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I've seen political stories flagged pretty quickly during normal HN usage, but rarely comment threads.
replies(2):
For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.
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.
Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.
Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.
A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.
Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.
Who is SamA?
It has to do with us noticing an uptick in two undesirable things: harsh ideological comments, and accounts that use HN primarily for political battle.
You can see one example of how the idea developed here:
It'll be interesting to see where this line falls on tech politics stories this week. Is a post about like... the FCC transition team in or out this week? It's definitely political, but also very tech.
Assuming bad faith without evidence is a big part of the issue here.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Examples would be helpful as well...
So I stopped watching the news -- both online and on TV -- since Nov 9th. It's been an incredible month for me since then.
I've made significant progress on my languishing side-projects ( a Show HN coming soon in Jan 2017!!!) and am generally less stressed and more mindful and happy.
I made a conscious effort to stop watching news and ride out the next 8 years (I expect Trump, like Dubya, will get Re-elected in 2020). I still need my "tech" fix, and visit only HN since I gave up the news. Yet I found a few Trump stories on HN recently, so this is a great move.
Thanks mods!
I would hope this purge would not include stories related to privacy legislation, as I think the topic is very relevant to the community.
Personally, I've found it hard to escape US politics on many of the sites I frequent. The comments/discussion often end up relating the topic to the last US election in some manner - and an unproductive conversation follows.
Just my experience, but again - love the idea of running an experiment here.
EDIT: @dang in another comment: Let me clarify. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents.
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 applies to political dissidents?
Still, I have always found HN moderation to be reasonable, and I expect this to be the same. This is also something I think is desperately needed, we could all use a cooling off period, and it'll be nice not to be bombarded with US politics from yet another angle.
Hoping for the best, thanks dang + crew!
Politics has caused me to start using new software so I can filter Twitter, change my subreddits, and aggressively unfollow people on Facebook (even family at this point).
And still I can't avoid it... though perhaps for the best, since social media by-and-large is just a distraction from real work and real life. I'm far better off coding, reading books, and playing go than reading garbage political news nd opinions from shrill internet denizens.
Our political climate is affecting all of us in many ways, and we need to process what's happening. We need to do that carefully and constructively. I want to know the subtle political aspects of many of the stories I read on HN.
That said, I'll play along for the week. I hope what comes out of this is a push to encourage critical thinking about the political aspects of important stories, not to push political conversation off of HN entirely.
Because I haven't lately noticed much of the phenomenon you're talking about. And in the first 3 pages I just skimmed over, I didn't see anything that was so political as to be flamewar fodder.
Are you sure you're not trying to solve a problem that your average user doesn't even have?
It is possible to talk about these topics from an academic perspective and it feels like banning it for a week is equivalent to putting your head in the sand and ignoring it because its too hard to have a conversation about it. This is exactly the behavior I was motivated to try and change in myself (stick to tech only, ignore other issues).
Yes, its very difficult to talk about some politics in thoughtful ways but I would hope a community like HN has the people needed to try and address some of the issues coming up. Be it technical (detecting fake news, biases, etc) or intellectual commentary.
For example, as of writing, the #3 post is " Silicon Valley’s Culture, Not Its Companies, Dominates in China (nytimes.com)". I would classify this as political, but others might not.
--EDIT-- I would also classify this front page post as (internally) political: "Dear JavaScript (medium.com)"
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. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents. Those stories aren't going to be evicted from HN or anything like that. For this week, though, let's err on the side of flagging because it will make the experiment more interesting.
Because a very large share of HN stories and comments have political content in the dictionary definition (it's hard to address the societal impact of anything even in a descriptive way, much less to discuss views of the merits of such impacts, without such content.)
I'm split on this: On one hand, firm moderation and keeping things on-topic makes for a good forum for discussion. On the other, this could easily be used by YC as a tool to say, silence criticism of YC for not disavowing Peter Thiel. Either way, there need to be clearer guidelines around what's allowed and what's not.
My opinion is that this place is great for two reasons: It's narrow focus on one topic, and a userbase that consists of experts in that one topic. When Hacker News strays from it's area of expertise I feel that Gell-Mann Amnesia is apparent and the quality of discussion much lower. Again not just for the politics but for other random news as well.
A challenge that's come up around lots of controversies is the way that one side might think something is "political", while another side thinks it's not!
You've pointed out some good examples above, and while you can talk about those things without any politics, it's a very shallow-feeling conversation, IMO.
Still, it'll be interesting to see how this week goes.
The detox/immune-system metaphor seems really suspect in other words. You could just as easily argue that there is a "virus" (the changing political realities, new realities dawning on us), and that ignoring the "virus" or "symptoms" will make the adjustment that much more traumatic, the later we accept that it's happening. Or to switch the connotation, perhaps instead of a "virus", look at it as a "disruptive innovation" - where if we act as an entrenched incumbent, we will be disrupted as our competitors rewrite the rules, and we will be too far behind to pivot successfully.
Letting the community process the new inputs vigorously might seem more traumatic in the short term but it could also make us stronger overall.
This just seems counter to the principles that I appreciate at HN.
The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.
Certain types of political discussion most certainly can be toxic. I'd support any effort to keep HN free of that. I'd also respect a choice to keep HN completely free of politics if you chose to go in that direction, though I'd rather see a more positive attempt to get the HN community more engaged with the serious political issues of our time.
Also, who decides what's political. I'm sick of hearing about socialist ideology, and I consider it politics, but I'm guessing that's not what you mean...
And as per the US-centrism aspect, personally, I can't see how muting political debate will shift the average discussion away from US-centric politics, in general..
You're right that HN should be a place for intellectual curiosity and substantive comments. But here's what I've seen in the past year:
* Flagrantly allow anti-prop-8 posts and submissions to assist in the smearing of Brendan Eich.
* Flagrantly allow pro-clinton posts and link submissions to thrive on HN.
* Never step-in to stop downvoting brigades on pro-conservative/libertarian/tea party posts.
* After unpopular (with silicon valley) president is elected, ban political conversations on the site.
I won't call you biased, because you've been a damn good mod, but this is probably your worst decision, because it looks like sour-grapes-in-retrospect.
Perhaps you're doing it because the pro-clinton camp is actually becoming too toxic to tolerate. Perhaps you're doing it to avoid the 4chan brigade from promoting Trump. Either way, this is a site full of people skilled at reading between the lines, and, correct or not, this action doesn't look like a way of promoting reasonable discussion.
Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means.
Story where a researcher makes incremental progress towards a quantum computer? Let's not talk about how long it will be until the NSA can break all crypto.
It's definitely a grey area, but I do there there are tiers of political talk. The best discussions have reactions to new information, not re-hashed and pre-established opinions.
I am totally cool with this experiment. It is hard enough to foster good discussion online even without politics.
Best.
One of the things I've found most impressive about HN, in fact, is the fashion in which people disposed across the full width of the US political spectrum seem able here to discuss potentially divisive subjects in a civil and perhaps even constructive fashion - I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say that comments here have given me pause for thought, and on occasion to significantly reconsider opinions that I've held - not all of which I still do. This isn't to say that I'm politically progressive or at all likely to become so, but I have found uniquely valuable some of the political discussion which has occurred on HN, and the degree of dispassionate consideration and tenor of general civility I've seen in such discussions here are unique in my experience.
The point I raise isn't that I think the "political detox week" is a bad idea. (Or a good one - time will tell.) But I do think it would be a shame if political discussion were banned or severely curtailed on HN in future. Such a decision seems to me as though it could only be a deliberate effort to invoke the "echo chamber" effect which has redounded to such cost throughout US politics in recent years and especially in recent months. That's something I've seen happening to a broad extent on both ends of the political spectrum lately, and especially since the election. No one on either side seems willing to hear anything from anyone on the other - except here, and I think there's value in that.
Perhaps I'm alone, or nearly so, in this opinion. But perhaps I'm not, too. And even if I am, it still seems worth throwing out there. In an increasingly polarized political environment (and I say this as a veteran of the 2000 election and all that followed it!), HN seems as close as anything I've participated in, seen, or heard of, to a demilitarized zone where parties on both sides can meet and interact in something approaching a constructive fashion. I realize that's not HN's intended purpose, and I don't blame the mods here if they decide that's not what they want to run. But I do think it's something that'd be a shame to lose.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I think this calls for more moderation so users that can speak civilly and intellectually about politics can do so, not banning speaking of politics entirely. "Conflict activat[ing] the primitive brain" is rather infantilizing, gaslighting, and not true.
You specifically asked "What's the ulterior motive here?" which implies you think there is an ulterior motive. An ulterior motive would be acting in bad faith, since it would by definition be different than the expressed motive, since the reasoning was clearly expressed above.
Presentation matters. Whether you meant it to be or not, your statement is somewhat inflammatory, for the reasons I just outlined. In my opinion, it's also a very good reason why the temporary ban is a good idea.
There are other sites to talk about politics on. Personally, I'm happy to come to HN to learn new things.
Letting the community process the new inputs vigorously might seem more traumatic in the short term but it could also make us stronger overall.
An extremely active 3000-day HN user with excellent technical contributions was recently banned due to the way they chose to express themselves regarding a political story. This made the community weaker, even if it was a necessary ban.
Being aware of the government stepping in our gardens is important, and if the side effect is sometimes we get mad at eachother, well, at least we're aware.
Well, victory gardens were a thing not very long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
Technology and politics are intimately linked, even if it's not always obvious. Technology's impact on politics is only going to grow in my opinion so I think the "political" discussions - as they relate to technology - are vital for the community at large.
If we as a community are going to be "disrupters" whether intentionally or not, we need to understand and discuss the social and political landscape and impacts of our work better, so that we can implement our technology in a way that doesn't spurn backlash from the communities and thus their political leaders.
Talk about political scandals and the like don't do service to this community, so I think those topics should be sequestered. However discussions on encryption, automation etc... are perfect topics for this community in my opinion.
>Our values are fragile
No, they aren't. If your values can't handle a basic criticism then your values are terrible. HN shouldn't be creating 'safe spaces' for the status quo or the new administration. I'd rather get heckled at Hamilton than live in a society where we worry about hurting each other's values, feelings, sense of entitlements, etc. Open discourse is always the superior solution.
If harm is being done, challenge it on a one by one basis. I see some very rude tones, borderline namecalling here, and other issues that get ignored by the mods. Encourage a polite discourse, don't eliminate it. I'd also be less liberal with posting rights. New accounts shouldn't be able to post on day one. A lot of these political firestorms are via 'green' accounts who may or may not be paid shills coming here and performing deflection and reading off bulletpoints or playing up typical 'whataboutisms'. Or regulars who post the same axe grinding over and over. Sadly, this goes against the religion of 'growth hacking' where conversations and new signups are the only metric that matters.
Many of those people now have more than 500 karma, by appealing to the majority opinion, so they're allowed to downvote all they want, skewing the demographics of the site. If you've been here a while, you probably noticed the shift in discourse and submission quality.
It happens with all "Nerd News" sites; they're great at the begining, then the people that shouldn't be here start coming, and the signal-to-noise ratio gets closer to 1:1.
They were banned because of what they chose to write, it wasn't just because of a political discussion.
Anything political or critical of YC already gets disappeared from this site quite quickly. I had assumed that this policy (which always seemed misguided to me) was already in effect.
I think the historical moment we find ourselves in is a time to make ourselves more uncomfortable rather than retreat and pretend that the only things that matter are software and how we might make more money on the internet.
Politics is about coming together to find common solutions to problems and make sure that no one gets left behind. Isn't it the job of a responsible community (even a VC sponsored one dedicated to making money with tech as HN is) to lean in when things start to feel hard rather than tune out and ignore our responsibilities as citizens and fellow humans?
Or Net Neutrality. Or research/tech about Climate Change.
It seems like this could easily be abused by partisans who want to deflect the issues. Requests to have mods delete climate change articles about a hot startup doing solar power seems to empower climate deniers. Requests to have mods delete Trump's anti-net neutrality appointments seems to empower Trump supporters.
There are a ton of other sites where you can follow and debate politics all you want.
I'm starting to stick my nose into local politics here in Bend, Oregon, but there's no reason I need to talk about it on HN. I'm ok with compartmentalizing things: HN for tech/startups/'interesting things', and other sites for other things. I love bike racing, too, and feel that it's the best sport in the world, but I see no need to introduce bike racing articles here.
I mean, you clearly don't think that we have "gotten by"; generally a moratorium on a topic isn't required unless something is going wrong.
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 sectors), employment legislation, patent laws, and many other topics are likely of interest to a large number of HN readers and contributors.
Personally, I don't come to HN looking for political discussion/commentary but I also don't mind seeing it when it's appropriate.
This seems like a dramatically misguided attempt to rectify conversational tone.
You can't de-program or disregard people's politics, it's shot throughout everything. Politics frame the foundational approach to recommending policy, how we make decisions and the stories and topics we care about.
It's important to find common ground and ways to discuss topics in spite of politics, not deny the fact that politics pervades everything.
> but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain.
Wait, is the entire premise behind this the idea that political differences can't be discussed in a respectful manner? History would disagree with you on this statement. People are capable of having political discussion without having a flame war, it happens all the time. You're taking the actions of a minority group and saying that because a few people are disrespectful we all have to bury our heads in the sand and avoid politics completely.
This is ridiculous.
This is one of those unintended consequences that gobsmack me any time we try out some new idea here. I'm sure anyone who deals with large internet communities has the same experience. The funny thing is that it's always obvious that it was bound to come up, in retrospect—just never beforehand. It's like the unveiling of the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel: hidden in plain view every time.
I don't know if I can respond in a way that satisfies you, but let me try. First, Clinton and Trump stories are equally penalized on HN. Second, it always seems like HN is biased against whatever views you personally hold, not because it is, but because the community is divided and we're biased to notice the things we dislike, and that offend us, more than the ones that don't. Your use of the word "flagrantly" is an instance of this. Why do the things you listed seem flagrant while others do not? Because they're mirroring your own preferences. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13083111 and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... for more on this if you want.)
I guarantee you that the people who feel oppositely to you about X, Y, Z issues feel like their side is flagrantly the underdog in the same fights. This is one of the dynamics behind why political fights are so toxic to begin with.
> Either way, this is a site full of people skilled at reading between the lines
Read my lines, please! Just don't imagine lines, then imagine subtexts between them, and then read the imaginary subtext. Instead, ask. We're happy to explain what's going on—what's actually, really going on, as best we understand it.
I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea. Sure, in a week we can get back into the grim reality, the tech-noir crapsack future, but perhaps for one week we can focus on a positive future and its soaring aspirations. Go Dang!
banning all political topics just because current state of affairs upsets someone is ridiculous. country is split in the middle, so what, when liberals win we will ban political topics again just because now the other side feels offended? how about you stop feeling offended and start listening to each other?
Am I to read that as "No Stories or Comments about Trump"? Maybe that wasn't the intention, but the specific hot buttons seem curiously chosen.
Well, talking about those issues is just moral posturing without <power>, and politics is the negotiation of power.
