291–300 of 1001 posts
Btw, if there are any Trump supporters on HN, it would be interesting to hear their views. Likely, due to how the community works they can't be heard due to downvoting and/or flagging which I think is a shame. I prefer more debate over less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rub is, a lot of difficult conversations lead to what are effectively political answers. Take the amazon go which is on the front page right now. We need to be able to have a conversation about job displacing technologies, and hacker news has been a good venue for smart, civilized discussion on the topic. I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but eliminating discussions outright because they might make pe…
Is political discourse in HN comment threads ever actually "effective", though? What actually results from having those discussions here that couldn't be accomplished just as easily in a forum where it's explicitly on-topic, e.g. /r/politics or similar? It's not as though policymakers or voters are looking to the HN comments section for guidance.
So what does good, relevant, political discussion on HN look like? What does bad (but relevant) political discussion look like? Then update the guidelines accordingly. Maybe the guidelines could even have examples.
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 feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.
There is no neutral option around this kind of politics and I'll be sad to see HN throw marginalized people under the bus to ensure the comfort of the privileged.
To some people, their livelihood and survival are on line based on what our politicians do.
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…
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
That's straightforward, and understandable.
Personally, though, I would want to measure that in some way. We all tend to notice harsh comments or politicized accounts when they are in opposition to our world view. Ones that we agree with might fly under the radar.
I'm seeing a lot of people say this is a bad idea. I completely disagree. TL;DR; If HN is your only news source, you have bigger issues than this experiment, go subscribe to another source of political news. Hacker news is a news aggregation medium for "Hacker News." The purpose of this site is to get your fix of tech news that you can't get other places. It isn't burying your head in the sand to ONLY have "Hacker" n…
I'm not sure yet whether I think this is a good or bad idea, though this I'll say: HN is not just a news aggregation medium. If in the beginning it were, it is no longer. It is now much more defined by the people on here. Like reddit, the story pages give the majority of screen real estate to comments. It's not a stretch to say people on here drop by, to a greater extent, for the discussions, ideas, and tips - and to a lesser extent, to be exposed to a story or link that they might not have eventually found elsewhere.
* Peter Thiel's support of Trump. * Mass Surveillance Laws. * Net Neutrality.
Are we going to simply avoid any and all potentially controversial subjects?
I live in Northwest Washington, D.C. I am a technologist, a government contractor, and an HN member for many years under various accounts since 2008. I respectfully disagree. Yesterday someone motivated by the "Pizzagate" story, spread and enabled by the social media systems we designed , fired multiple shots from a semi-automatic weapon into a crowded restaurant near my home. My partner and I passed the crime scene…
1) It's an experiment, there should never be any disagreement with an experiment unless the experiment itself can cause harm to someone/something. The results of this experiment should be evaluated closely, and if they make new guidelines for HN I'm fully onboard. But it's an experiment.
2) The person who shot the gun did not read HN, I may be wrong but I feel this is a fair assumption. I'm not saying no one here could shoot a gun in public, but they wouldn't come here as anything but a complete troll and shoot a gun based on some crap story like that. If I'm wrong in this then the experiment is terrible and stop it now. But I very much doubt it.
3) The issue is that news in general has degraded. This degradation of journalism has led to many of the issues we experience today. If experimenting on HN can lead to some sort of anecdotal evidence that Politics = bad for communities I'm all for it. I believe part of the issue is pointed to in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 24 Hours news is the issue. 24 Hours politics is the issue. Taking a purge is a great idea.
4) HN should not be where you get your news about politics.