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

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

#151

Post by 27182818284 »

maxerickson wrote: post #101
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An extremely active 3000-day user with excellent technical contributions was recently banned due to politics. They were banned because of what they chose to write, it wasn't just because of a political discussion.

Having been here roughly 8ish years, I don't think I can recall someone being banned unjustly off the top of my head. Surely I haven't seen all of the bans play out, but the ones I have seen have always come as no surprise (Like I'd probably ban the person for 24 hours myself in a lot of cases. )

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

#152

Post by mnx »

To all the people saying there are lot's of other places to discuss politics - what good quality ones (with reasonable moderation, not total echo chambers, accessible to normal people) would you recommend? I'm genuinely asking, I feel like they are not that easy to be found. For my part, I like slatestarcodex.

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

#155

Post by ocdtrekkie »

koolba wrote: post #141
dang wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it looks like sour grapes This is one of those unintended consequences that gobsmack me any time we try out some new idea here. I'm sure anyone who deals with large internet communities has the same experience. The funny thing is that it's always obvious that it was bound to come up, in retrospect—just never beforehand. It's like the unveiling of the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel: hidden in plain view every…

I'd have a lot more confidence in the unbiased nature of a request like this if it was suggested prior to the outcome of the election. It's not like things were less contentious then. Say if this were announced the day before the election, regardless of the outcome, with a hold period of say a month.

Arguably deciding to kibosh political chat before the election would've been even more contentious, because it could be seen as trying to affect the outcome of the election.

No matter who you favor right now, political discussion helps nobody. The outgoing President can't do anything much, and the incoming President can't do anything much either. Nothing you read in the next two months is realistically going to lead to you having a meaningful impact on anything, more than likely.

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

#156

Post by guildwriter »

This feels a lot like closing the barn doors after the horses have already gotten loose. This kind of action was sorely needed weeks ago, especially when political articles turned into flame wars populated by 140 char political emotional screeds. It was really disheartening to see HN turn towards the same kind of political discussion I have to endure on other sites. Especially when commentators who tended to post thoughtfully completely devolved.

These days it feels rarer to see the same kind of inflammatory articles gain traction. The same kind of discussion is there but the flaming feels less rampant than it once was. With passions cooled I feel that the community is slowly returning to normal. Though it's likely with such a contentious president, especially to the de facto SV culture, it's not going to be smooth waters.

More brush fires might just be the new normal for now. I think that controlling the burning in this case is more advantageous to the community than trying to stamp it out entirely. Giving the silent treatment to unpopular views is partially how we ended up where we are.

I'm always up for a short term experiment though.

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

#158

Post by djsumdog »

tarikjn wrote: post #62

I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then p…

I actually haven't seen very many political stories on here. I've personally avoided most of the political crap too, so maybe I just didn't click on a lot of it (and therefore selectively un-memoryed it).

I don't feel this need to be an explicit policy. I mean it gets into the entire "what is politics debate."

Hackernews is about hacking (software, hardware, life), and I still see tons of that on here -- well that and Amazon spam, but that's mostly due to their recent conference/product announcements and will probably die down soon.

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

#159

Post by dkural »

How do you draw boundaries of what's political? Everything is political - rules for how and where Cars can drive, rules for who can host whom in their house, gender equality and the job market, drones, and accountability abroad, encryption and government surveillance. It's impossible to have a conversation about Uber, AirBnB, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Twitter without talking about whom it affects and how.

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

#160

Post by pshc »

knz wrote: post #115
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…

> Tribalism is so toxic. And yet isn't one solution to tribalism a respectful exchange of ideas and dialogue? Political changes have many direct impacts on this community - net neutrality, education policy related to STEM, funding for organizations/government agencies that have a long history of supporting technology, legislation concerning the development of new technologies (particularly for the medical and energy…

Yeah, that's well put... I could go further to propose that the respectful exchange of ideas and dialogue is the antithesis of tribalism--of othering.

I agree with you that politics are deeply intertwined with hacker culture.

But practically speaking, how we get to that respectful ideal? Throttling political stories when things get too heated might help.

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