These are all political issues. If you care about your fellow person, you already have the seeds of a <political> motivation. You want to change the way the world works -- but that takes power, power like the AMA or AARP has.
People who duck their heads in the sand and scorn politics and power as something dirty are counterproductive to this highly disorganized technical community with almost zero union potential.
Once some ideas are too 'dangerous' or too contentions to be discussed, there is little hope of ever moving forward in solving the very real problems we have in this world.
Characterizing values as fragile things which cannot withstand the rigors of robust debate is also a troubling viewpoint.
edit: typo.
I've also been actively working on engaging constructively in difficult, contentious conversation. HN is one forum. If politics is on area that's generally avoided here for the benefit of quality discussion on other topics, there are other forums where one can. And perhaps after a detox week (or two?), constructive political might work on HN. I certainly hope so, but am also aware of how difficult that can be in person, and even more so online.
I assume putting the "flag" button one click away is to prevent people using it as a down vote when arguing, but it definitely means that I never flag comments, only stories. And comments are the place where "politicalness" really has the damaging effects.
I wonder if there might be either an opt-in to keep it zero clicks away, or maybe over a certain amount of karma it is visible, or some other compromise so that proper comment flagging is more widespread.
I don't think politics have overtaken the site or even become a significant part of it, so I wonder why politics-averse individuals cant just avoid political threads?
Edit: class, too.
Perhaps I should make explicit what seems obvious (to me) and say no, this doesn't have to do specifically with Trump. This whole year has been a political game-changer—think of Brexit before it. Perhaps our societies are becoming increasingly polarized, I don't know, but lots of things are going on in the outside world and Trump is just one of them, though of course a major one.
I wonder if developments on other online forums might be characterizing how this one seems to some users, but the truth is pretty mundane: I don't know about those other online forums because I don't have time to look at them. What we're talking about here is purely HN-grown.
I would personally like it best if the political news just lessened overall, rather than stopping entirely for a week, but what can you do. Can't just tell people "actually, the political thermometer is at 25°C, gotta let it cool down to 21°C."
Say if this were announced the day before the election, regardless of the outcome, with a hold period of say a month.
Now that is a "unicorn" in the sense of a mythical beast! You can dig into usenet archives from the 80ies, and find people debating a lot of the same stuff they do today. People mostly do not change their minds about things.
> We become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones.
HN is designed to be a tribe. The HN tribe and the Silicon Valley ethos it espouses are by their nature very political, having profound effects on the direction of our economy, our society, and our world. By censoring challenges to this ethos, you are reinforcing the tribal boundaries, and members of the tribe continue on without the constant challenge and testing that is the very nature of truth finding and even science.
This Tell HN is itself a political act.
No matter who you favor right now, political discussion helps nobody. The outgoing President can't do anything much, and the incoming President can't do anything much either. Nothing you read in the next two months is realistically going to lead to you having a meaningful impact on anything, more than likely.
These days it feels rarer to see the same kind of inflammatory articles gain traction. The same kind of discussion is there but the flaming feels less rampant than it once was. With passions cooled I feel that the community is slowly returning to normal. Though it's likely with such a contentious president, especially to the de facto SV culture, it's not going to be smooth waters.
More brush fires might just be the new normal for now. I think that controlling the burning in this case is more advantageous to the community than trying to stamp it out entirely. Giving the silent treatment to unpopular views is partially how we ended up where we are.
I'm always up for a short term experiment though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb
I guess it is also necessary to turn on showdead in the settings.
I don't feel this need to be an explicit policy. I mean it gets into the entire "what is politics debate."
Hackernews is about hacking (software, hardware, life), and I still see tons of that on here -- well that and Amazon spam, but that's mostly due to their recent conference/product announcements and will probably die down soon.
I meant stating prior to the outcome of the election that after the election, regardless of the outcome, there would be an N-day moratorium on political discussions to allow the community to decompress. Maybe even start it a day after the election as obviously it'd be the news of the day on election day + 1.
I agree with you that politics are deeply intertwined with hacker culture.
But practically speaking, how we get to that respectful ideal? Throttling political stories when things get too heated might help.
If not the ideal scenario, this certainly isn't the worst possible outcome. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, if you don't speak up for other people then who's going to be left to speak up for you?
Although it may appear the politics and gardening are unrelated or in opposition, there is actually an important link. PG always lists Kenneth Clark as one of his biggest influences. And if you actually watch Civilisation, in the first episode he says that it's a misconception that art arises whenever people have the resources to do things other than working or whatever. Rather, making art (loosely defined) always entails an enormous personal sacrifice, one which people only undertake when they have faith in the longterm stability of society.
Actually, the OP is very politic, as it is about how HN is governed, should we flag this post and should you kill the story?
This may sound pedantic, but the example shows the importance of defining what you consider is the limit between "politics" and "everything else"
Science without philosophy is dangerous, and philosophy without science has no use. The political implications of technology are a big part of the discussion.
I guess I don't believe this step would have been taken if someone else won, and that belief, justified or unjustified, troubles me.
But, I guess anything that gets the damn pipeline news off HN is fine. I'm getting a little sick of the distortion field and do gooders that are going to leave people high-and-dry on that one.
[I voted 3rd party for the top spot in ND if it matters]
Are those all in the vein of things you think we should take a break from?
I'm of the opinion that, had HN banned political threads for a month after Prop 8, Eich would've still been in charge of the Mozilla Corporation. Which, I guess, means I view HN as a kingmaker.
EDIT: Modified post to be less flamebaity. I was genuinely interested in discussing HN's role in previous political stories.
Considering the low quality of political discussion in general (and especially on the internet), HN is one of the few places where there are generally reasonable, well-thought-out views.
Obviously YC doesn't want HN to discuss politics because it could create a divisive atmosphere and alienate people, resulting in lower levels of engagement and harm to the YC brand.
"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." -RMS
However if this blackout includes government level censorship and attacks on internet freedom it seems like a bad 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 free speech zone. If you want to talk political topics, the Internet has more than enough outlets.
Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. This is not an opinion; look only to sites that allow political discourse (Slashdot?), or even our own comments to see how quickly rational discussion can devolve into flaming. One of the major selling points when I introduce HN to other people is the _absence_ of political topics or discussion: leaving the politics out just produces better technical content.
Also, please consider the idea that politics are regional and differ between countries. In Canada, where I'm from, many of the US political topics would never come up; many European countries might feel even more strongly. As a Canadian, I find American political musings and arguments even less relevant and noisy. By contrast, technological topics are always interesting to me - I can appreciate these, and I love that there's this corner of the Internet where I can participate in a reasoned, interesting technical community. Please don't ruin it with politics, especially the polarizing American variant.
I appreciate that the site is willing to take this step, and I sincerely hope it can keep this site useful, interesting and level-headed for the future.
8 - Silicon Valley’s Culture, Not Its Companies, Dominates in China (nytimes.com)
21 - Russian deaths from malnutrition rate 5x lower than in the US (worldlifeexpectancy.com)
I wouldn't support a moratorium forever, because there are topics that are both of perennial HN interest and also overlap politics, like intellectual property law and things specific to the tech industry. But I would support bumping off a lot more of the marginal stuff permanently. In general I would say that I see very little HN-specific contribution to most of those topics. (Not quite none, but hardly worth poking through the dross.)
Unfortunately this a consequence of people trying to shove politics everywhere, including in unrelated communities. I don't want to point fingers but a specific camp has mastered the art of forcing their political beliefs upon others in the name of "the right side of history". The result is now, you can't be just a developer, or a techie. You have to be a techie + or a developer + qnd also support a specific political agenda, or "you're not a decent human being". Maybe people should stop doing that at first place. The same thing happened in atheist communities or gaming and it permanently ruined these communities, because it forced everybody to take sides. HN is no different. The dev community will suffer the same fate if people don't come to their senses before it's too late.
Maybe political subjects that are totally unrelated to tech should be banned from HN. I don't like censorship, but if the goal is to keep a community united and focused well, I'm open for alternative suggestions...
As someone who values the contributors to HN and appreciates the diverse set of opinions, perspectives and critical thinking I find here, which are all handled 99% of the time with decent respectfulness as far as I can tell, I find this effort kind of sad.
Hopefully we learn something good from this, but not sure what that could be, how to decide if it's good, or if it will be worth the effort.
More seriously, I'm not going to rock the boat (and won't miss the discussions about politics) but I always figured those stories would disappear from the front page when the community at large didn't want to discuss them. It's a dangerous slope since you can also make the argument that other topics are also too dominant. I personally would like to see fewer articles on Angular but I wouldn't have suggested that they be off-topic for a week. I guess I assumed the up-voters wanted them.
OFF-TOPIC: Any chance we can down-vote articles with enough karma?
EDIT: I guess I should also note that I rarely flag articles since that seems like it should be reserved for some sort of abuse. My thought about down-votes is that it's the opposite of an up-vote ("I'm not interested in this" versus "this is interesting").
I don't know whether that is politics or not but I can't imagine discussing Amazon Go as a technology without having that discussion. In fact when you look at HN very little is about particular technologies. Most of our discussion is around the implications.
We talk about important things here and should do so in a way that is conducive to engaging conversation. Topics shouldn't be off the table.
Also, what is 'political'?
Edit: typo
I think what dang is after getting of is tribalism, where people show group membership with displays of insults, meme-dropping, etc.
Different things, but if any group can separate tribalism from politics, through thoughtful community-making, I'd say HN can.
Technology and politics go hand in hand, unless we'd like to head back into the dark ages.
EDIT: I'm not hear to offend or persuade with politics talk. I'm here to provide or obtain new perspectives and understanding. If I want an echo chamber that reinforces my perspectives and beliefs, I can head back to Facebook.
That is all anecdotal of course.
edit: grammar.
But where do you draw the line of what is 'politics' and what is 'cool nerdy tech stuff'?
Is a breakdown of 538's method of poll aggregation too politically charged, even if there's a perfectly good overlap of math and statistics?
If Trump makes an out-of-left-field statement about repatriating corporate money, are we prohibited from talking about how it will affect Apple?
A blanket ban of 'political threads and topics' seem harsh, even if just for a week. I personally haven't found the political content on this site to be out of bounds, considering the monumental political upheavals we've been witnessing over the past year.
HN is a community for the the intellectually curious, who come here for a wide range of interests (some of which have political aspects, of course--there's no getting away from that). But there's a different kind of users, ideologically committed ones, who use HN primarily for political battle. That's not something that sits well with the purpose of this site, as I tried to explain above.
Those users really want a different kind of site than HN, and need to find another, or maybe start a new one. Plenty of new sites have spawned from HN; that's partly a function of our not trying to be all things. HN has always been in the lucky position of not needing to grow for growth's sake, so we're happy when people who want a different kind of community find it, or create it.
You see where I'm going with this. It may be worth rescinding that policy during the testing period.
And who is going to keep the comments on track? The typical anti-US people will come out in droves to derail. So we'll end up with the same issues, but instead we'll have political filtering done on the accepted articles themselves that could generate bias.
Its not like all these people will suddenly stick to the topic. In fact, I find many articles that involve India, China, Russia, Brazil, etc usually have a top comment of "But the US is worse." There's a lot of knee-jerk anti-US sentiment here and filtering things out isn't going to change that.
I'd appreciate if you didn't make accusations like these which include me in it. This is coming from a moderator - IIUC, it's entirely dang's idea.
> admit
a one week experiment.
> banning all political topics
Temporarily.
> just because current state of affairs upsets someone
It sounds like it has nothing to do with that.
> how about you stop feeling offended and start listening to each other
It starts with you. There is no other word than offended for your reaction to this little announcement here. And if you actually listened, you'd perhaps glance more than just "we're offended Trump won so we're banning politics forevah".
My initial reaction to this announcement was actually negative - I like politics on HN, the community does a decent job of keeping the trashy comments flagged. But then, seeing your post essentially proved dang's point: You've been here for 3.5 years, but just couldn't help yourself and take a piss on the community you're a part of, to try score some political points.
Urgh. It's so disappointing.
The vision of where we want to be is the central political debate of all time, to which all other political discussions are peripheral appendages. So, no, banning political discussion doesn't let us focus on that, it prohibits even considering it.
I agree hatefully ranting is not working but I don't think politely steering away from the difficult part of the conversation is prudent either. I'm looking forward to hacker news being a place we can still have these difficult discussions in a civil tone after this moratorium.
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.
Saying "We're going to forget y'all for a week" is... just... fucking... terrible. And whoever conceived of it should be fired on the spot.
I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. Frankly, it may be impossible to expect objectivity within political discussion because our political feelings are so deeply-held and tied to our individual upbringings, culture, and locale.
Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.
A strict reading of the guidelines would suggest that they already are. There's nothing interesting or gratifying in those discussions. They devolve into poo-flinging with a probability approaching 1.
In my experience, obvious political flamebait gets flagged off the frontpage out what feels like sheer exasperation. Comments not so much, but they generally end up a few shades lighter.
I no longer frequent the politics sites (left and right) that I used to visit being a politics addict. I now no longer want to listen to any politics for the next 4 or 8 years (whichever the term may end up being).
I have stuck my fingers in my ears and am spouting "la la la la...." loudly whenever I go near a political discussion.
No more politics for me (at least till I am ready to come out of my self imposed exile).
When this happens, many people are forced to get their news from the sites deemed 'fake'. The mass banning of opposing viewpoints (which has been happening for a couple of years now) has pushed more people towards these sites and may have actually won Trump the election. If you want to change it, stop silencing all opposing views.
The problem is that politics is in every part of our lives. If you ban politics and religion, people still get political and religious about other things. It's part of human nature (GNU VS BSD), (VI VS Emacs).
I believe that, if more people in the United States felt the way you did, we could have world peace in a generation.
It's dangerous to avoid short-term pain by stifling conflict. HN is about technology news and I don't think we should separate the "oh cool" part from the "how will this affect our neighbors" part.
Hackernews is like reddit before subreddits.
It's too big now, too many people, too disparate of subjects, too much noise and not enough signal.
Over the past couple years, definitely in the past 2, hackernews has gone from say a reddit SV subreddit, to a generalized, worldnews/politics/general news generic reddit.
That's not what this is. And when hackernews becomes what reddit.com/r/reddit.com used to be, it dilutes the userbase and invites/attracts people who have nothing to do with the hackernews ideology and culture.
This is a positive first step, but far too little and maybe too late.
This site is becoming a generic catch-all subreddit for all news, and with that change the userbase is reflecting the lack of focus on SV/technology/hacker culture.
Without dramatic intervention, the tides will turn and hackernews will not be an attractive place for real hackers, real innovators. Won't be worth their time anymore. They'll find greener pastures. Many already are.
When I say slow, I mean slow. I see part of my job (and it's my temperament anyway) as taking care to understand what this community is and how its system functions, and then to protect that and help it thrive. In practice this means that we take a long time (especially by startup standards, not that HN is a startup) to make changes, and have a strong preference for subtle changes. If we do make a significant change, you can be sure that we waited a long time for the need for it to develop.
