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

751–760 of 1001 posts

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

#751

Post by allemagne »

Kaedon wrote: post #507
thembones wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

An audience can have more than one interest. For example, tech sections in newspapers are roughly analogous to political stories on HN.

I agree with the week detox but I also agree that it probably shouldn't be permanent.

The equivalent analogy might be that the HN magazine has published too many politically slanted stories in recent issues and worries about losing sight of their larger editorial goals.

It's too easy and too cheap to make another politically provocative cover story. It might make sense to totally stop writing political stories altogether for a bit to break the habit.

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

#752

Post by [deleted] »

chrissnell wrote: post #567
tripzilch wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone whose views don't align with a good chunk of HN readers (or don't align, period), I've grown to love reading about differing ideas through the eyes of others computing/tech enthusiasts. There's common ground to start from and most importantly, even if it turns out to be a viewpoint that deeply goes against my values I can still respect this fellow human because of their tech expertise. I have to admit, it…

> Come on what does that even mean? > People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio. Downvoted comments are subject to being greyed out here, which is a stigma. Yes, it happens. The downvote in a political story has such a different meaning than downvotes in other stories. I feel like people use…

[deleted]

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

#753

Post by aswanson »

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…

There as about 18 billion other places on the internet for useless political arguments. HN was much more informative and intellectually stimulating when the immune system response to even hints of political bickering was brutal and swift.

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

#755

Post by macrael »

_qc3o wrote: post #524
idlewords wrote: post #380

This 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…

Talk is cheap and political discussion is especially cheap. How do you propose to lead constructive discussions around these matters that will lead to actionable items for cleaning up the mess? From what I have seen I don't think HN in its current form is the right forum for those discussions. Even scanning this sub-thread prompted by your comment I'm already starting to see that the discussion seems to be devolving.…

idlewords recently organized a meetup to discuss exactly those questions: https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2016/11/28/meeting_notes.ht...

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

#756

Post by throwaway098345 »

dang wrote: post #725
jdp23 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps grounding your moderation policies around concepts you know are undefined and inseparable isn't the best basis for moderating the site. As for how people see your actions: labeling it as "projecting" might make you feel better, but probably gets in the way of you understanding what they're saying. In today's environment, you can't simultaneously make the site an welcoming place for people who are anti-Muslim,…

It's the best basis for moderating the site because the alternative is impossible. You're right, though, that I shouldn't use the word 'project' like that.

It's not impossible to say "this is a technology site, here we discuss technology" which would make it much less arbitrary which things are politics and not. You might not want to do that, but it's certainly not impossible as an alternative. "Technology only week" is probably even an easier sell for an experiment.

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

#757

Post by dkarapetyan »

macrael wrote: post #755
_qc3o wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk is cheap and political discussion is especially cheap. How do you propose to lead constructive discussions around these matters that will lead to actionable items for cleaning up the mess? From what I have seen I don't think HN in its current form is the right forum for those discussions. Even scanning this sub-thread prompted by your comment I'm already starting to see that the discussion seems to be devolving.…

idlewords recently organized a meetup to discuss exactly those questions: https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2016/11/28/meeting_notes.ht...

This is great. More of this and less mud slinging on HN might actually move the needle.

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

#758

Post by delegate »

All censorship is done with good intentions. Things are censored because they are somehow against a certain set of values or they threaten the well-being of the establishment.

So this move is on thin ice.

But I also think that politics and politicians in particular are getting a lot more media exposure than they deserve or need.

Politicians are the new rock stars... but they shouldn't be. They should be spending time working on actual societal problems - the things they've been elected for.

All the rest of us, too, should give them a lot less attention and focus our attention on issues rather than people.

Political affiliation is a very subjective thing, similar to tastes in music or art or sex. There's no perfect solution to all the problems we're facing and that's why we disagree on things.

So often political discussion is a futile attempt to convince the other side that the worst (their point of view) is the best (our point of view). Which is a waste of energy and time and should be avoided.

Considering all of these factors, with a shade of worry I think this is the right thing to do.

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

#759

Post by rtpg »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #278
mattnewton wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you think talking about SOPA on HN makes sense? Talking about the legality/morality of NSA snooping?

What about Uber's woker policies? Facebook censorship/curation? Data privacy?

Hiring and firing policies in tech companies?

How to manage rogue IoT devices? ICANN domain policy?

This is just a sample of topics that feel pretty "Hacker News". They're all political (or at least have strong political angles), and they're all pretty popular topics of conversation here.

Now I've felt the moderation here has worked in good faith, and is likely trying to reduce flamewars here. But I'm a bit worried that the things that get marked political will mainly be around discrimination issues.

And considering the amount of SV "leadership"(scare quotes but you get the idea) on Hacker News, this is a _very_ effective forum to talk about the difficulties of certain people to get work, get funding. Talking about it here can jumpstart more ways of tackling these issues, and thinking about what the community as a whole wants to do

Post reply on HN