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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

#81

Post by burkaman »

koube wrote: post #54
burkaman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a site for "hackers", which is an intentionally vague term, and it's not supposed to be limited to just CS and startups, although that's obviously the main audience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

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

#82

Post by SVisWallStreet »

So I assume Hacker News will think its just a debate when members of the community begin helping Trump make a Muslim Registry or facilitate deporting humans? I assume we need to detox from politics because without folks might not remember that grab them by pussy is what Peter Thiel supports? This is bullshit. Silicon Valley is no better than the gutters of Wall Street despite what your branding tells yourself.

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

#84

Post by Mz »

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?

My understanding is that sama does not run HN. I believe when things were restructured, HN became dang's baby.

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

#86

Post by jrubinovitz »

"Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time."

I think this calls for more moderation so users that can speak civilly and intellectually about politics can do so, not banning speaking of politics entirely. "Conflict activat[ing] the primitive brain" is rather infantilizing, gaslighting, and not true.

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

#87

Post by kbenson »

ProAm wrote: post #35
ivraatiems wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how quickly examples of the problem dang specifically mentioned have popped up, like this comment. Assuming bad faith without evidence is a big part of the issue here.

Im not assuming bad faith, just said I was skeptical. YC is a business and they are very interested in making money. Since the CEO of YC was very outspoken against one political candidate and now there is a week long ban I was just curious. Ive always seem YC as very open to intelligent honest discussion, so a ban like this seemed odd to me. That's why I asked the question, I probably could have phrased it better.

> Im not assuming bad faith

You specifically asked "What's the ulterior motive here?" which implies you think there is an ulterior motive. An ulterior motive would be acting in bad faith, since it would by definition be different than the expressed motive, since the reasoning was clearly expressed above.

Presentation matters. Whether you meant it to be or not, your statement is somewhat inflammatory, for the reasons I just outlined. In my opinion, it's also a very good reason why the temporary ban is a good idea.

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

#90

Post by sillysaurus3 »

tunesmith wrote: post #61

I'm not really a fan of this move. I don't see it as an addiction that reduces its power over us by abstaining for a period of time. I also don't agree with applying system effects to individuals - while political discussion can appear to create a dulling or muting effect overall it doesn't mean that individual people aren't being positively influenced, in ways that might have even larger positive effects on the syst…

and that ignoring the "virus" or "symptoms" will make the adjustment that much more traumatic

There are other sites to talk about politics on. Personally, I'm happy to come to HN to learn new things.

Letting the community process the new inputs vigorously might seem more traumatic in the short term but it could also make us stronger overall.

An extremely active 3000-day HN user with excellent technical contributions was recently banned due to the way they chose to express themselves regarding a political story. This made the community weaker, even if it was a necessary ban.

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