But this isn't a significant change, not yet; it's a one-week experiment to see what happens.
this decision is actively contributing to erosion of the free world, as if not talking about politics makes them go away. hint: it's not and technology and hackers are changing the world so much politics necessarily enters the debate and it just can't be worked around.
ps. is uber breaking labor laws around the world politics or not?
This community already has its head in the sand. Political topics are flagged to oblivion, and even those that aren't inevitably inspire so much discussion that the flamewar detector goes off and nukes the thread.
Imagine: in an era where we rail against filter bubbles, a website punishes threads that are too active!
The Devil's Advocate says "Hey now, there's certainly a time and place for political discussion, but HN is a tech forum, not a political forum." Good point, but HN is also a Third Place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), and being a Third Place means promoting Civic Engagement. I agree that HN should strive to stay on topic, but there is plenty of overlap between tech and politics and I think that space deserves to be explored by the community.
It is indeed possible to avoid clicking on a specific kind of topic. From what I understand, the issue here is more that it just isn't a fit for the purpose of this community/website.
[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 this way, and that the effects will linger beyond the 1 week time limit.)
Do you feel that political posters, regardless of viewpoint, are merely chasing the endorphin high that comes from the argument?
But personally I think all of the topics you mentioned are likely to lead to flame wars in the comments about Trump, considering that all three are likely to be significantly affected by him once he takes office. Discussing those topics is still valuable, but unless there is some important development in one of them in the next week, taking a break seems pretty harmless to me.
Hacker news is a news aggregation medium for "Hacker News." The purpose of this site is to get your fix of tech news that you can't get other places. It isn't burying your head in the sand to ONLY have "Hacker" news on your Hacker News site. It's sticking your head in the sand not to read any other news sources. That is on the individual. It is not the job of Hacker News to educate you on politics. The responsibility of getting good news is on the user not the medium. HN doesn't claim to be a one stop shop for all of your news.
More importantly, this is an experiment, on a site that is very interested in Science and Programming. It completely makes sense to have an experiment like this to see if it affects the quality of the comments. Being against this experiment is like my dad trying to tell me that God Created the earth 5000 years ago from parts of other planets (complete hyperbole). WTH? It doesn't matter it's one week and then it's over.
I'm assuming a good experiment will THEN make assertions and consult with the community to see if this worked, was bad/good/etc. At that point voice your concerns, but not yet, there is no evidence it's all conjecture.
In practice, that's going to be grey. But it gives a kind of guideline that may (or may not) be what the moderators are trying to do.
If you want to enforce the code of conduct more strongly, fine. But highlighting political discussion as somehow worse than other kinds of discussion involving competing views is incredibly frustrating and only serves those who may benefit from engineers putting their political and ethical agency to bed in a work/work discussion context. Politics is about choice, its about reasoning out decisions and coming to a consensus on those decisions. Work life is not exempt from the scope of those decisions, and trying to keep that discussion out is a pretty questionable practice.
I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but eliminating discussions outright because they might make people feel uncomfortable or might turn uncivil seems like we are missing a really important piece to the news we discuss here.
Minority opinions are never going to have "fair treatment" by the majority. I've been down voted several times for my opinions and I'll take it again just to be able to have the discussion here.
Also, taking it to an absurd, think of /r/aww. Would you support having 50% of the stories on there be links to CNN/Fox/MSNBC? There's a line somewhere, and there are multiple ways to address it: have a separate section or site for political news (call it PHN), have specific days or a quota of political news, to try to keep on topic, allow it, but moderate it so it has something to do with the Hacker part of Hacker News, etc. Why not experiment. Even the most HN-addicted of us can probably live without this one part of HN for a week.
Reddit went full political and I left. The chans went full political and I left. Facebook went full political and I left. Twitter went full political and I left.
I go on the internet to escape being repeatedly told I'm not doing enough to live up to the moral supremacist standards set by the Baby Boomers in the 1960s.
Nearly every single massive social network on the internet exists and have for a decade to cater to your daily fill of Silicon Valley bicoastal "look down the nose of the flyover plebs" equality porn. Go there for your schadenfreude. Don't bring it here.
Spirituality means having an imaginary friend. Politics means having imaginary enemies.
I think that being able to discuss political issues such as regulations that impact startups is important, and will certainly resume after the political detox week is over.
I think technology coupled with a market economy shows us the way that societal transformation happens from the emergent order of individuals acting in their own self-interest, rather than being forced to choose a "better way" by those in power.
#17 Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for a week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
#23 Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092330
#29 Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065599
#37 Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103611
#49 War Is a Racket by General Smedley D. Butler (1933) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068641
#59 FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074285
Now, if you had recommended one faith/sect over others for a superior experience of human interaction, then maybe you'd have a problem.
Not sure I can keep this up for 4 years, but I'll give it a go.
Would you always try to car discussions in a baseball forum?
They are both valid topics. But there is a reason why forums specialize on particular topics.
This just reads like a cop-out to me, in the same way that large media orgs have been parroting the "it's impossible to be truly unbiased" line as if it were an excuse to throw up their hands and stop trying altogether.
Not that I'm saying you're being disingenuous here, mind, it just reads like defeatism. "All tech is politics so it's pointless to try delineating them". This mentality gets worse and worse as you go down the main thread...
Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking down the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..
Those topics aren't even tangentially political in nature.
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 shortly thereafter on our way back to our apartment.
The new National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, endorsed the totally false rumors that led to this shooting. He will soon be empowered by the full force of the nation's intelligence agencies.
I want you to very carefully consider the implications of what he could do with access to that power, and the potential result of blocking discussion of such issues, particularly at this moment in time.
A talk I recently attended by a data scientist from Amazon had him gloating about how many jobs he could eliminate.
Ironically, the only speaker who brought it up as a major social problem we'll have to tackle is someone from Uber. His solution was less than satisfactory, but at least he recognized the issue.
I don't want to pretend we live in a world of algorithms without consequence.
I really believe that people on either side of the political spectrum should at the very least listen to the view points espoused by the other side so that they can get out of their own echo chambers.
Its a real eye opener to know that there are more than one opinion/point of view on a topic.
Here I go again....finger in ear..."la la la la..."
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" areas.
Squelching political discussion won't cause us all to transcend ideology, it'll just make it impossible to discuss or critique a dominant ideology whenever one shows up in someone's unstated assumptions.
This is a bad idea and a little dystopian (the world is upside down, but think happy thoughts, folks! Here's a TED talk!)
Not to mention I didn't really see a huge problem on the site, so in a time when politics and ideology are on everyone's minds for good reason, it seems you've chosen to solve a non-problem with censorship.
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 productively. Since the U.S. election, I've noticed posts getting flagged that seemed like they were worthy of discussion. I'm not sure if the flagging was ideologically motivated, or if it just happened because of election fatigue.
Even though I don't live in the U.S., I still like to see these discussions happen because the impacts of things that happen tend to have repercussions throughout the tech world.
Maybe limiting comments on political topics to people with 500+ or karma would make reasonable discussion more likely? It's not insanely difficult to react that level in a month or two if you're making thoughtful contributions to the community.
And these are the articles that matter the least to me. I come here to discuss applied technology, not theory. How can technology improve quality of life? How are we going to deal with automation replacing the need for jobs? How are startups and their culture effecting both their employees and society as a whole (I'm looking at you AirBnB and Uber).
To each their own. I don't believe it's a cop out, but that's my opinion. You can have your threads and I can have mine without any interference. That's my problem. There's no need to censor politics threads if you simply skip them because you have no interest.
I think they're concerned about things like community civility. Instead of the detox metaphor, imagine a community that is riled up about something, and is starting to riot - that is, to fight with itself. The authorities declare a curfew to get all sides off the streets and not fighting with each other for long enough for tempers to cool down.
Unfortunately, that analogy breaks down, because we can all go just outside the city limits (that is, to other sites than HN) and get all riled up again there, and be ready to rumble here after the curfew ends. Still, it strikes me as an experiment worth running for a week.
Can't help you there. We don't have anything like that degree of finesse in planning.
The way it works is, we do our job and think about it a lot, and don't pay that much attention to other stuff, and when we think something is a good idea and finally get around to it, we do it. About the only thought that went into political timing was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098321.
Yet, that's the necessary result whenever declawing becomes a topic - /r/aww then becomes not just political, but even very tribal.
The official press has committed collective suicide, and the whale-sized corpses are rotting in the street. Sometimes they twitch.
Things get pretty insalubrious.
Let HN be HN, where we can have a reasoned discussion. If you want to politically organize the tech community, take it somewhere else.
Tech is like any other industry, it's rife with politics. I don't agree with trolling but obviously this place isn't reddit, lot of political debates are valuable and offer insights for those less politically inclined.
If we agree to this policy what guarantee is there in the future that other topics that HN leadership doesn't like will be censored?
This is censorship pure and simple. Shame on you Dang for even suggesting it, my question is:
Is HN an America based community that reflects the core beliefs in freedom of speech & expression?
If yes, we shouldn't even have this kind of thread. Let trolls be flagged but everyone else having meaningful discussion should not be collectively punished.
Purely political posts rarely make it to the front page anyway. And having those discussions in comments is what comments are there for.
The only thing I'm going to flag is this post.
We work on technologies that impact, in one way or another, other people's life.
As you correctly point out, the discussion of the social impacts of Amazon Go is currently open in another thread and I consider that a must.
Other example of the need of politics in here and in our heads when we design something is the case of Tristan Harris [0], as a former Google employee.
I am not saying I agree with Tristan Harris, or with one side or the other in the Amazon Go thread, but I consider HN as a place where civil political debate needs to take place, because we have a moral duty to have it.
We are, in a way, the 1% of "technologically aware people" (and probably among the world top 10% wealthiest...). We need to discuss these issues and we need to think before we act. I'm not trying to re-enact the 99% battle, but our privileges do come with a price and that price is thinking before we act...
I urge people on Amazon Go team to have that discussion. Do they consider working on that project socially acceptable for them or not, and why?
Do I consider, as a SaaS marketing provider, my job as socially acceptable, and why? That is something I, both as a citizen and a business owner, need to think about and openly discuss with my customers, shareholders and consumers/citizens if need be.
I will probably kick down an open door, but the etymology of politics is politika "affairs of the cities": aren't we all, as technology workers/operators/... all living in these cities?
[0]http://www.realclearlife.com/2016/10/27/former-google-produc...
If the non-political solution antibody makes itself a permanent resident of the HN community as a result of detox week, I know I'd be pleased.
Yes. And HN may in fact be a good forum for doing so, if we can keep the respectful and dialogue parts.
This may not be the week for it, though. (The last two weeks haven't been so great for civil, thoughtful dialog on anything touching politics, even on HN.) If HN is going to be the place to counter political tribalism via thoughtful cross-tribe communication, it may need this week off in order to be able to get there.
This type of perspective is in my opinion part of the problem, and not recognizing that this type of comment is itself part of its own narrative. When the discussions descend into repeating talking points or following a narrative, it's no longer a thoughtful, inquisitive discussion. Given that you've included one such example in the meta-discussion is indicative of how ingrained some of this "anti-discussion" is and hard to get away from.
The goal here is to let people get past the yelling so that we can get back to the thoughtful, polite discourse.
The idea that it's not possible to be thoughtful and political at the same time (and thus we should just cut out all/most the political stuff) is disheartening.
The problem isn't the politics, the problem is the lack of thoughtfulness.
I'm deeply ambivalent with this as an experiment. I hope it achieves what you're interested in without compromising the things I worry it will.
Quick question for clarification - would http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-companies-delay-diversity-r... fall into the kind of race and gender issues that you'd block this week?
Btw, if there are any Trump supporters on HN, it would be interesting to hear their views. Likely, due to how the community works they can't be heard due to downvoting and/or flagging which I think is a shame. I prefer more debate over less.
So what does good, relevant, political discussion on HN look like? What does bad (but relevant) political discussion look like? Then update the guidelines accordingly. Maybe the guidelines could even have examples.
I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.
There is no neutral option around this kind of politics and I'll be sad to see HN throw marginalized people under the bus to ensure the comfort of the privileged.
That's straightforward, and understandable.
Personally, though, I would want to measure that in some way. We all tend to notice harsh comments or politicized accounts when they are in opposition to our world view. Ones that we agree with might fly under the radar.
I'm not sure yet whether I think this is a good or bad idea, though this I'll say: HN is not just a news aggregation medium. If in the beginning it were, it is no longer. It is now much more defined by the people on here. Like reddit, the story pages give the majority of screen real estate to comments. It's not a stretch to say people on here drop by, to a greater extent, for the discussions, ideas, and tips - and to a lesser extent, to be exposed to a story or link that they might not have eventually found elsewhere.
* Peter Thiel's support of Trump. * Mass Surveillance Laws. * Net Neutrality.
Are we going to simply avoid any and all potentially controversial subjects?
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 feel this is a fair assumption. I'm not saying no one here could shoot a gun in public, but they wouldn't come here as anything but a complete troll and shoot a gun based on some crap story like that. If I'm wrong in this then the experiment is terrible and stop it now. But I very much doubt it.
3) The issue is that news in general has degraded. This degradation of journalism has led to many of the issues we experience today. If experimenting on HN can lead to some sort of anecdotal evidence that Politics = bad for communities I'm all for it. I believe part of the issue is pointed to in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 24 Hours news is the issue. 24 Hours politics is the issue. Taking a purge is a great idea.
4) HN should not be where you get your news about politics.
I see a need for an upgrade in political discourse, yet I'm not convinced eliminating conversations entirely is the answer.
Some recent topics I can think of... Facebook + fake news is about technology and user behavior, and also very political. Government use of surveillance technology is both technological and political in nature. Role of social media in elections has technological, sociological, politic aspects to it that can be discussed.
To me, being "political" is both what you're talking about, and how you're talking about it.
I enjoy reading what the HN audience has to say about the above examples. I'd be disappointed if they're considered too political and off limits going forward.
Interested to see how this experiment goes.
I just saw a story about Paul Allen resurrecting a CDC 6500 supercomputer. Yes, that took place in an environment where politics shapes the capitalist foundation of our society, and that's where Paul Allen got the money to be able to do that. It takes an extreme stretch to call that a political story, though...
I also don't think that the hacker spirit responds well to barriers of thought and discussion.
It's just an anecdote, but I know my views have been greatly affected in part by hacker news. I was once a staunch libertarian, but reading a lot about universal basic income and other approaches people have offered to income inequality and social issues, while talking about the technology trends first and foremost, have convinced me to broaden my beliefs.
There is something about having a stated goal outside of political points scoring that helps everyone see themselves as part of the same team. I've always felt hacker news is largely about understanding things related to technology - trends, weird bugs, how startups work, etc. With that as our main focus we can defer to each other and learn from each other. When the main force is to debate the other side there is no room for concessions or finding common ground.
What I want in a community, is for people of all different views and backgrounds to think about a topic with the end goal of solving some problem. Hacker news isn't perfect there but it's close.
The idea that major social ills can be solved with no governmental intervention is itself very political.
