If people keep submitting (edit: I should really say upvoting) wikipedia.org articles on widely popular topics, we're going to have to penalize Wikipedia submissions again. We used to do that, but I was persuaded to remove the penalty. This case is particularly bad because the topic has long been an internet cliché, and also because it has a meta aspect. Meta is internet forum crack, so we try not to do it here—er, not too much. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114661" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114661</a> is another current thread where the topic is much too well-known to make a good Wikipedia submission.<p>Good HN submissions from Wikipedia are about topics that have not been widely discussed before, and about which there isn't a good article available elsewhere. (If there is, it's best to submit the latter instead.) Since Wikipedia is the most generic of sources, short of maybe a dictionary, it should be the domain of last resort for a topic.<p>I appreciate that not everyone has seen the same things. You can always use search as a proxy for how well known something is: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=gish%20gallop&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>.<p>This has been coming up repeatedly recently:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089041" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089041</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990237" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990237</a>
I've noticed that moving the goalposts is extremely prevalent on HN, which makes for pretty frustrating conversations (or just reading). And then sometimes it's a tag team. E.g.:<p>Person A writes their comment. Person B1 offers a rebuttal. Personal A offers their response. Person B2 offers a second rebuttal that abandons the premise behind B1's rebuttal, and may actually be at odds with it. Person A ends up either deflated or looking defeated.<p>It's like the cross product of a Gish gallop and a DDoS.
A particularly ridiculous version of this is "spreading" in debate, where you speak extremely fast so that your opponent has difficulty addressing all your points.<p>Wired video with some interviews: <a href="https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0</a><p>And a transcribed video from a highly-prepped debate: <a href="https://youtu.be/JhzwSlK4uEc" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JhzwSlK4uEc</a>
How do you deal with this strategy? A lot of hyper partisans and conspiracy theorists hammer you with a ton of “facts” that sometimes are correct but most of the times with half truths, misinterpretations and a pinch of things that are plain wrong. If you are lucky you can refute immediately but often it takes a lot of time and effort to research the topic. In a debate or discussion with friends I often feel stupid saying things like “I don’t believe the stuff you are saying but I need to research things for a while before I can tell you what exactly is wrong.” .<p>The current pandemic is a good example. The “Plandemic” movie is making its rounds in the neighborhood but all I can say is that I can’t imagine that thousands of researchers around the world are part of a conspiracy. It just doesn’t make sense.
The online version of this is a whole bunch of 'sources' in a comment. In fact, I suspect that there is a number of sources in an online comment where the truth goes up in sources and then drops.