"Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they're like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don't mix."
This is so misguided and absurd. What is the definition of politics here? Trump stories? Or are fake news stories also political? Alot of the HN community came to value intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation from political ends
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 see it more as "let's state that this isn't the appropriate forum for a political discussion for a week", as opposed to head-in-sand.
I'm okay with it, but would've preferred it in the weeks leading up to the election - I've got plenty of places for political news and discussion; that's not why I come here.
> 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…
They have made so that an article that cultivates discussion is actually penalized, softly silencing any topics worthy of discussion here. Now they outright ban things. Might as well just disable comment functionality if they don't like people opinions and ideas that much.
For the most part, the "they" you refer to is the community at large. By far the most flagging and down voting is community members, not the mods. And it's not "silencing topics worthy of discussion", its "avoiding topics that have empirically generated mostly uncivil, non-constructive flamewars". I've made comments expressing this distinction a number of times in response to comments such as yours (silencing/censoring worth discussion; why did this get flagged; this particular political view is always killed), and they've been consistently some of my most-up-voted comments. That indicates to me that this is an idea that has relatively strong support from the community as a whole.
Imagine HN banning crypto-related discussion for a week after the Snowden revelations, because it was too hard to deal with.
Well, Paul actually did change the ranking algorithm to penalize anything Snowden or NSA-related. He also adjusted the ranking to penalize discussions of TSA policies which directly affect entrepreneurs who have to travel in and to the US. And the discussions at the time were much the same as now - people (including me) saying "hey wait a second these are very much on topic" and others saying "but it makes us uncomfo…
I support political discussions, but I also support these weightings. Without them the site would've talked of nothing else. It was a huge amount of stories which all got massive amount of upvotes.
I think we should aim for reasonable ratios. Maybe we should have an algorithm that categorized stories and tried to create a certain ratio of tech:politics:curiosities:startups, for example?
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.
To be blunt, /r/politics is full of groupthink and represses alternative opinions. HN is much better in that regard. Also, the fact that everyone here is united by a smaller set of common interests makes the discussion more relevant to me. I enjoy reading political discussions here and often find them though provoking. I don't on Reddit.
I don't know why we couldn't have voted on this. Whether it's a good idea or not, trying to impose something so broad on a community of hackers is an exercise in masochism.
I agree with everyone who has said that we're capable of making up our own minds about what to talk about. I don't think political discussions were ever a problem
I get what you are doing - HN has been in eternal September mode for a while now. I'm not sure it will work but I hope it does I don't want to have to find a new message board.
My question is what counts as political? HN has been an important place for me to get news about censorship, surveillance and copyright issues that are just not covered by my country's press (UK). I would be sad to lose this news source.
The 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" area…
Of course it's delusional. The concepts can't be defined to begin with, nor can they be separated in any consistent way. And still we have to moderate this site. > the world is upside down, but think happy thoughts, folks! Here's a TED talk! It's sort of a peeve of mine that people project this onto us because I can't say how I really feel about it without breaking our own rules.
> people project this into us because I can't say how I really feel about it without breaking our own rules.
Perhaps people aren't projecting so much as seeing your rules as a reflection of your beliefs, which you now say they are not.