Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

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

#411

Post by bargl »

ben0x539 wrote: post #364
bargl wrote: post #228

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 worried about this move because I think that I'll somehow miss out on political news, I'm worried because an attempt to detach ourselves from politics (as interpreted here) can only be to the detriment of those on the losing end of politics.

It's an experiment. Experiments are good. They allow us to take risks and see if something good or bad happens.

Banning politics on HN is not what they are proposing, they are proposing a cease fire on HN. That is by no means a bad idea.

If they propose banning news on HN permanently I'll get out my pitchfork too (assuming the experiment goes poorly). But lets put them away for a week, then talk.

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

#412

Post by CN7R »

chrissnell wrote: post #205
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 fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it…

I thought there were rules established: upvote if a post is thought provoking and or informative; downvote if it's factually incorrect or doesn't contribute to the conversation.

The forums on the internet should not be solely to affirm your opinions, but also to challenge them and allow growth as an individual.

The problem isn't with politics -- it's with the people misusing the voting system.

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

#413

Post by gioele »

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 wonder why it is called an experiment at all. In the end this just the mods upholding the part of HN guidelines [1] that I like the most:

    If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The problem with having stories and comments about mundane politics is also that they bury the technically interesting comments and they make stories on the the front page go away quicker. There are plenty of other sites where one can discuss about politics. Only on HN can one discuss, for example, with Animats (John Nagle) about the shortcomings and the history of the Nagle's algorithm [2,3] or getting lessons of public speaking from patio11 [4].

Mundane politic topics interfere with HN being the exception place it is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050645 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544

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

#414

Post by nico_h »

How about you put out this detox for the week after the electoral college has made it's choice? Instead of trying to silence the debate over the most important election in the history of the human race!

This time, the choice was between a candidate that is "politics as usual" and maybe let's slow down a little on the path to human extinction, and a candidate that said "let's annihilate the status quo, and anyway I don't believe in the fundamental equality of people of color or women; and science? pffff whatever." and who's motto is "you didn't vote for me? losers! sad!", whose "policy" is a run towards misery for the Americans that did vote for him (deregulation of ... everything!), definitely a trade war with the main partner of the American economy, or possibly an actual war. And who don't seem to care about the extinction of the human race (let's bring back coal!). And lies about everything.

But yeah, let's silence political debate. Cuz' we're totally not going to be affected by the results! Everything's fine, Tech dismal diversity is not a problem anymore, we'll get protected from all these Chinese copycats that steal our ideas. And hey, we might even get to build this registry for this two minorities, people of a weird religion or people that ensure that all our fresh produce stay so cheap. 2 sets of 2-3 million people, and maybe they overlap! Too bad it's too small for big data, otherwise there would already have been a hackathon! (or did I miss it?).

Did I miss any reason we totally should not talk about this election?

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

#415

Post by shitgoose »

scrollaway wrote: post #194
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…

sigh... after reading this, we probably should ban politics. sad.

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

#417

Post by jowiar »

davegauer wrote: post #386
jowiar wrote: post #198

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. Sayin…

Please correct me if I have completely misread your statement. It sounds as if you believe there are topics that are so important that they must always be discussed in any forum dedicated to any topic?

I'm saying that, in a forum dedicated to the practice of shaping the 21st century world by people who have immense power to shape the world, having a "We will be having none of that politics stuff in here!" policy is dangerous. The tools we build affect people's lives. The world we live in affects how the technology we build will be used, what our tools enable, and the problems we should focus on solving.

Feigning that we can have conversations in isolation from the world at large is a dangerous lack of recognition of our power and our responsibility.

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

#418

Post by pjlegato »

rubicon33 wrote: post #128
nerfhammer wrote: post #93

Politics stories seem to get flagkilled 95% of the time already, and despite the difficulty of discussing it politics affects our daily lives a lot more than the latest release of some javascript framework.

There are different forums for politics though... I think the point Dang is making is that this place isn't primarily (even tangentially) a place for politics.

Evidently a large subset of the user base disagrees.

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

#419

Post by fweespeech »

mattnewton wrote: post #232
chrissnell wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it…

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…

Yeah, it honestly seems like HN should split into two forums effectively.

Tech (No politics, etc.) / Not Tech.

The trying to force it all into a single view seems to be creating some friction.

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

#420

Post by weberc2 »

CN7R wrote: post #412
chrissnell wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it…

I thought there were rules established: upvote if a post is thought provoking and or informative; downvote if it's factually incorrect or doesn't contribute to the conversation. The forums on the internet should not be solely to affirm your opinions, but also to challenge them and allow growth as an individual. The problem isn't with politics -- it's with the people misusing the voting system.

> downvote if it's factually incorrect

I would be surprised if this had much of an impact. I've encountered a lot of people even on HN who truly seem to believe their ideology is somehow 'fact'. Those who are sufficiently self-aware in this regard are probably not abusing the downvote button to begin with.

Post reply on HN