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Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

#51

Post by Arcsech »

Who decides what's "political"? Are discussions of regulations surrounding Uber political? The ongoing Tesla/dealership feuds? Using machine learning to detect fake news? New immigration policy that impacts H1B tech workers? The impact of Brexit on tech companies? Restrictions on cryptography?

I'm split on this: On one hand, firm moderation and keeping things on-topic makes for a good forum for discussion. On the other, this could easily be used by YC as a tool to say, silence criticism of YC for not disavowing Peter Thiel. Either way, there need to be clearer guidelines around what's allowed and what's not.

Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

#52

Post by ProAm »

dang wrote: post #8
ProAm wrote: post #5

I'm a little skeptical of this.... What's the ulterior motive here? We all know SamA was very anti-trump, is this an alternative method to keep the new US political regime from affecting YC? It's almost a weird form of discussion censorship. Whose idea was this?

It was my idea and has nothing to do with political preferences, though the election season was probably a factor. It has to do with us noticing an uptick in two undesirable things: harsh ideological comments, and accounts that use HN primarily for political battle. You can see one example of how the idea developed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13052458

Interesting, I have noticed the change in discussion but a ban seems a swing too far in the other direction, but it also no go unfettered. I guess we'll see how it goes. I'd like to see what gets defined as being 'political'. To play devils advocate there are several YC backed companies that lobby and contribute to politicians.

Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

#54

Post by koube »

burkaman wrote: post #16
ProAm wrote: post #5

I'm a little skeptical of this.... What's the ulterior motive here? We all know SamA was very anti-trump, is this an alternative method to keep the new US political regime from affecting YC? It's almost a weird form of discussion censorship. Whose idea was this?

I think the HN guidelines have always discouraged politics, so this isn't exactly new. I'm guessing the mods have gotten a lot of complaints about the volume of what many people see as off-topic submissions and discussions. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cove…

This is a site for computer science and entrepreneurship, right? Over the past few months I've seen a lot of posts unrelated to those two topics and it seems like Reddit is very much bleeding into here, not just politics.

My opinion is that this place is great for two reasons: It's narrow focus on one topic, and a userbase that consists of experts in that one topic. When Hacker News strays from it's area of expertise I feel that Gell-Mann Amnesia is apparent and the quality of discussion much lower. Again not just for the politics but for other random news as well.

Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

#55

Post by schoen »

pshc wrote: post #30

Tribalism is so toxic. I'm all for this. But for flagging purposes what's the boundary between a political/non-political story? EDIT: @dang in another comment: Let me clarify. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have polit…

It would be great if dang could clarify a bit; for example, what about news about legal developments (that most likely comes with a normative slant, like welcoming or regretting something that courts have done), leaks about government institutions, or opinion pieces about social issues that don't directly associate them with politicians or legislation?

A challenge that's come up around lots of controversies is the way that one side might think something is "political", while another side thinks it's not!

Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

#56

Post by wccrawford »

rustyfe wrote: post #32

One question that interests/concerns me is making judgement calls about what is/is not a political story. Some links will be cut and dry, some will not. Some comments will be immediately identified as political, some will just be politics adjacent. For instance, on a story about self driving cars, will it be appropriate to talk about UBI? On a story about cryptography, will it be acceptable to talk about how it appli…

I think this is exactly how we got into this situation in the first place. Politics absolutely has a lot of effect on the other things that we talk about here. Trying to eliminate all talk of politics will see a huge void in the data needed to make intelligent decisions, IMO.

You've pointed out some good examples above, and while you can talk about those things without any politics, it's a very shallow-feeling conversation, IMO.

Still, it'll be interesting to see how this week goes.

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