> HN is a garden, politics is war by other means
Denial, denial, denial. This is like the arms dealers selling to both sides in third world conflict and claiming they are ethically above the killing.
You claim intellectual curiosity, but you peddle intellectual dishonesty.
Thank you, btw. I left HN months ago, and today come back to see exactly the pathetic hypocrisy that turned me off in the first place. Shit like this makes me be ashamed to be part of the tech community.
Sure, let's hide from the real world and pretend it isn't happening.
I was very specific to outline an additional condition which I think makes all the difference, which is that you were presented with the reason for the action. Assuming an ulterior motive when you've already been given an explicit motive is assuming they are acting in bad faith, and that that they've provided a reason that does not match reality.
Clearly you don't mean stories touched by politics like uber tracking users or everything tech would be offtopic. Clearly you do mean stories about Trump. Somewhere in the middle a line has to be drawn.
Yes, what we do can have consequences. We need to think about that!
I have friends working for weapons manufacturers. They don't gloat about building stuff that can blow children up!!! Why the hell should we be absolved from any moral consequences for our acts?
I am not equating elimating jobs and kill children, but I would prefer if our industry abstained from any thought on the consequences of its trades.
I once had to choose between working for a weapons manufacturers for a very nice salary. I chose not to work for them. But I thoroughly thought about it and I don't blame my friends for making a different choice. I politically object to that choice, but it does not mean I am some sort of white knight...and it does not mean that sometimes in the future, if presented with another opportunity, I wouldn't make a different choice...
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 objective of political discussions on HN should be to convince those people - not, say, to make the minority which is affected feel validated. My impression is that when people who are affected by something go and read a ton of Very Strong Opinions put forward by people who aren't, the result is usually more invalidating than validating; validation is important but is a purpose better served by more focused communities. Now, when it comes to convincing people, a constant barrage of discussions on the same topic is probably more unhelpful than helpful; at worst, pausing discussions for a week (which gives them time to reflect) is unlikely to be very harmful.
Notwithstanding that, some people may perceive the idea of taking a break as invalidating, because it reminds them of a generalization about the community (not affected) which does not apply to them. However, so far as it's an accurate generalization, this seems like it can't be helped. I suppose you could argue that it seems more accurate than it really is, since marginalized people are present but silenced…
Anyway, I think "things that affect other people" is an oversimplification to start with. A lot of the specific political topics people like to discuss on this site, like encryption/surveillance, have fairly little direct impact on pretty much any of us; others, like the economy, affect all of us to some extent, albeit some more than others.
EDIT: Which HN is totally within its right to do.
It's often pretty obvious from the ensuing conversation what kind of post it is: are people discussing the politics, or the technical thing that's kind of related?
Also: HN threads on that particular topic (statistical evidence for diversity in the industry and its impact) are invariably a shitshow here. I am guessing your political leanings w/r/t/ industry diversity are identical to mine, and I do not see what HN generally gains from the trolling and nastiness that occurs on "diversity as a phenomenon" threads.
HN pretends to be largely apolitical, but the quick disappearance of certain threads or topics seems to show that it has a heavy slant towards a sort of techno-utopian quasi-libertarianism that wants to work its way out of challenges to its ideas by sort of putting its fingers in its ears. Instead of attempting to "depoliticize" itself, maybe HN should spend time developing a better understanding and clarification of the extremely political stance it takes every day?
Is climate change news political? Edward Snowden news? Wikileaks? A new build of the Signal app? Hyperloop news?
> The way it works is, we do our job and think about it a lot, and don't pay that much attention to other stuff, and when we think something is a good idea and finally get around to it, we do it.
I do sincerely believe the italicized last part.
I also suspect that nobody on the HN mod team thought that Trump would actually win. It was such a far off concept that planning for it and the ensuing gloating / division / trolling would have been laughable. If they did, they would have put more thought into stating this type of thing in advance as I'm pretty sure it's been suggested more than once over the past few months.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
i come here to read tech news and be part of one of the least toxic communities that's not my old irc channels.
as to politics, there's futurology and discussing sociology, and there's left vs right, "make mericuh gr8 agin" vs "gief all monies to poor" politics, which would put HN on some political brigade's list.
i don't have anything against future speculation and theorizing about conservative\liberal angles to automation and rise of AI or voting machine tech.
it'll be interesting to see what results the detox week will bear!
From my perspective, this is not very odd because HN is not a general purpose message board. The guidelines have always outlined what is on and off topic, and politics has always been considered off topic. It seems like a very reasonable experiment.
Preventing political discussions causes far more harm than it prevents. I understand the intent. I understand the problem. Flame wars are not productive. But I think this is a poor response to a valid problem.
But during WWII in Finland there were definitely gardens built by soldiers. As the Soviet Union defended against Germany and its Finnish front was effectively paused, the Finnish soldiers began to build temporary houses on the front lines. Here's a photo from 1943:
http://www.nautelankoski.net/sota/kuvat/sotakuvat/jatkosotak...
That's all you can ever really achieve with any online discussion about a topic that has no "right" answer.
Where better to talk about the politics of HN and Y Combinator than on HN? As far as political stories go, these are the most relevant ones to HN readers. Political stories about the tech scene, and related topics (such as political reactions to tech employees grabbing up all the real estate in certain tech-heavy cities like SF) are also very relevant.
I would be more ok with the banning of non-tech-related political stories/threads. But, I think a better solution than censorship would be tagging. Tagging would allow every reader to do their own filtering, and include/exclude what they felt was appropriate, rather than have those decisions dictated top-down.
On the other hand, I also understand the desire of the site owners/admins to guide the site to be what they want it to be, rather than what its users want it to be. That's definitely their prerogative, and much of it I agree with - particularly the censorship of hate speech, flaming, and trolling.
The guiding of this site towards more tech and less politics is also a desire I understand and commiserate with. There definitely are plenty of other political sites out there, where you can argue this stuff 'till the cows come home. But personally, I don't visit those sites, and would like to be able to discuss at least some of those topics -- the ones relevant to tech and to HN/YC, on HN itself.
No, it's 'moderation'. Censorship is where you can't say something in any (public) outlet.
> Is HN an America based community that reflects the core beliefs in freedom of speech & expression?
No, because downvoting 'ghosts' a comment, there's shadowbanning, dead comments, and the mods can already kill stories. Moderation is already alive and kicking on HN; there's plenty of it done by both mods and users.
Also, it's only for one week. It's bizarre to see just how many commentors are treating it like the end-times of civilisation.
C'mon, hearing people talk positively about working with JS lights a fire inside me and my veins pop, so I just don't upvote their comments. Pretty simple.
HN might not should be or should strive to be the place where you get your news about politics - but it has certainly educated me about political positions and history in the past.
So many of the technologies that we use have political consequences or undertones—the reason that we have these discussions here is that otherwise it's not possible to have a substantial discussion about the technology at all. We'd be reduced to meaningless small talk.
If you start a business, politics impact you. If you are an employee, politics impact you. If you invest in businesses, politics impact you in a huge way.
Uber and AirBnB are no longer just startups, they are very politically active corporations. But they both started, if not from here, then from other communities just like this one.
1. Any views expressed here or elsewhere on HN are purely my own and not representative of the United States government or any other entity.
2. This is not about one individual act of violence. It is symptomatic of a culture created by the types of technology we discuss and implement. I happen to know many people within various spheres that do read HN, and are influenced by it.
3. This comment was flagged, which seems contrary to the purpose of inviting a public discussion, particularly on the thread regarding the appropriateness of such discussions on this site.
If we can't even express dissent that we can't express dissent, that is a problem.
-Discussions of intrusions into US infrastructure by Russia which, curiously, always engender enormous political controversy.
-Manipulation of social media for political ends both manual and automated.
-Policy changes on net neutrality proposed by the president elect or others.
-Governmental surveillance as is and as likely to evolve.
-Trolling as a political tool to disrupt opposing communities.
One level up, there is also the possibility that calm well informed discussion is the exact thing that is targeted for destruction. But perhaps this week's experiment will take some steps towards thinking about that.
If the story gets big enough, the articles about Amazon Go's impact on workers will move from the tech section to the politics section of the newspapers. Where do you draw the line on HN in that case? Once they have move in the WaPo, we should stop talking about them?
I agree with others that moderating such a large online community is probably very hard and that dang and others probably experience bad times when comments thread inflame, but I think that a blanket ban on affairs of the cities is not the way to go.
Actually, I find it quite funny that we are having this debate, because in essence that is a political debate. Some US posters will consider it as hampering their right to free speech, some others will consider that making that space void of any political discussions is fine, some (as myself :-) ) think it is impossible and impractical... Debate around the frontiers of that is admitted here is entirely political, in the noble sense of the word.
As long as our debate is civil (and as far as I can see, it is), I think we should be allowed to have it. And what if my comments are not interesting and bring nothing to the debate? They will be downvoted to hell. HN, in contrast with Reddit, has apparently a very good track record with karma. It seems that brigading is not practiced around here.
I think it is probably linked to the fact that under a certain thresold, you cannot down-vote. My karma is indeed too low to downvote for instance and at first I was uneasy with the fact that I couldn't downvote...but I think I am starting to understand why it is actually a good rule for the board ;-)
If we discuss and use technology without considering it's ethical ramifications then we are on cruise control to hell.
To those who will respond with "he said politics, not ethics" - prithee - where is the line?
Stifling one angle of discussion stifles others.
We need to be talking about the political implications of what we've built, and figuring out how to fix our mess. This is like the period before the hurricane: everyone should be busy boarding up windows, and you can't do that if you decide you're just not going to talk about the coming storm because it makes you feel bad.
Politics seem to work like religion in the brain. I'm not sure it's possible to have a good discussion.
That's another reason why it should be banned, because it will crowd out other topics by dint of being more important to more people - which is also a feedback loop, as more people get drawn in for the politics.
On the other hand, the idea of an interminable ban on political discussion has many obviously salient implications, emotions, and such. A sort of half-baked analogy is that it's like lighting a tiny, contained trashcan fire in the middle of a nuclear reactor--it's not really a big deal but it's easy to see how it could trigger high-magnitude reactions from onlookers.
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 it sounds like you're looking for more of an echo chamber, right?
> even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way
Maybe an example of a time you made a point in an informed and respectful way only to be downvoted and derided would help clarify?
> Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.
I strongly disagree. I don't know what "fair treatment" means, but if enough people on the site feel a topic is worth talking about, we should talk about it. Specific incidences of abuse should be flagged, but again, it's hard for me to say one way or another without examples showing what you mean.
As to the overall question of whether politics should be allowed on HN, HN started as "Startup News". It's always been a site about entrepreneurship, mostly in the tech industry. Entrepreurship is intimately linked to politics in obvious and non-obvious ways. Politics has to do with taxes, healthcare, immigration, legality of certain types of research, market size and access, shifting demographic trends, financing sources, and much more.
Edit: I removed a final sentence because it's moot and doesn't add to my actual argument.
Regardless of whether a given comment is OK now, once this detox experiment gains steam will anyone be able to mention anything about any of the designated concepts under the anxious eyes of a newly deputized membership?
(I'm specifically thinking about the 99th percentile of moderation activity given the large number of people on the site and the fact that neutral opinions are not counted by the current voting system.)
Or, will these sorts of down votes be weighted? And if so, by what? Using the karma system doesn't seem appropriate - there are many well-spoken members on HN that hold wildly different, even antagonistic, viewpoints.
What inhibits abusive moderation activity of the sort observed when a CTR-like group was actively manipulating /r/politics?
Of course people sometimes get angry and flame each other in political threads. That should be flagged. For that matter, people flame each other on "Technology A versus Technology B" threads all the time, too, and many other topics.
The way to promote more civil political discourse is to promote more civil political discourse, not to ban political discourse as a dirty, taboo topic altogether.
The thing is that we all have very different visions on the hill of where we want to be, and that friction is what's playing out in these threads.
I applaud the admins for attempting something like this - communities need to develop strong opinions to survive, or else they will be torn apart by infighting when it becomes big enough that people no longer assume goodwill. This creates an ever-more toxic environment and poisons the well. At least then people are making a conscious choice to agree or disagree with the purpose/opinions of the community.
Unquestionably. Uber has power because it occupies the bulk of mindshare for ride sharing. The internet has power because that's where people are. You can't argue that facebook, MSFT etc... don't have POWER.
Did Apple coerce people into buying its products by the billions?
You're conflating power with coercion. It's possible, and desirable, to have power without coercion. Most power is not coercive - it's called "soft power."
Though radicals could argue that even soft power is coercive.
I agree that HN does not need walls of bickering partisan flames, but outlawing discussions of politics and ethics is not the way to go in my mind.
Shutting down discussion of "politics"-- the methodology of distribution of resources within a society-- is the complete opposite of gratifying intellectual curiosity and having substantive comments. How is it possible to gratify curiosity, when you're not allowed to start the discussion? How can the substance of your comments be displayed when the topic is verboten? Perhaps what dang is upset about is the tone with which these comments are conducted. Sure, they're shrill, sometimes. But isn't it natural to be shrill when discussing issues of morality and heavy consequence?
As far as HN not being intended for use as a political or ideological battlefield: that dream is dead. Technology touches every aspect of humankind, and yes, that means it's political.
It is also an experiment. I'd like to emphasize that. It is an experiment. It is OK to not get politics on HN for a week. It will not be the cause of a global meltdown in society.
I'm also pretty confident that if some ground breaking news broke about Donald Trump wanting to launch a nuclear weapon that dang would allow that, but the current noise that is happening can be removed for a week is a good experiment.
Reason I ask this is that I recently encountered an HN situation where someone who appeared to be a productive member of the HN community was banned from posting because of (truly) poor etiquette, if not outright bad behavior. However, seeing that he had for over a year been a contributing member, I felt that a total ban was heavy-handed and that simply being punished temporarily for a transgression might have served better.
Is anyone familiar with an online forum that merely temporarily punishes transgressors w/o permanently banning them? Does anyone else think banning is sometimes a bit too much punishment?
I'm 100% behind you if they try to ban politics on HN. But for a week it's ok, we'll live and we may even learn something.
If you want to discuss whether this experiment is a good idea for HN, that's fine, but you need to do it without fighting a specific political fight at the same time. "The new National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, endorsed the totally false rumors that led to this shooting" is the very thing we're asking you not to post this week.
this actually happened, as you know. "politics aren't my problem" should be called out as effectively authoritarian, as it's an admission that they'll do exactly as told.
3) 24 hour news may be an issue of degradation but fake news perpetuated within giant tech companies is also an issue. You cannot talk about fake news without going into the politics of it.
I was going to send this in an email to you ages ago, but this is as good a place as any, I guess.
I'm sure you've seen this account many times, but I intentionally post unpopular opinions here, often to actively game upvotes/downvotes. Sometimes, I post the exact opposite opinion that I hold in meatspace. Occassionally I accidentially stumble on something new (who knew wal-mart was so popular on HN?[0]), and proceed to extend a conversation to see how much karma I will actively lose. I liken it to game testing, where one is encouraged to play incorrectly in order to identify bugs in a program.
