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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

#191

Post by dang »

mememachine wrote: post #138
KineticLensman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea. Sure, in a week we can get back into the grim reality, the tech-noir crapsack future, but perhaps…

Not all of us view political topics as nausea inducing. I don't think politics have overtaken the site or even become a significant part of it, so I wonder why politics-averse individuals cant just avoid political threads?

It's in HN's DNA to have a single community. The path you're talking about leads to subreddits, which would make for a siloed kind of site, i.e. one that is broken into silos rather than being in the same world. This is an important point, because it touches on the what-HN-is-and-isn't thing.

HN is a community for the the intellectually curious, who come here for a wide range of interests (some of which have political aspects, of course--there's no getting away from that). But there's a different kind of users, ideologically committed ones, who use HN primarily for political battle. That's not something that sits well with the purpose of this site, as I tried to explain above.

Those users really want a different kind of site than HN, and need to find another, or maybe start a new one. Plenty of new sites have spawned from HN; that's partly a function of our not trying to be all things. HN has always been in the lucky position of not needing to grow for growth's sake, so we're happy when people who want a different kind of community find it, or create it.

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

#192

Post by Karunamon »

One concern I immediately have is that what is politics to one person might not be politics to another, and given that too many flags that are judged to be inaccurate result in the removal of the user's ability to flag...

You see where I'm going with this. It may be worth rescinding that policy during the testing period.

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

#193

Post by drzaiusapelord »

trjordan wrote: post #74
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…

Agreed, this is hard. My personal benchmark is: does this article have information that would change a political viewpoint? If so, then political talk feels like fair game. Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means. Story where a researcher makes incremental progress towards a quantum computer? Let's not talk about how long it will be until the NSA can break all crypto…

>Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means.

And who is going to keep the comments on track? The typical anti-US people will come out in droves to derail. So we'll end up with the same issues, but instead we'll have political filtering done on the accepted articles themselves that could generate bias.

Its not like all these people will suddenly stick to the topic. In fact, I find many articles that involve India, China, Russia, Brazil, etc usually have a top comment of "But the US is worse." There's a lot of knee-jerk anti-US sentiment here and filtering things out isn't going to change that.

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

#194

Post by scrollaway »

shitgoose wrote: post #123

so HN users admit that they are incapable of carrying out a civilized discussion on political issues? sad. banning all political topics just because current state of affairs upsets someone is ridiculous. country is split in the middle, so what, when liberals win we will ban political topics again just because now the other side feels offended? how about you stop feeling offended and start listening to each other?

> so HN users

I'd appreciate if you didn't make accusations like these which include me in it. This is coming from a moderator - IIUC, it's entirely dang's idea.

> admit

a one week experiment.

> banning all political topics

Temporarily.

> just because current state of affairs upsets someone

It sounds like it has nothing to do with that.

> how about you stop feeling offended and start listening to each other

It starts with you. There is no other word than offended for your reaction to this little announcement here. And if you actually listened, you'd perhaps glance more than just "we're offended Trump won so we're banning politics forevah".

My initial reaction to this announcement was actually negative - I like politics on HN, the community does a decent job of keeping the trashy comments flagged. But then, seeing your post essentially proved dang's point: You've been here for 3.5 years, but just couldn't help yourself and take a piss on the community you're a part of, to try score some political points.

Urgh. It's so disappointing.

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

#195

Post by dragonwriter »

KineticLensman wrote: post #122
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 find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea. Sure, in a week we can get back into the grim reality, the tech-noir crapsack future, but perhaps…

> I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea.

The vision of where we want to be is the central political debate of all time, to which all other political discussions are peripheral appendages. So, no, banning political discussion doesn't let us focus on that, it prohibits even considering it.

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

#196

Post by mattnewton »

dang wrote: post #48
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…

Right, it's not possible to define "politics" precisely, and it would be a mistake to try. But there's nothing new in that; the HN guidelines have always mentioned politics without defining the term, and we get by. We can clarify, though. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet.…

I respect this decision and the difficulty of moderating in this crazy climate, but I think for most people those issues aren't so clearly divided. Take, for example, privacy, where a lot of the positions are based in class and political ideologies, and the outcome of that discussion very much affects tech. Or on the ethics of technologies that replace workers (like the recently announced amazon go) - clearly we need to have a discussion based on political ideologies to talk about whether universal basic income, job retraining, or something else is a solution to real fallout from these trends. Hacker news is close to my only source of smart and civil discussion about these relevant, but politically charged discussions.

I agree hatefully ranting is not working but I don't think politely steering away from the difficult part of the conversation is prudent either. I'm looking forward to hacker news being a place we can still have these difficult discussions in a civil tone after this moratorium.

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

#198

Post by jowiar »

When "politics" is treated as "things that affect other people that we opine about", this decision makes sense.

But this decision is the epitome of privilege. To enter a space thinking "I'm not going to think about politics" is to be someone whose sheer existence in that space isn't a political statement in and of itself. And for many, such a space is "The United States", "The Tech Community", "HN", or whatnot.

Saying "We're going to forget y'all for a week" is... just... fucking... terrible. And whoever conceived of it should be fired on the spot.

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