651–660 of 1001 posts
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. 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…
Well, this certainly trumps anything that Reddit is trying to do with out-right bans. They were like "Oh! BAM" A ban on /r/this and that. This election cycle felt like I was taking a lot of mesclin, ton of it too... Anyway, I like the non-political week. Anyway... that's just my two pence...
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…
Hi dang. About 45m ago, I added a comment [1] in the Amazon GO mega-thread that mentions the concept of religion. Is this comment acceptable per new policy? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108455 (Aside: I believe that this detox experiment is treading on dangerous ground, that it will be a struggle to contain the amount of censorship that will happen as a result of encouraging people to flag each other in…
I'm not a mod, but I wouldn't flag your comment. Mentioning faith-based alternatives for human interaction may not be 100% on-topic, but it isn't political or divisive. Now, if you had recommended one faith/sect over others for a superior experience of human interaction, then maybe you'd have a problem.
The boundaries of political discourse are like art or porn. You know it when you see it but one person's+ definition is different to another.
+ NB I used the word "person" in this sentence rather than "man" - some would therefore say that my comment has a political slant because it is attempting to use gender neutral words - I would say it isn't because I always try to use gender neutral words...
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> 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 or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion. Are there any online communities where their political opinions match more with yours? Why don't you hang out there instead? I realize that's reinforcing an echo chamber, but…
I don't want to hang out in an echo chamber. I enjoy the diversity of opinions that I find among my coworkers and social media friends. However, neither my workplace nor Facebook feature the "downvote". Being downvoted for expressing an unpopular opinion here is the equivalent of being shoved out of a circle of friends. It doesn't feel good and I don't come here to feel like crap. I don't think I'm all that different…
At other times... well, as I once posted, "One thing I've learned around HN is that sometimes you have to wear your downvotes with pride."
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It's weird to talk about the technical aspects of the Zeppelin if you're not allowed to mention the swastika painted on the tail.
At some point it moves from politics to history. Using facts to discuss the past is not the same as projecting what might happen in the future, or why something in the near past happened, when we don't have nearly enough data to make definitive statements on it. This lack of factual data leads to opinion holding sway, and that leads to inflammatory arguments. Let's not pretend that we can talk about the current polit…
Aside from news and politics itself, I can hardly think of anything more political than history. People with different nationalities and sometimes party affiliations usually have wildly different perception of historic facts. Whether the Holocaust happened or not is an obvious and well-publicized one (I believe it did, for the record), but there's an uncountable amount of subtler and/or less famous differences in how humans perceive history.
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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…
> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site When people talk about "the average HN reader", or the "prevailing slant", I'm always curious what they mean. For me, it's always felt more like a back-and-forth struggle between radical liberals and hardline libertarians. That's always been the general nature of pretty much every tech-oriented forum historically (e.g. HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, etc)…
Personally, I tend towards liberal politics. I interperent this statement as "Liberal politics dominates HN, and conservative politics is a minority that gets downvoted"
Even assuming that's accurate, I tend to find more conservative viewpoints on this forum, compared to other forums I browse, and I find those conservative viewpoints better argued, and more likely to affect my view.
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Hacker News is an unfair place for people to speak up about about the lack of racial and gender diversity in tech. I have been downvoted for comments where I felt like I was making uncontroversial critiques of the status quo. I have seen HN users say that black neighborhoods need more policing than other neighborhoods. It's not an easy place to be non-white or non-male. I believe banning politics is a bad idea even f…
I don't understand how your conclusion follows from the rest. The fact that your "uncontroversial critiques of the status quo" get down voted is evidence that we can't have unbiased and productive political discussions on HN.
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.…