I have no complaints. This is where I come more and more often because I am so fed up with endless political bickering on Facebook, Twitter, and, well, pretty much every other place I go that has some sort of comment section or forum. It's frustrating. For me, this is the last bastion of rational discussion.
Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#262I am running tech site with 10k users on which i made surveys about politics with possibility to comment by users. I've stopped because there were so many conflicts, such bad emotions, then users moved their personal conflicts to other discussions on forum. After stopping the political surveys everything is a lot more stable and people are nicer to each other, without any biases, they discuss about software, hardware etc.
This was very good decision, will it work for HN? Probably yes, it worked for us.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#263I 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 think this is a fantastic idea -- it seems the trend today is to inject politics into absolutely everything. In the past, the prevailing wisdom was to avoid political and religious topics in the workplace and technical spheres (conferences, message boards like HN, etc.). Focus on the tech and just the tech and you'll be surprised how much nastiness is naturally eliminated from this board.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#264The idea that we can carve out a space that exists outside of politics and ideology is delusional.
Ideology is present everywhere. It's built in to the ways we relate to each other, to our employers, to the public and private institutions and technologies we interact with all the time, and especially the way we work and conceive of work. Ideology is often tacit, baked into our assumptions even in "non-political" areas.
Squelching political discussion won't cause us all to transcend ideology, it'll just make it impossible to discuss or critique a dominant ideology whenever one shows up in someone's unstated assumptions.
This is a bad idea and a little dystopian (the world is upside down, but think happy thoughts, folks! Here's a TED talk!)
Not to mention I didn't really see a huge problem on the site, so in a time when politics and ideology are on everyone's minds for good reason, it seems you've chosen to solve a non-problem with censorship.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#265I 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 think it is reasonable to avoid political subjects that are off topic. Which is difficult, I know, because on-topic for HN is literally 'Anything that good hackers would find interesting.'
Perhaps, for politics, it would be good to try to limit political discussion to things that affect the technology world broadly, and startups specifically?
In the past, topics like those have been discussed here quite productively. Since the U.S. election, I've noticed posts getting flagged that seemed like they were worthy of discussion. I'm not sure if the flagging was ideologically motivated, or if it just happened because of election fatigue.
Even though I don't live in the U.S., I still like to see these discussions happen because the impacts of things that happen tend to have repercussions throughout the tech world.
Maybe limiting comments on political topics to people with 500+ or karma would make reasonable discussion more likely? It's not insanely difficult to react that level in a month or two if you're making thoughtful contributions to the community.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#266I'd rather there be some kind of isolation of political discussion rather than an outright ban for a week.
Maybe just have a permanent/rotating "politics/culture/society" thread for people to share whatever?
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#267I'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…
I don't think "detox" is the point of what they're trying to do, so whether it would work as detox is irrelevant.
I think they're concerned about things like community civility. Instead of the detox metaphor, imagine a community that is riled up about something, and is starting to riot - that is, to fight with itself. The authorities declare a curfew to get all sides off the streets and not fighting with each other for long enough for tempers to cool down.
Unfortunately, that analogy breaks down, because we can all go just outside the city limits (that is, to other sites than HN) and get all riled up again there, and be ready to rumble here after the curfew ends. Still, it strikes me as an experiment worth running for a week.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#268We live in a political world. Any attempt for the HN community to bisect the set of stories that make up our everyday experience will only illustrate the political bias of the aggregate opinion.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#269Earlier 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.
> 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.
Can't help you there. We don't have anything like that degree of finesse in planning.
The way it works is, we do our job and think about it a lot, and don't pay that much attention to other stuff, and when we think something is a good idea and finally get around to it, we do it. About the only thought that went into political timing was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098321.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#270I 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…
Meh. This is for a week. Also, taking it to an absurd, think of /r/aww. Would you support having 50% of the stories on there be links to CNN/Fox/MSNBC? There's a line somewhere, and there are multiple ways to address it: have a separate section or site for political news (call it PHN), have specific days or a quota of political news, to try to keep on topic, allow it, but moderate it so it has something to do with th…
> think of /r/aww. Would you support having 50% of the stories on there be links to CNN/Fox/MSNBC? There's a line somewhere
Yet, that's the necessary result whenever declawing becomes a topic - /r/aww then becomes not just political, but even very tribal.