I have a pretty good understanding of the political pulse of HN as a result. The HN of 2016 overwhelmingly skews California Liberal, and often includes much of the identity politics. If you even hint at opposing gay rights (which, as an LGBTQ* is obviously not my position), you will be downvote-bombed. In this thread I have been downvoted for making a pro-Eich post. Sometimes, the retaliation for an opinion extends to downvoting my post history.
The system is incredibly easy to game for karma; just post something that largely supports the majority opinion, and contributes just enough that it isn't flagged for not providing anything to the conversation. Keep this up until you have enough karma to downvote, then work on another account. If you're judicious in keeping to the hivemind's platform, you can get a 650 karma account in less than a month (I've done it twice, though I deleted the accounts afterward). in six months, you can downvote a post you don't like to light grey in a matter of seconds.
I'm sure you've made efforts to penalize stories. Largely, you've been really good on that. However, comments are where the hivemind lives, and it can be measured in upvotes and downvotes. If a post isn't incendiary, but ends up with more downvotes than upvotes, it's safe to say this is an account of maybe not the entire site, but at least who is regularly active at the time of posting.
I completely agree with you about the toxicity of political fights, even though I hypocritically partake in them for research. I also agree that everyone believes their side is the underdog. I just don't agree that HN is "equally-biased", and I have the post history to prove it.
(yes, kissing the ass of the mods is part of the game, as it effectively stops the flow of downvotes once you intervene; However, I do mean it when I compliment how you've run the site. You've made HN worth using throughout this Eternal Septembering of redditors)
In fact, what is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion is: emotionally charged, poorly-considered, and dishonest discussion. The topic doesn't matter: health fads, operating systems, or taxes. I agree, many people have terrible style in their approach to political discussion - but see also, e.g. Hobbes and Rousseau for more thoughtful representatives.
Yes the moderation team is going to be handling this on a case by case basis and a thread like this isn't actually going to be shut down but I think it illustrates my point: politics is woven through society at virtually every level. There are very few stories that lack at least some form of politics.
So why not let the community decide what they feel it a topic worth discussion and what is not by flagging posts (like what they do today)? Why must there be interference to steer the community in a specific, editorialized direction?
Banning politics on HN is not what they are proposing, they are proposing a cease fire on HN. That is by no means a bad idea.
If they propose banning news on HN permanently I'll get out my pitchfork too (assuming the experiment goes poorly). But lets put them away for a week, then talk.
The forums on the internet should not be solely to affirm your opinions, but also to challenge them and allow growth as an individual.
The problem isn't with politics -- it's with the people misusing the voting system.
I wonder why it is called an experiment at all. In the end this just the mods upholding the part of HN guidelines [1] that I like the most:
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Mundane politic topics interfere with HN being the exception place it is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050645 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544
Feigning that we can have conversations in isolation from the world at large is a dangerous lack of recognition of our power and our responsibility.
Tech (No politics, etc.) / Not Tech.
The trying to force it all into a single view seems to be creating some friction.
I would be surprised if this had much of an impact. I've encountered a lot of people even on HN who truly seem to believe their ideology is somehow 'fact'. Those who are sufficiently self-aware in this regard are probably not abusing the downvote button to begin with.
Others have stated this elsewhere in the thread, but it's often impossible to avoid politics altogether. I'm completely with you about posts that are purely political in nature.
I do like talking about politics, especially when it's polite and level-headed discussion (which seems to be the norm here in NH), and a lot of my comments are on that subject. So yes, it would be somewhat sad to see that go.
But the bulk of HN's value lies mostly elsewhere, and not being able to talk about politics here would still keep it a valuable platform and an interesting community to participate in.
So it's really not a big deal one way or the other.
> I was skeptical about the reason dang
As to this, I'm not sure I have the same skepticism you do in this regard. HN has a history of flagging overly political stories, as it can often be hard to keep discussion civil. There seems to be less flagging of these as the election gets close, as it's more relevant to everyone involved, but trying to cut back after the election is past seems appropriate to me.
About 15 years ago I was part of a general forum run by a kiwi, who was frustrated at US politics overtaking his site (which was the bulk of political talk there). He implemented a month-long ban on US politics... and the site got more peaceful and more interesting. The effect lasted afterwards, too, though the userbase was < 100.
I'm of the unpopular opinion that we should each take responsibility for our own actions, and should not act on orders we consider ethically unacceptable. I could tell you stories about a great uncle who designed dams in Austria...
In turbulent times like these, with hate speech, racism and sexism out of the shadows and in it's highest, it is crucial to be having conversations.
Being silent, burying head in the sand - not much different than siding on the side of the oppressor.
Whatever news are posted here - is a reflection of a community. If politics are posted, that is what people read. Instead, concentrate your efforts to battle those who game your algorithms for rankings.
2. The person who shot the gun was informed by Reddit, a company that had it's genesis here. The Y Combinator is a function that makes other functions.
The Internet is not like a blank canvas. The decisions we make about a platform, about news optimization, and about community structure affect our public discourse. If Twitter had set it's character limit at 280 characters, that would have had a profound effect on the marketplace of ideas in the public sphere.
3. The issue is that the particular forms of communication which enabled these thought-bubbles to exist were created by a handful of decisions by software developers.
4. HN is where I get my news about technology. Technology is a crucial area of political discussion, and right now the very basic freedoms of the internet are under direct threat from political forces.
Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?
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). When Mike Judge was once asked about the core insight behind his "Silicon Valley" TV show, he cited his belief that the tech ethos is a conflict between liberal and libertarian values.
As a pragmatist who just likes to read about tech, I find both sides annoying.
Detox will not strengthen the immune system of HN.
Immunity is conferred when the 'garden' is threatened and unifies to counter a problem.
That problem? Inflammatory, unsubstantiated comments that cause people to upvote and downvote not based on the validity of the comment but whether it's favorable to their ideological values.
I believe people can have civilized discussions about politics in HN -- I've seen it before.
It is an experiment. That's a good thing. Let's talk about solving Fake News in a week. If they try to ban politics on HN in a week I'll get up in arms with you.
3) perpetuated by the users of software distributed by giant tech companies
To finish up: It is an experiment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site.
The "someone" I'm referring to here almost certainly, in reality, isn't one person. And the "entity" who did this certainly should lose their position -- it's a privilege we've granted them for far too long.
But now tech is political, surveillance and the surveillance economy being built by SV companies is political, techologists working for the government building invasive surveillance systems is political, the betrayal of people by a technical elite is political, the censorship advocated by social media based out of sv is political, AI is political.
Ignoring this is like an arms supplier turning a blind eye to his weapons used to kill innocents choosing to focus on specifications. ie a world without morality. That's not protecting values or intellectual curiosity, its killing it.
The kind of forum HN has morphed into for lack of an alternative cannot be run by an organization with commercial interests. Then you get knee jerk arbitary decisions like this that begets a culture of passivity accepting what ever is handed down to you. I think the technical voice needs more robust expression and to speak as one with the rest of the population rather than seek isolation and alienation.
The reason I don't consider it wise is that I think the current political situation is completely unique at least in my lifetime (<40 years) and is not the typical political camps bickering with each other over simply "politics".
Rather, this time around there are Real Issues that are Important. The current trend of populism will have global ramifications for many decades to come. Not allowing discussion on these topics seems counter-productive to me.
my personal POV is that a lot of issues affecting the tech community at large resolve to politics in the end - be it the fight of cities and entire countries against AirBnB and Uber for example, the infamous Flint water disaster, the "fake news" battle, internet censorship, snoopers' overreach, the role of Big Data in elections, voting machine fraud...
Nearly every story (even those about new startups "disrupting" a specific market - markets ripe for disruption are usually created by political decisions, be it Republicans or Democrats!) has its base in politics, and I believe it is our duty as citizens and educated people to call politicians and their parties out when they mess stuff up.
Therefore, I believe that prohibiting political discussions outright is a dangerous move - I'm all fine with penalties or flagging if a discussion devolves into outright fight, but not for simply bringing up the topic.
If an article clearly has a pro-left/right spin, I don't want to read it.
This whole idea about avoiding political discussions strikes me as very counter-productive. It reminds me of a quote attributed to a well-known person who once traveled these parts: Those who feel too intelligent to engage in politics will be governed by the less intelligent members of society.
That's not the exact quote, but I think it captures it very well.
More than at any other time, this is the time to be very engaged in political discussions, because our future is being decided right now.
If intelligent people refuse to be part of that discussion, we won't like the result.
For one week.
> "Forbidden topics" because some people's feelings are getting hurt?
It's about a lot more than that, as I tried to explain in the text above. There are two different kinds of site—intellectually curious and politically combative—and we cannot be both of them.
As the Amazon Go thread, and this comment from PG demonstrate, the default position - where there is no discussion of race / gender / class / diversity - is for the protections that minority groups enjoy to disappear.
Either because no-one thinks to protect them (as white working classes feel has happened to them) or because SV bigwigs see those protections as an inconvenient fact that should be swept away by technological disruption.
pg: "Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups."
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en
It's a fallacy to think that HN and hackers can somehow obsolve themselves from that responsibility any more than it thinks it can obsolve itself from responsibility toward homeless in SF.
By all means take the decision you feel you need to to maintain your community - but don't under any circumstances pretend it's a politically neutral one because it just cannot be.
I believe banning politics is a bad idea even for a week.
One benefit of this community is that technical discussion is exclusive. Not everyone is ready to understand why a relational database might be better than a key value store. This hopefully results in discussion that is based on experience earned expertise.
Politics has virtually no barrier to entry. Consequently, the comment quality declines.
These issues can't be discussed in a vacuum. This is the person who is openly promoting a Muslim registry, and intends to use the technology we have built to do it. There is no ground to be apolitical in that context, particularly when you have just seen first hand evidence of the violence it portends.
I submit that, if people were firing assault rifles into pizza places in your neighborhood because of "politics," you might feel differently.
The controls on the usage of national security programs, as we know, are today largely governed by the discretion of the people in charge, much like your discretion governs comments here.
It's fine if you don't consider that acceptable discourse anymore. It's your sandbox. But if that's the case, I'm taking taking my toys and going home. I know what censorship looks like when I see it.
Worst of all dang, I though I could trust you guys to be better than this...
There is a reason the shadow-ban was invented: when loudmouthed/trollish users are allowed to realize they are unwelcome, they get angry, and express that anger by defacing, defaming, DDoSing, etc. the community that has rejected them.
My personal belief is that the best thing to do is to not disallow this content altogether, but rather to ghettoize it.
Two examples of this:
• How Metafilter treats posts about Metafilter: they're allowed, but they have to go into a special "meta" ghetto, separate from regular content, where only people who want to see that kind of thing will have to see it.
• 4chan frequently makes new boards—new "homes" for certain content types—just to quarantine content it doesn't like. For example, /soc/ was not created because the 4chan moderators think 4chan should have a meetups+dating board, but rather because such threads were incessant on /b/.
---
Now, HN already has something quite like these approaches, but IMHO better: the "showdead" system for negative-scored posts, which ghettoizes posts but also individual comment subthreads of posts, in a very granular way.
Here's the experiment I'd like to see done, re-using the "showdead" code:
• Split downvotes into an "irrelevant/Obviously Did Not Read The Article" button and a separate "is political" button (where you can press either or both on any given post.) Track the totals separately.
• If a post's (upvotes - irrelevant) is negative, then it's "dead" as happens now, and you have to have "showdead" on to see it.
• If a post's (upvotes - is_political) is negative, then it's "politics", and you have to have "showpolitics" on to see it.
• If both scores are negative, then you have to have both filters on to see the post.
• Posts would sort/rank according to (upvotes - sqrt(irrelevant^2 + is_political^2)).
I think this alternative would ensure that the people who most want to get into tribal flamewars would "go quietly into the night" (from everyone else's perspective), rather than becoming the sworn nemesis of the community.
Even setting aside how this effectively encourages the status quo: you are functionally telling women and minorities not to relate their own experiences for fear of being branded as "political" and getting flagged for it. That's bad. That's real bad. When somebody like 'tptacek says he's on-board with this because he thinks that 97.99% of politics on HN are alt-right trolling...maybe there's a problem here that isn't "politics".
I generally regard the proprietorship here with good faith even when I disagree 'cause you have always been fair and straight with concerns I've thrown your way, but this is an unmistakably dark message you're sending to your community--a message that works very much to the favor of the white supremacists who are actively pissing in your pool around here.
- Making a sweeping generalization while implying a lack of nuance or legitimacy of others' contributions shows a lack of self-awareness while not contributing constructively to the discussion.
- Your including a politically charged comment in a thread about attempts to limit the negative affects of political discussion indicate just how difficult this can be for some contributors.
Edit: Even shorter: Political Detox Week is targeted, in part, at statements exactly like "These are inviting words for many millennials to commit to their media narratives".
That's why I think the industry has a moral and practical responsibility to push society to properly prepare for the results. Because we understand the implications better than anyone.
Ditto to the many commenters who point out that nothing is apolitical and that such censorship would be subjective anyway.
Don't do this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095475
You'll need 'showdead' set to 'yes' in your profile if you want to see all the comments in it.
the downvotes will likely not be weighted. flagged comments will likely have +3 karma as much as they have -3 karma. at least, that's the hope of a 1-week moratorium, right?
To answer your question, the only thing stopping the abusive meta-moderation activity are the two mods here. So long as the posts otherwise meet the posting guidelines, they'll likely remain unmoderated. If they're not flagged, they might not even pop up on the moderator's radar.
Basically, it is up to you to point the mods at things that may or may not be abusive. Which I guess answers your question.
HN is a public outlet, anyone is free to register and participate in the discussion. The thread is soliciting the community to censor themselves with a pretty vague and large blanket under "politics".
HN is run by an American corporation correct, it's servers are in America, then it should follow American values. If this was a Chinese or Russian company, well, their land their rules.
People are freaking out because dang set a precedent for future discourse, the community leadership can declare any topic they deem unsuitable with a pretty vague set of rules and discretion which does not follow a democratic process.
That said, not wanting to talk about politics is a political act. It's basically saying, "let's let the status quo keep going for now", because most things involve politics on some level.
Can we get away from namecalling and toxic behavior? Sure. But having a politics free space isn't the way to do that.
Religion Sex Politics
All "no nos"
Still Good Advice!!
Now I add
Money, abortion, Hitler, the holocaust, child care, and elder care.
2) The person was informed by the hive mind of a subreddit that reddit allows. I mean look at what happened when the Steve went and edited user data on Reddit. We talk about not wanting censorship, but then we blame technologies that don't sensor for having toxic communities. How do you find out if the community or the individual is to blame? Would you perform an Experiment?
3) Software has perpetuated the thought bubble issue, this is one thing I can think of being introduced to society purely by software so I agree on this point.
4) Which is why I think after the experiment we should go back to politics on HN.
> Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?
I get my political news from other sources, I'd suggest anyone reading this does too.
