining your position is what i think is owed - if you gave zero explanation but still expected people to believe you (e.g. just yelled "bullshit" and walked away), i think that would be an unreasonable position.

> I disagree, the person trying to convince you of something always owes you an explanation.

Nope, nobody owes you anything on the Internet.

You shouldn't believe them, of course. But you need to have the tools to figure it out for yourself.

This is worthy of expansion into a blog post or similar discussion piece. Public discourse has long been weaponized for economic or political profit, but otherwise well-intentioned people keep falling for the same tricks over and over.

In my experience "are usually reasonably well received" is heavily influenced by the topic of discussion.