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

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

#341

Post by aroberge »

Thank you very much for attempting this experiment.

Notwithstanding the enormous influence the U.S. has on the world, as someone living in another country, I welcome this very much. In my opinion, HN shines when it comes to discussions of technology, it does an ok job when it comes to discussing scientific topics, but it tends to break out into parochial cliques (with full cultural blinders on) when discussing topics like politics. This is worst (again, imo) when this happens in comments on other topics; when it is the main topic, at least one can easily avoid it.

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

#342

Post by crusso »

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…

should be fired on the spot

Someone should lose their job for coming up with the idea in an attempt to increase the signal to noise ratio of the site?

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

#343

Post by sigmar »

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…

If your feel your perspective gets marginalized, shouldn't you want to be able to convince others of what you believe to be true? Removing all political conversation will perpetuate the status quo.

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

#345

Post by jamez1 »

Is this because the HN preferred candidate lost? HN staff are upset and censor things in response?

I'm disappointed, if you can't handle politics how are you meant to disrupt an industry? Everything about our industry is political.. how are we meant to navigate our world if we can't debate one of the most defining aspects of it.

If you can't stand the heat stay out of the kitchen. Don't censor important relevant discussions because of your emotions! You are failing your community

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

#346

Post by julian_1 »

Excellent decision. You only need to look at what happened on reddit in /r/politics or /r/the_donald. The polarization is poison for creating a shared culture for intelligent discussion of topical issues. To be sure - these debates are important - but it's not like there's a shortage of forums that do cater to this stuff.

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

#347

Post by gibrown »

bargl wrote: post #300
s_q_b wrote: post #255

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…

I empathize with your view, but I very much disagree with you. 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…

"The person who shot the gun did not read HN, I may be wrong but I feel this is a fair assumption"

The systems on which that person read the false information that drove them to shoot the gun were built by people who read HN. That may sound like a lot of levels of indirection, but to ignore politics for a week seems like a symptom of pretending that we are not a part of the problem.

I think the technology running the web needs to be thought of as a part of the fourth estate. We are not separate from the media which we have restructured.

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

#348

Post by scj »

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…

> Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.

Given that cultural and political values and assertions are diverse within relatively small communities, never mind a global audience, I'd suggest this would be very difficult to pull off.

For a moment, consider speaking about a topic that was settled decades or centuries ago in your community, but is still a controversial topic elsewhere. What topic are you thinking of? What other communit(y/ies) were you thinking of? What issues and communities do you think other people would offer? I bet there would be a lot of different perspectives on these questions, which is the reason political discussion should be limited.

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

#349

Post by dang »

minimuffins wrote: post #264

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.

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

#350

Post by thembones »

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…

"Why does calloc exist?" That's the title of one of the articles linked on the front page right now. I would challenge anyone to show us where the NYT, Economist, Drudge, Huffington Post, etc have anything like this. They don't. Why not? Because it's not what people come there to read about. I would argue this is "Hacker News". If you want politics, what's wrong with the 10k other sites dedicated to these topics? To note, all of the aforementioned have tech sections discussing topics like the ones you mentioned here, but none of them have anything like Hacker News does on a daily basis. This isn't censorship anymore than Cosmopolitan magazine not covering Nascar very often (if at all). Know your audience.
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