It would be interesting to know how they will judge the results of this experiment when it concludes.
How is anyone supposed to realistically draw the line between what is political and what is not? Couldn't any topic in the world be related back to politics one way or another?
This seems like a blatant plot to censor 'unwanted' topics and articles. A huge downvote from me.
I mean, yeah I get it's probably a lot of work to moderate all the political related discourse and keep the lanes wide enough for a lot of different voices, but it's the catch that comes with having a "community" in the first place.
If this is the first of a series of "experiments" I wonder which other "conflicts" might "cause harm here" - Identity Discussions? Health care in the US? As cheap as it might sound to pull out a slippery-slope card here, it seems rather apropos.
I get a lot of flack for it here, but if you don't think Politics and Tech are coiled together in significant ways - eg. DMCA and Copyright - then you're just ignorant, childish, and a fool. SV and tech culture is actively using the "Political System" just like every other special interest. Pretending there's some kind of effin' halo over the Hacker News community where such conversations are "below" or "too conflict loaded" then just shut down the forum altogether.
Man discovers fire. Man burns self. Man puts out fire. The end.
How are marginalized people "thrown under a bus" here? Not allowing discussions about race and gender is not equivalent to that at all.
I can barely tell the gender or race of anyone here.
The "broad" definition is the one in most dictionaries; the narrow one you suggest seems to be the overlap of partisan tribalism with a society with a single overwhelming axis for the reason described above.
In any case, simple utterances of tribalism are already clearly off-topic on HN, whether they are centered on political ideology or not, so clearly an experiment of the type here must be targeting something broader (though apparently also narrower than the dictionary definition of poltiics.)
1 I only refer to myself as part of the unwashed masses because: A) I am not actually a programmer B) I am incredibly poor and C) I literally do not bathe frequently due to said extreme poverty as I am homeless. ;-)
2 Evidence of total support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692
I think we should entertain this experiment of Dang's for the time being.
I don't agree. I think it's worth reading and trying to understand the perspectives of the participants. I wouldn't guess that any of them feel embarrassed by their comments. Instead, I get the feeling that everyone feels like they did what they must and the outcome matched their expectations based on the world they each perceive. I think it's instructive to review the episode and consider whether a different approach might have been able to reach a better result.
The thing about political discussion—the identifying feature of it, which is the same thing that makes it such a problem—is that it sucks people into it. There can be four productive subthreads of a discussion all peacefully chatting, and then a political subthread gets started and from then on, all the comments end up on the political tangent subthread and discussion of the original non-tangential topic is forgotten.
This is a structural pattern to how posts happen—the kind of thing you can identify with linear regression on time series of post metadata. Politics is almost literally a "black hole": it has greater "mass" than other subjects, sucking commenters away from their original intent toward political subthreads. If you model subthreads as having that sort of "gravitational force", you can predict the ones with the highest "pull" will be political in nature. (Well, that, or a subthread indulging HN's fun habit of primary sources showing up to make comments on stories about them. But those subthreads likely have very low "controversy" metrics [in the Reddit ranking algorithm sense], which can be used to filter those out from political consideration.)
I'd like to point out that this site is called "Hacker News", not "Technical and Business News". While there is no single "hacker political stance", there are ethical principles embraced by the community that can be applied usefully to policy questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics
As many have pointed out, it's really the subjective content of this site (here in the comments) that has the most value.
By all means let's have a civilized conversation but we're in a political crisis and "we" as "hackers" need to help fix it, not wish it wasn't so.
For instance, I just came across this interesting article from The Brookings Institution: "Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs low-output America" [1].
It's a look at how the election broke down by county. Clinton won 472 counties, Trump won 2584. The counties Clinton won produce 64% of the country's GDP, with Trump's counties producing 36%. With the exceptions of the Phoenix, Fort Worth, and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won all the counties that have large economies.
They have a neat visualization of all the counties by size of contribution to GDP and who won them.
The discuss how this big a divide is "unprecedented in the era of modern economic statistics".
The article itself is not taking any political position. It is just providing a way to perhaps get some insight into how the election came out the way it did.
Would this article count as politics and so be subject to this week's ban? Or is it an interesting look at data that happens to be data about a political event?
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another...
I think the idea is, basically, that rather than "calling out" these things and getting into a big argument about them each and every time they happen, you just (indicate to the mods that you want to) blow them out of the sky.
So my only piece of (hopefully) constructive criticism is that I think there's a prima facie less biased stance to take with an announcement like this. It might go like:
Dear HN,
HN, as a public discussion forum, is a dynamical system that's always "attempting" to spiral out of control. Hence, we have moderators. Our moderators can only inject so much stabilizing energy into HN, and we've noticed that many or most political discussions are more energized than we can handle. So, we're going to see what HN looks like from a moderator's POV when we disable political discussions.
I guess this too sounds a little alarming, but my point is that I think there could be a way to talk about the issue at hand in terms of pure magnitudes instead of using language that says anything qualitative about different types of discussions. Something about the idea that "we have certain values, these discussions aren't aligned with our values, these discussions don't belong here" is a little off-putting.
All that said, it's not at all ridiculous to test whether or not banning political debate may in fact make HN a more robust and effective knowledge hub. Hopefully this experiment will yield interesting results.
HN should stand up for values it believes in, not just tech as if it exists in a vacuum. If HN believes in diversity and LGBT rights, it should stand up for it. If HN believes in corporate deregulation and dismantling of the EPA, it should stand up for it.
The idea that HN is neutral on all these issues is just false. HN is the people who run it. They have views and a vision for the site. What kind of site do they want it to be? Stand up for that vision. People who don't like it can go elsewhere.
Reddit and Twitter and other sites have made a huge mistake in the past allowing racism and hate to fester in their midst. They should have thrown those people off years ago. They have other sites to go to.
Anyway, that's my view. It's time for people to stand up for what they believe in.
But as we know, some parties prefer more stringer voter identification at the expense of supression, and vice versa.
None of that is to say that politics isn't important, or that I don't enjoy discussing the subject. It just isn't mainly why I come to HN, and I honestly feel a little dirty every time I get drawn into a political discussion here.
1) Many things are political on some level. Consider encryption, the future of technology, automation, global trade. What counts as political?
2) Not discussing things that are deemed "political" is itself a political act - you're basically saying, "we don't need to talk about these things that are actively causing harm." Often times, this is a show of support for the status quo - it's the privileged who get to say what conversations can and cannot be had, and they rarely say, 'let us stop talking about this subject that deeply affects us'. They say that about things that don't matter to them, because they're worried about civility.
3) Some people are actually actively fighting for their very right to exist, politically and in the physical world. Consider the current administration's (especially the VP) stance toward LGBTQIA people, or toward abortion, or consider the active physical harm perpetrated on the bodies of non-white people by institutions and corporations. If you're upset because people are getting their feelings hurt, consider the people whose actual bodies are being hurt, whom you are now potentially silencing.
Sure, maybe hackernews should be a place where people post stuff like "Show HN: Version 1.2 of my parsing state machine" and nothing else. Maybe we yearn for the yester-days of freshmeat or whatever.
I don't operate under the assumption that HN is a free space or a space for me in particular or demand the right to say anything I want on its platform. I did appreciate its relative openness and the general quality of its commentariat. But this experiment has radically altered my opinion of HN as an online space. I'm going to re-evaluate that, I guess.
This really does feel like someone grumpily saying, "keep it down, kids, we're trying to eat dinner here!"
I disagree strongly with suppression. You break it, you own it. the point of view of most younger and not so young people is nowadays mediated through tech via social media. Here is the place where it is most important to have a debate about that.
If you want to moderate it differently from other subjects, add a different set of tags or karma reservoir so that it doesn't spill over from it. I think it's important to keep the political stories on the front page, especially as this election's outcome will create incredible changes.
Aren't those just subset off politics?
Consider an article about discrimination in the hiring practices of startups. Is that "political" under this policy? My guess it is. And so out come the flags and the status quo is reinforced by the thunderous claim that it's Just Not A Problem--because, whether or not flags mean "this is bad and obviously unimportant" to 'dang, that's what they mean to the audience. And so, incrementally, the culture here gets worse. And worse. And worse.
I don't agree that everything is political, unlike most of the protesters above. We have sister sites like lobste.rs that have even less politics than we do and seem to have some useful dialog.
I have always missed the less political atmosphere we used to have and am really glad to see this "cleanse." I hope it helps reinstate some of our culture, even if it is temporary.
"A story about systemic gender discrimination in tech should be flagged under this policy."
"A comment regarding a person's startup experience that describes how their experience has been impacted by their race or gender identity should be flagged under this policy."
"A discussion of the sociological impact of Facebook's news curation tools should be flagged under this policy."
And yet, teaching people new things tends to affect the world more than political discussion ever could. I'm happy that HN exists as a solace from the political storm the rest of the world is wrapped up in.
Of course politics will affect each of us. But as tptacek is fond of saying, HN can't be all things to all people. It's more important to preserve the spirit of the site than to affect change. (In fact, it seems like one comes at the cost of the other.)
...then go write another political policy blog post about how a board member's politics aren't representative of a company's mission, etc, rinse, repeat.
You might be suggesting an unconscious and in a sense innocent psychological bias.
I also allow that a comment like the GP is in a style intended to twist and inflame. In this context the motivation could be to keep HN on the trajecory of more noise.
Anecdotally, I had a neighbor who programmed the guidance systems for bombs, and the only reason I remember him is because immediately after introducing himself as such, he followed up with, "But I'm not the one who's dropping them. By making them smarter I can save lives".
I think that no matter how technically intelligent a field's operators are, they are still subject to the same dissociations as everyone else.
The opposite people feel the opposite:
Thank you for reminding us here about that. Let's make it a month? A year? :-)
If you clean out some of the more inflammatory words, you make a decent point. I agree that censorship should be avoided, and I see a push on the left for censorship.
EDIT: I initially said I agree with the tone but that was poor editing on my part.
Technically true. But practically speaking, I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others. If that's true, then this moderation should boost the general quality of HN comments and topics, which is why most of us come here in the first place. As a comparison, I was initially annoyed that simple jokes / witty remarks that were void of other content were down voted on HN. But long-term I compare it to reddit and agree with the method: I can still go to reddit if I want wit (I often do). I (ideally) come here for high quality technical content.
Step 2: Figure out a way to Avoid Problem
Step 3: Attain Nirvana
For example, a story about a new data analysis tool or technique used by police would presumably still be on topic. Would a comment discussing how this tool might disproportionately affect minorities be considered off-topic politics? If that story is allowed but the discussion about race is not, the marginalized people might feel like they need to go elsewhere.
The unfortunate fact is that political discourse in America (and, I understand, in many places elsewhere), has been reduced to lizard-brain questions.
In particular, but certainly not as the only example, the US president-elect ran on a platform that many of us would characterize as playing off machismo and fight-or-flight, rather than actual policy proposals.
HN is a good thing not because it's a way to waste time at work, but because discussing technology ultimately helps us create better technology. But the assumption in this decision seems to be that discussing politics doesn't help us make better political decisions.
I think it's clear to most of us that tech's recent success is due in large part to communities -- open source, StackOverflow, and yes, HN. We learn from each other, and this makes us all better.
If we think this model doesn't apply to politics, that each of us is better left to make up our minds independently, and that we cannot learn from each other, I fear for the future of democracy.
And those issues are not just a one sided affair. It is politics after all. HN is impartial in that it silences both sides of that story (the other side being affirmative action or racial discrimination in favor of those who are supposedly oppressed).
And frankly, a 'detox' is absolutely the wrong word for it. The emotions for me at least come from feeling scared. I have several family members who will lose coverage if the ACA is repealed and I have muslim friends who are looking at the prospect of being sent to interment camps.
This is anger and fear that should be cultivated, not extinguished.
sudo bash -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts'> The problem isn't the politics, the problem is the lack of thoughtfulness.
Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness. I don't know if it's impossible to have the two together, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible at scale.
I would argue that the opposite is necessary, as a general rule of discourse: we should calmly and confidently talk about politics with anyone and everyone. We should be able to have discussions about things like taxes, the military, and technology, without resorting to screaming and shouting names.
One could make the argument that Hacker News is not a political forum, but I think explicitly discouraging political discourse is not healthy in the long run.
This may be partly because so many thoughtless people feel qualified to enter a political discussion (e.g., about basic income, or immigration), whereas they couldn't even pretend to understand real-time operating systems or functional programming enough to have an opinion.
Part of the beauty of HN is getting opinions about things that matter in the real world, from people who really think about things.
Arbitrarily banning relevant political topics could take away alot of the value I get from Hacker News. I expect news on Trump banning net neutrality to be on Hacker News. I expect news on fully automated McDonalds to be on Hacker News or Amazon suffering a bot revolt.
I can understand a need to flag unrelated political comments on non-political topics.
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. Here is a group of technologists that could in theory spin up another forum with moderation tools and integration with HN to have back and forth between the two forums based on what "flavor" (political or technical) the discussion was going in and all I see is second-guessing and critiquing with no actionable and constructive items in the mix.
I support the experiment! This is the sort of creativity and character that brings me to this site! I'm OK with topics with too much political overtone being a little stigmatized.
But yeah, partisanship, not so much. Maybe a week of non-politics will help level the conversations here, though it's still a relative oasis compared to just about anywhere else online.
Is the incipient problem, for those not so fortunate as to be born white and male, perhaps a little clearer now? (And, to be clear, I am a white male. I'm just not blind to the concerns of others.)
It will be nice to see HN minus the outrage and Twitter/social media drama/witch-hunting.
"Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new." is very vague.
This sounds more like an exercise of power.
Of course that can be a slow process, but anyone who doesn't want to be banned is invited to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that they'll abide by the rules in the future. And if you see a case of someone being banned that you think is incorrect, you should email us about that too, because we don't see everything.
In recent threads, I've made some factual observations, only to have people imagine a slant or motivation, then argue with that commenter of their imagination. I think HN is succumbing to the "Arguments as Soliders" antipattern:
If hacker news is getting political, that is a function of it's users ( and the social climate ). A community is built by its members. For better or worse.
Work on addressing the issues that make the discourse toxic. What does covering the sun with the censorship finger actually accomplish?
Trying to diversify discourse here sounds like the opposite of looking for an echo chamber, and the 'tech community' is in dire need of it, at least as far as politics is concerned
Whereas as another participant, I see your approach as more akin to a 'griefer' than play tester. I think there is a difference between testing a pre-release game, and disrupting others who are trying to find a community in which to communally understand the world. There are some good parts that would be sad to lose, and even without deliberate misrepresentation the situation is fragile. Please be gentle with your research, and don't take for granted the resilience of the community here.
I just don't agree that HN is "equally-biased", and I have the post history to prove it.
