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Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#812I'm done. If I could delete my account I would.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#813This is a terrible decision. The tech industry has built powerful tools of social control, and runs vast databases of private data on pretty much everyone in the country. We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry. We need to be talking about the political implication…
Not to mention that "can we please stop with all the politics" is not political neutrality , it's a position that supports the status quo. Silence assists certain forms of repression.
How can you come to such a conclusion?
"Can we stop with the politics" doesn't take away your right to protest or discuss politics _elsewhere_. It just means someone is tired hearing the same arguments rehashed over and over on HN.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#814I think I'll just take a break from HN for one week instead.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#815I see all the re-assurances about this being "only for one week", but what's the point of a one-week experiment if you're not at least remotely considering making it long-term?
You even say yourself that "we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes" and I assume you're hoping the experiment maybe helps you form that opinion?
While I understand the intent behind this decision I don't see it accomplishing anything worthwhile. It may reduce flamewars temporarily, but people get flamey on tech topics too.
It's a hell of a privilege to think that technology and business discussion can be separated from political discussion. Politics will constantly intersect with technology and business.
You're using a battering ram to hammer a nail.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#816Many of the top-level comments here are against this move. I, on the other hand, would like to express my strong support for this move. Hacker News has never been an anything-goes site. Tight moderation, considerate rules, and low tolerance for bullshit have made this a great site to talk about interesting technical topics and ideas. Remember that we all abide by the rules of the site, and that this isn't a magic fre…
I definitely support having a detox.
In the longer run, I think it is good to have some politics on the site. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum and has a huge amount of intersection with politics. In the past, it has been possible to have rational and nuanced conversations about political issues on HN.
In the recent election cycle, that's been destroyed. It seems to have emboldened people to derail threads with political mud-slinging and the crazies have come out of the woodwork.
To put it simply, I never thought HN would be the place where I was first told to leave the country or get killed. The fact that it was (and not Reddit) honestly depresses me, and I hope that a detox period will force the worst politics out of the forum.
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That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.
If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a pretty well-constructed argument, despite the unnecessary invective at the end. It took me a while to figure out how to rebut it. (Therefore I upvoted you to counter expected downvotes.) But I think it goes like this: there's a difference between not caring about something for a week and not talking about it. If, as you assume, for most of HN politics is "things that affect other people", then the primary o…
What you may not be taking into account, though, is that for some of us, "we're not going to allow 'politics' for a week" is being read in context with the years of previous moderation decisions and community signaling about who and what it cares about. And in that light, "we're not going to allow 'politics' for a week" is pretty obviously a decision that upholds the really toxic status quo of HN. (And that's leaving…
Hi adrienne :)
This is a fair point and valid data point for how people view it.
Only thing I'd say is, to me the reasoning seems related to a sentiment that's I've seen in a lot of places, that after all the nastiness that's built up through the course of the (very long as usual) US election cycle, it's time for everyone to cool off a bit. So my instinct isn't to tie it that much to anything about HN in particular. Now of course, the same point applies outside of HN - it gets a lot harder to treat Trump as a topic you can just stop talking about when you're more likely to be directly and immediately impacted. And then there's the idea that we shouldn't normalize him by treating him like a normal candidate where, after the election, even if your ideas lost, at least you know there's a modicum of competence and civic-mindedness at the helm… Still, despite all that, despite the fact that I attended a protest myself (just one so far), for me some of the sentiment of wanting to cool off still rings valid. Maybe it shouldn't - but then it's not like we can do anything to change the election result; we're all in this for the long haul…
There's also the fact that "politics" as described by dang covers a lot more than US electoral politics. But the reason for wanting to avoid it is still the influence of US electoral politics on those conversations.
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#818I 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'd suggest that the point of avoiding political discussion is not just because it's unpleasant or divisive. In my eyes, the problem is that politics has so much implicit back-end that it cannot be usefully discussed on an internet forum. In the several paragraphs (at most) that we write to another, we convey so little while disagreeing on so much. Besides that, there's the issue that we spend much of political disco…
This is one of the best comments I've read on HN recently. Thank you!
Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#819Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 productivel…
Limiting to "people with 500+ or karma" doesn't make for a reasonable discussion unless you like an echo chamber with 100% pure San Francisco values.
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Re: Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week
#820Otherwise known as Ideological Purity Week, The Week of the Great Politics Purge, Cultural Reeducation Week and Peace Week. A week for the Districts to come together and pay tribute to the Capitol!