Perhaps those of different biases are more or less likely to flag or vote? That is, could there be many here who believe more strongly in the positives of free speech, and thus are reluctant to flag comments they disagree with, such that a small number of flaggers who do not share this view have a disproportionate voice? I don't know what the vote-to-view ratio is for HN, but I'd presume it's very small, with the flag-to-view being miniscule in almost all cases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108944
So, that immediately prompted follow-up comments about rivalries between northern and southern Californians over water use (edit: including whether the choice of this metric is southern-Californian political propaganda!), about whether Californians can manage to reduce the amount of water that we need, about whether the west has too much human settlement, etc. While those may not align very well with political ideologies that have been the most controversial here, they could be seen as political questions (and they could potentially lead to flamewarring over different aspects of environmentalism).
How does this kind of topic fit in with this plan, dang?
I'm not a white male and I never think to bring up issues affecting my group to the discussion. It doesn't brother me that those issues are barely brought up.
edit: grammer
Let's not pretend that we can talk about the current political spectrum with anything near the certainty and information we have about Nazi Germany, the economic policies that were involved at the time, the propaganda used, and the world events at the time.
No Trump/Clinton stories for a week.
These are the ones that are the major trouble makers. And since there is no chance of an article on the culture war not mentioning those people - this will rid of the second tier stories too.
I have to admit, it really irked me at first when I came here. How can all these people that like the same things as me, have ideas that are so ... "wrong?!" (just kidding, honest :) ) But then I learned to listen and realize that these opinions will be here whether I engage them or not.
Of course, I see subthreads that aren't very "objective in the way I want them to be". But I don't share your experience with downvotes. I try to refrain from trying to convince the person I'm directly replying to if their view is directly opposed to mine, that never works any way. I just state my own personal position and how it reflects. Sure I get the occasional downvote but that's almost always when I've let myself be confrontational about it. Also, there's a big difference between providing a link to some facts that a person might not know, and a very opinionated link (that may also have facts and numbers) that is arguing your point.
So yeah, while I support the experiment (it'll be interesting to see), I really hope they don't extend this to forever, but just occasionally after particularly turbulent US elections.
Finally:
> fair treatment to minority opinions
Come on what does that even mean? I don't know what your opinions are. You don't know what mine are (you can read my comment history but good luck). I have no idea what "fair treatment to minority opinions" should even mean. My opinions are minority opinions too (I'll change them if you don't believe me), but I know this; 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.
Admittedly I'm probably at the point where I don't even see it when it's right in front of me, but it would be interesting to here from the mods of people who frequent /new.
But I disagree about the approach -- what is politics anyways? Most polarizing these days: probably gender, race, and socioeconomic status, and the various parties cater to those human categories. We all inherently have these things that form the basis of our thoughts and how we see the world -- so I honestly don't think it's easy to separate.
If the cost of thoughtful conversations on politics is dealing with flame, then many of us are glad to pay the cost of doing business -- and I hope you'd find a majority of people here would behave similarly.
This is why I support a moratorium on politics here. This kind of assumption and hyperbole is really off-putting. I'm happy to debate these topics, but not here.
Now, that said, it's going to be a little murky. For example, I want to examine Ed Ou's detention at the US border. What if something breaks about Snowden or Assange? How about net neutrality?
But your distinction is a good one regarding partisan politics, vs politics in general.
The tech community is already perceived as being out of touch, it's not going to help if we keep our head in the sand.
You see this kind of problem on debates about climate change. Once people learn about environment and ecology they tend to assume that humans have an unavoidable impact on the planet. Climate change "deniers" simply have a different intuition. All the science in the world is not going to change that. Which is why it is political, and not objective.
Really the entire point of politics is to debate things that lack definitive truth. Of course that is probably true of anything that is discussed on a forum to a lesser or greater extent. Otherwise the answer would already be on Wikipedia.
Lisp date from 1958 and some would argue that rule-based programming is AI. Eliza is also more than 5O years old.
The ethics of AI have been extensively discussed for a very long time.
In essence, the debate taking place around AI is a heir of the 19th debate on automated looms. Karel Čapek play, Robots, has been written in 1920 and it was already an ethical discussion of "autonomous machines"...
My first introduction to AI and its consequences and dilemna come from Isaac Asimov Foundation Cycle and that dates back to the 1950s.
AFAIK, the 3 Laws of Robotics invented by Asimov are actually used by philosophers & AI practitioners.
(I added and then removed references to the Golem, but...it could be argued as relevant to this discussion)
I am quite vehement in this discussion exactly because I am currently debating whethever or not I should release a new AI software I have designed. From a technical standpoint, I am quite proud of it, it is a nice piece of engineering. From a political standpoint, I feel that tool could be used for goals that I am not sure to agree with...
Find just about any article on the hacker mindset and politics, aside from the desire for freedom, won't be anywhere near the top of the list. Nothing about Republicans, Democrats, race, etc.
Some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28subculture%29 http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://suntzu23.blogspot.com/2006/11/five-principles-of-hack... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.html
The article was not "how to argue with people you disagree with" but how to connect with an audience who does not believe in a scientific consensus due to misinformation. In fact the point of the article had nothing to do with arguing (or political parties), but rather empathetically connecting with an opposing viewpoint.
This is exactly what I meant from my parent comment. Because a topic has been hijacked by political parties we can't bring it up? Climate change = science topic. It is a well documented phenomenon that 97% of the world's climate scientists agree on [1].
Being on either side of the political spectrum is irrelevant here, as at its core this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with science.
Anyway, I like the non-political week. Anyway... that's just my two pence...
I would suggest that maybe this isn't true for people who aren't you. And who aren't me. Many things, like getting a job as a software developer or talking to my boss--things I think you and I can probably agree are likely shared experiences?--feel very apolitical for me. And it is understandable that they feel that way: because I am the beneficiary of the biases extant in society. I get the breaks. It's "normal" for me to look around and see nobody having it easier than I do and when I fuck up (god, do I fuck up!), I am not othered so that my actions reflect on my race or gender, but on me specifically.
Such an "apolitical" world, such an "unbiased" world, may not exist for, say, women or African-Americans or trans folks. And sweeping that realization under the rug is, by itself, a political act in favor of the continuation of the incentives and the policies that create that situation that lets me be comfortable and "apolitical" and ensures that other folks cannot be either.
Nothing is apolitical: it just may work to your benefit. And it usually works to mine--I am fortunate to have the grace to understand just how lucky a dice roll I got, and that's why I can't be on-board with policies that want to prevent discussion of whether the dice are loaded or not.
We're happy to clarify (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614) but it's impossible to draw a precise line. Moderation is about a few core principles and a lot of case-by-case judgment calls, and it's inherently unsatisfying.
Whatever rules we have, though, we apply them less rather than more in cases where YC itself or a YC startup is at issue. That's one of the rules :)
In my opinion, the fix is to mark then as political and give the user the choice to bypass them. Either as a prefix such as in "Tell HN" or to flag it as such via a clickable option. Putting a defacto policy against political news is a bad idea.
The flames,etc are symptoms..and this is just as bad..
We need a somewhat deeper solution and the discussion of one...
When I look at the tone of the downvoted/flagged "dissident" comments (not a value judgment, just an objective description of perspectives that are not generally well-tolerated in intelligent, cultured, Western circles today), and compare it to the tone of the "normative" comments, I see very little difference.
They are both slightly snarky, hostile, exasperated and dismissive. If I was moderating on tone to oppose conflict, I would not like seeing either kind of comment. But I would not consider this tone level worthy of the Giant Banhammer.
But the banhammer is applied very asymmetrically -- both by voters/flaggers, and by moderators. Or so it appears to me.
The result is a context in which "dissidents" feel like they're essentially sitting in the back row next to the teacher's pet. Any time Jamal has a spat with Andrew, the teacher's response is the same: "Jamal, why did you hit Andrew!" "Jamal, stop being mean to Andrew!" But Andrew can say pretty much anything to Jamal.
And both sides argue vociferously that the teacher is unfair. Jamal feels it's unfair that the rules seem to be different for him and Andrew. Andrew feels it's unfair that Jamal, that annoying idiot, is even allowed to be in the same class as him.
It's relatively easy to adopt "both sides complain about the teacher" as the definition of "the teacher is just enforcing fairness and good behavior." But in fact, whatever the teacher draws the line, one side will always want it farther to the left, and the other side will always want it farther to the right.
A critique of the status quo that doesn't generate controversy is probably irrelevant.
> 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 them as an agree/disagree vote in political threads, whereas they serve as an informed/uninformed vote normally.
For example, you could use your justification for banning any discussion about HN's rules since that would also be subjective and have minority viewpoints unfairly downvoted. People are often passionate about any rules changes as we can see by the upvotes on this submission. Do you think discussion about this rules change should be banned too?
In fact, most voting machines don't check ID at all; they leave that to the humans. (If they did check ID, the machines could secretly match votes to names.)
Who is the deity that gets to determine what the "spirit of the site" is? Is that spirit not simply made up of the collective users and dynamic by nature?
Decides and all wise and smart moderator. People on HN somehow are capable of perfectly logical and intellectually enlightening arguments when discussing Javascript frameworks, best practices of team management, recruiting processes and if women are less paid in tech industry and their love and devotion for Elon Musk.
> Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.
How a detox week helps compared to outright banning it ? Isnt that better ?
This is how I read above comment:
Some HN users might be feeling triggered to hear opinions that go against their own political opinions. Such people might be in large numbers. Censoring political opinions might help HN to keep these users. But HN moderators are not sure if this hurts HN very badly. This detox week is basically an A/B test to see if HN does indeed lose by censoring political opinions.
This must be renamed to "Political Safe Space Week to figure out if we can outright ban political speech on HN".
I'm reminded of Ted Nelson's notion that politics, loosely defined, is "clash and reconciliation of agendas" and, "If software is successful, it steers the path that many users take, and selects among many possibilities to further the creator's agenda...Suppressing the other possibilities may also be part of the agenda."
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/video/the-politics-of-internet-soft...
In any case, I get & appreciate the practical goal here and what you're looking to accomplish. I know I specifically need a Trump-related detox, in general (although not because of anything I've seen on HN).
I think this is exactly the place to do it as the people who would be involved in its creation are likely here. Where else would be a better place?
If I post about the rising cost of computers, is that political since costs could be influenced by tariffs or gov policy?
I've always felt the HN community as a whole was respectful to political points and now seeing this be censored is a bit of a downer.
Removing political discussions is in itself tricky since the definition of what is political is subjective. But removing certain kinds of political discussions is even harder to do well, if not impossible. If it's still going to be allowed to post things about housing markets, education, economics, regulation or other areas where social science arguments are relevant. You must also be able to express arguments or submit stories that uses subjects like class or gender. Otherwise you are removing certain perspectives from the discussion in favor of arguments outside those perspectives, which is censorship.
I don't think polarization is the problem, nor even that society is more polarized now than before. In many way it's the opposite. Subcultures and large dividing issues are to some extent a thing of the past. People tend to have less developed views and less experience with other peoples views. Which makes disagreements more personal.
I don't program guidance systems for bombs, but I program marketing tools which are, in essence, tricking consumers into buying stuff. I dissociate myself with that issue by considering that any commercial relationship is based on tricking the other party into buying more stuff, but I would totally understand if someone objected that my software is not morally acceptable to them (and I would politely suggest that they go bother someone else :p ).
Further down the line, we could end up discussing if living in a society based on capitalism is "right" or "wrong". I would totally understand if people considered that as "not an HN worthy submission", but I think that inside a thread on the moral, philosophical and social consequences of AI, it could come up as a subject...and be down-voted if need be, not flagged as off-topic.
And it's not just about finding out that I'm completely wrong. Sometimes it's just a new light, and sometimes it's just the reminder that really smart people too believe some things that I didn't think were possible for a "reasonable smart person" to believe (if you don't think you need constant reminding of this, ... well ... haha ;-) )
Kind of plan on staying that course.
Keep the political links, discussions, etc. It's not like I have to read them or comment on them if they appear.
And neither do you.
Well, okay: one solution, if there's no practical way around the asymmetry, would be to make it explicit in the guidelines. You could say: when expressing unpopular views, make a quadruple-strong effort to ensure your perspective is presented clearly, sincerely, civilly and humbly.
What really rankles Jamal isn't even that he's a second-class citizen. He could deal with that. What rankles him is that everyone keeps denying that he's a second-class citizen, while in practice treating him as one.
No offense to the HN moderation team, but I have very low confidence that this is going to be how it works out. :/
I think the better explanation is that a lot of tribalism is slipping through the filter, so the filter is becoming more strict for a time.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide, All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."
Information/Internet technology is inseparable from politics now. I never asked for that and neither did any of us, but that's the inescapable reality. Our inventions are being used to both enhance and disrupt democracy, and they are causing real people real pain along with the huge benefits to millions of others. Like many, my own productivity has taken a huge hit in the last year because of all of the political news. I resent this in the same way I'd resent a hurricane hitting my house, but pretending it isn't happening won't help. HN being a blend of pure tech stories along with political+tech stories is absolutely the right blend because IT REFLECTS THE REALITY OF TODAY'S WORLD. Trump's election is the biggest change in politics in the last 50 years, and IT was at the heart of that election, in terms of the forces that have caused the desire for change (e.g. worker displacement, cultural upheaval), and the mechanics of the election itself (e.g. Twitter, news feeds, fake news, media manipulation, big data, etc.). We, the IT workers of the world, are the new weapons-makers. That we never meant our work to be used that way is immaterial. Everybody in tech should now be politically informed. We should be tuned in. We should know details. We should learn the facts. I'd love to spend 100% of my time learning about new frameworks and hardware, and that's what I enjoy doing. We have the ring now, even if we never wanted it. Now it's our job to keep it out of hands of evil.
P.S. I started writing this response with, "Good! I am so sick of reading about politics everywhere. Great move, HN!". Then I changed my response to the one above.
Because the YC/HN culture is to experiment to inform future direction. "just for a week" probably means "just for a week, so that we can see if it negatively or positively influences the quality of discussion... and, if the effect is positive, we may implement a similar policy for the long term"
Thus, "just for a week" doesn't appear to have much relevance since the experiment is (presumably) part of a longer term plan to curb hostile commentary.
I don't understand why people on the left assume he was lying all of the times he delivered toned down statements and was only telling the truth when at the most extreme.
[0]I was unable to post this comment when I wrote it, and had to wait.
This is exactly why people are compelled to speak up politically in every space they can. You are not affected by the policies other people are afraid of and you feel slightly inconvenienced by talk of them and want talk swept under the rug. Whereas the other side says "we cannot sweep this under the rug because of how important it is to our well being."
HN is like a "release early, release often" sort of software project, which would require active testers on live code. I sincerely doubt that my sole efforts to study/game the system really made much effect overall to moderation. However, I definitely try to take your advice, and will continue to do so.
What I've found about voting/flagging is it's largely laziness, and those who take the opportunity to downvote first. Most of my posts are either downvoted within 5 minutes, or upvoted to +2 or 3, then actively downvoted to -3. There is usually a bottom on meta-moderation, though; once a post gets to -3, a post is rarely seen enough to be flagged. This goes triple for older submissions; if you make a new post on a day-old thread, even the most vitriolic and offensive post possible, you may get a 0 karma for the post. if you're unlucky. Either way your post will be near the bottom, even if +1.
I've had this account for 3 years now, and I had my first two flagged posts today, which tells you how little they are flagged.
If you're 45 minutes late to a topic, you'll likely read for a few minutes before you get to the bottom grey area. Most readers of comments flake out of a thread before they get that far. The ones that stick around usually notice the grey text, and don't downvote or flag, even if they disagree heavily with the comment. This is why it gets interesting when I experience late downvote-bombings, or someone that was so offended by what I said, that they downvote my post history; it means that someone went looking for me to retaliate. These anomalies provide a lot of information about the mean moderation activity, I think.
I'm seeing that all sides of a debate seem to have equal amounts of apathy when it comes to downvoting or flagging, and I attempt to account for that when playing.
I'm tempted to try and see how long a "Trump Supporters for Systemd" post would last in a linux thread this week, but I probably won't.
HN is already pretty bad at silencing opinions outside the groupthink common wisdom; I think this would just make it worse.
Very much agreed. I find dang having a problem with political accounts amusing, given it was dang's moderation that inspired me to make mine.
The issues will still be there to fight when you're done, just in a more appropriate forum.
So I love Plato's work on SiFi hypothesis : what it means to be invsible and the implication on moralilty (cf privacy) ... just philosophy.
So I love Jeremy Bentham nerdy works of architecture on how to build perfect jails where the one in power can watch everything the others do without being watched ... just architecture.
Finally, I love Gary Gigax (D&D) quote : evil (or politic) is in the eye of the beholder!
You should learn to take feedback less personally.
It doesn't feel good and I don't come here to feel like crap.
If someone uses emotionally charged language to denigrate you, then I think you have a valid complaint. But the interpretation you assign to a downvote is just that - your interpretation.
Carl Sagan, Buckminster Fuller, Thoreau, MLK and many others all spoke about how our technological development is far outpacing our sociopolitical development, to our own demise.
Arbitrarily attempting to censor and separate the two is grossly negligent.
That's the rub: political disagreements tend to go beyond facts and into the realm of values, at which point it's no longer a matter of informedness. This phase change in the debate can be hard to detect, as even the debaters might not realize they are no longer arguing from facts (since their deeply held values may 'feel like facts'), but IMO it's the reason political discussions tend to decay in quality at a certain point, because one side is no longer honoring the previous terms of the debate, knowingly or not.
For what it's worth, I think political debates on HN are worth having and can be very productive, because my subjective sense of the HN population is that a higher percentage of us are open to reevaluating our beliefs (and potentially our values) in the face of new information than the human population at large.
However, I definitely like that you're trying it out.
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/20/donal...
> Donald J. Trump, who earlier in the week said he was open to requiring Muslims in the United States to register in a database, said on Thursday night that he “would certainly implement that — absolutely.” Mr. Trump was asked about the issue by an NBC News reporter and pressed on whether all Muslims in the country would be forced to register. “They have to be,” he said. “They have to be.’’ ... Asked later, as he signed autographs, how such a database would be different from Jews having to register in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump repeatedly said, “You tell me,” until he stopped responding to the question.
Okay, I've flagged this one thread titled "Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week". It was this strange and laborious screed about how political speech is harmful or something?
Privileging "non-political" speech is an implicit endorsement of the status-quo, and thereby, an incredibly political action.
That being said, I think I understand where this is coming from, so I have empathy with dang and the hn team about it, but I disagree with this move on principle, especially now, at a time when some very important techno-political moves are being made.
For example, the FBI now claims to have the ability to use 0-days to hack thousands of computers on a single search warrant! It's completely unconstitutional, and that is a huge deal, technologically, and politically, that I haven't seen addressed by any crowd very well, and it's the kind of discussion HN needs to have, not to avoid. To suddenly have a non-political week when some of the most important things, time sensitive things, are happening right now is not good at all.
The timing of this also feels suspicious, and there is something else that feels suspicious to me as well, and that's the algorithm that controls what is on the front page. I've seen repeatedly, enough to no longer call it just coincidence, that stories of techno-political important, like the FBI one, get ~250/500+ points and have ~100/300 comments, that are completely off the front page long before is normal for more mundane stuff. I think the hn userbase deserve more transparency on this front.
HN is an American based forum, so while I understand the want to lean towards a type of globalistic technocratic neutrality, I think that is a mistake and fails to take into account the primary user-base, and I think the hackers and geeks of the world, but in particular America, have a duty to participate in the political discussion that is going to be needed to steer policy of our American system, because the revolutionary nature of technology is quickly getting out of control for ordinary citizens and politicians, and our system impacts the rest of the world.
We need more politics, not less, but we need it in the unique HN style where people can have good manners on the discourse, which is much more conducive to intellectual conversation than just about any other internet forum I can think of other than slashdot in it's heyday.
With the increasing totalitarian surveillance society that we as hackers have handed to the politicians through technology, I think we have a duty to also protect the citizen-victims of our technology run amok in the hands of others. We can't, and shouldn't, hand a technological nuclear weapon to nation states and just walk away and say, but we just want to talk about the technology of the thing. It's a naive and fundamentally flawed process of thinking. I also think it's time for the HN team and it's users to have a more serious discussion about how they want to participate in the future of the internet, and the dystopian society it is enabling, piece by piece.
I also have a single question for the HN team:
Have you been pressured by the US government in any way shape or form on this subject?
In protest of this move, I will not be participating on HN until the week is up.
Also, yes, in a strongly charged political thread, up and downvotes are used very differently (compared to the wide variety of ways people use up/down otherwise, definitely not just "un/informed", take a breath and a step back and you can see that). I've seen it, and it seemed mostly there was wild voting going on, and if it changes the meaning in any sense, only to make the votes less meaningful, so just don't worry about it.
I've personally seen maybe two of those threads, cause as a non-US citizen I don't have much of a beef in it. I think stuff like that is what prompted this detox-week.
But from what I saw, the up/downvotes really went both ways. I know for sure, because that's when I realized the voting was going wild, reasonable comments on both sides voted in to greyness.
BTW the recent discussions about the new Macbook being sufficiently "Pro" or not, followed pretty much the same pattern and I'd love to have a detox week for those as well.
edit: Hey. So, we were explicitly not talking about our personal political points of view, but just about dealing with opposing views and reactions there on. Now I see you're getting greyed out. While I'm getting mad upvotes (you guys). Can we maybe agree that it's maybe perhaps not the political points of view that make the difference here, but rather the earlier-mentioned S2B ratio?
I know I just learned something from this meta discussion, about the argument that the economy can't support UBI based on GDP numbers, and I'm eager to go read more. Most arguments I have seen say it won't work because of moral hazards and I haven't seen an argument that says it flat out can't be done, because there are so many different approaches and different ways it could play out.
I'd be interested in examples of what a political story or a political thread are, because none were given.
I trust that the admins want the best for the community.
The reality is that the "latest and greatest JS framework" and how I can use it to make my clients happy is likely to have far greater impact on my family's situation than arguing endlessly about national and international politics. Arguing about politics online is about as useful to your personal situation as arguing about football team uniforms or Dancing with the Stars celebrity scores.
Then I hope it's just for a week. I know HN weights certain topics down already. I think there's a good argument for some of that, but I don't see an argument for more of it.
> There are two different kinds of site—intellectually curious and politically combative—and we literally cannot be both of them.
FWIW, as a user, I have not noticed an uptick in politically combative discussion on HN, although I have noticed the uptick in political posts. If your target demographic is basically founders/hackers/entrepreneurs/whatever, having a place to find relatively sane discussions about politics is a good thing. HN is pretty much that, I can't think of a place that's better.
I do think having lots of strong opinions in one place is a good thing and helps those opinions evolve towards something better. Echo chambers result in the information equivalent of inbreeding.
But that's my point, I very much don't want HN to become an echo chamber by, for example, banning political posts for more than 1 week (which is a weird experiment, but fine).
It absolutely doesn't have an overwhelming majority favoring any one US political party or candidate .
Like it or not, politics affects all of us. We don't have anything to gain by ignoring it, and the more we ignore it, the easier it is for them to get away with things that are good for them and bad for us.
It's a bit like the distinction between true democracy and a democratic republic. True democracy is mob rule. Democratic republics are slightly better at maintaining some sanity and objectivity.
That could certainly be true, but does that mean that they are important and appropriate in all circumstances? Are no areas allowed to have a politics free discussion?
I applaud this change. The only criticism I have is that it's limited to a week.
What are the criteria you've established for evaluating whether the experiment was a success? Do you have evidence of HN being used to seed political clickbait stories? Voting rings? Etc.?
The hysteria of thinking that we (the US) are one or two steps away from a police state is exactly why I support the notion of political bans on my computer related news sites.
And if you live in a country that is approaching a real police state, I would guess there are more appropriate locations for discussing your political situation than HN.
I come to Hacker News not only for the submissions but more so for the discussion. I find as of late discussions populated with meaningless content. It seems people feel a need to communicate what they are thinking regardless of the comments usefulness.
I fall prey to this too. If my comments are short I do try to make sure they are helpful in some way. I will try to keep them on-topic and not filled with worthless opinion.
I know I could just be very sensitive to anything that smells like censorship right now, and that could be coloring my visceral reaction here.
Still, I afraid of this becoming a thing. One week is a while and while I don't think the mods would ever dream of intentionally doing this, it could happen during important events.
It is really hard for me to imagine what metrics after the fact would justify this. How do you measure the effect of self censorship has on influencing people's beliefs here?
I am worried that this will generate some numbers that seem to justify the practice and it becomes a regular practice around politically charged events.
Agreed. I've been thinking about how communities can handle this problem for awhile. A solution to it would be revolutionary, in a very good way for the entire Internet, and what better place to experiment with and develop a solution than HN. Here's my over-ambitious shot at a solution, based only on experience in online communities:
------------------------
I propose that we have different rules, much higher standards for commenting, for hot button issues. When these situations come up, our moderators could post something like,
** Hot button rules apply **
----
1) Be precise: Who? Did? What?
Who should be a proper noun; only individuals (and in some cases, specific organizations like 'Acmesoft') actually have thoughts, motives, and perform actions; groups do none of those things - we are not hive minds. This eliminates lazily broad statements with huge implications that provoke anger and fear, stereotype large groups, and don't make us any better informed. 'Tennesseans hate Kentuckyians' doesn't inform anyone - there is nothing all Tennesseans agree on, and nobody can possibly read all their minds, and we know nothing more after reading it than we did before - but '60% of Tennesseans who responded to this survey say they have stopped visiting Kentucky' is fine.
Did: HN readers mostly grasp empirical science and should be able to understand: Only actions are observable, not other people's thoughts and feelings - though you can observe what they say about their thoughts.
What, used precisely, eliminates sloppy characterizations. 'Tennessee Governor Jane Jones despises Kentucky BBQ.' No, what actually happened? 'Tennessee Governor Jane Jones said, "I despise seeing Kentucky BBQ taking jobs from hardworking Tennessee chefs."'
Finally, Be precise also means: No hyperbole.
----
2) Context is required: Where and when
Where and when are essential context. Think of your high school writing guidelines: Who, what, where, when, etc. 'Tennessee Governor Jane Jones said, "I despise seeing Kentucky BBQ taking jobs from hardworking Tennessee chefs."': It is essential to know when she said that (1985? 2010? Before the Kentucky-Tennessee trade war began or after?) and where (On a campaign stop in a TN BBQ restaurant? The title of a book? A tweet? A warm-up joke for a speech?); otherwise, we have no idea what really happened.
----
3) Back it up:
The burden of proof is much higher, and on the commenter: Respected scholarly research (not someone's self-published book) or highly respected news media, and not in a column or editorial. Wikipedia's Reliable Source rules may help here, but with higher standards for sources (and also actually applied here; Wikipedia articles often ignore the standards).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
----
4) Be 100% respectful, as if talking to someone important to you whom you respect. No exceptions; no grey areas; stay well away from this line.
----
5) The only idea we don't tolerate is intolerance itself. See Karl Popper's Paradox of Intolerance if you want to go deeper on this. Or a simpler way to approach it: Tolerance is a social contract - you tolerate me and I'll tolerate you.
----
6) These rules apply to anyone you quote, also. You can't say 'Kentuckians suck', and you can't quote someone else saying it (except to talk about the quoted person's habit of broad stereotypes).
----
Comments violating these guidelines are immediately, mercilessly killed dead. Busy moderators may not have time to explain why, but in most cases you can find the reason(s) here pretty easily. Feel free to rewrite according to the guidelines and try again.
------------------------
By now you may be thinking: 'With those standards, I won't have much to say on inflammatory topic X!' or 'Those will be much shorter threads!' or 'I'd really need some good information and think it through in order to comment!' Good; you understand. Imagine if we restricted those discussions to only valuable, informative content. The contents of the threads could actually advance our knowledge about inflammatory, often very important, issues. It's almost hard conceive of. We could actually, in the heat of an issue, advance rational public discussion - a goal that has seemed so intractable that it's almost forgotten; it seems almost fanciful. The perfect challenge.
It also eliminates the prominent problem of people making endless wild allegations for others to refute (see rule #3 - they must back up what they post). So instead of endlessly repeating the same low-value information back and forth, we'd actually gain real knowledge from each other. And if some threads are very short, then what have we lost? A bunch of low-value comments from uniformed commenters? Ideological rants? Things we've heard a thousand times before? It even will save some disk space and bandwidth, and reduce page load times.
Finally, if it works - which not at all a sure thing and will require fine-tuning at the very least - the concept could be used by other online communities. What we develop here - not software, but guidelines for community interaction - it could change the world, in a way that it badly needs and longs for.
Note the "most". Pointing out one counter example where discussion barely shows up isn't a counterpoint. I would also argue that those experiences are shared but that is its own political discussion.
> Such an "apolitical" world, such an "unbiased" world, may not exist for, say, women or African-Americans or trans folks. And sweeping that realization under the rug is, by itself, a political act in favor of the continuation of the incentives and the policies that create that situation that lets me be comfortable and "apolitical" and ensures that other folks cannot be either.
I don't think it is reasonable to feel uncomfortable about not being able to discuss two sided issues on one board out of millions on the internet.
Political discussion is inherently caustic and damaging to discussion boards. Only small, heavily moderated boards can produce productive discussions. It is in the nature of simple user registration and no posting restrictions.
The idea that Hacker News or tech in general is a 'garden' which should exist separately from politics is simply naive and very privileged. Taking no position, or worse suppressing opposition is itself a position. This is a critical time of political organization and resistance in the days before the Trump administration takes control.
Even 7 days lost in this process, allowing the readers of this site to ignore the reality outside their doorstep is a concrete injury to the disadvantaged communities which will be targeted in the first weeks of the Trump administration.
Sister site to HN the way it looks.
It would be nice to be able to consider HN a welcoming, warm community but, on the other hand, I don't want it to be a fake sense of community -- I'm glad when people vilify me for my beliefs so that I can mark and avoid those people.
The way I see it, the mods are asking us all to hold our political tongues and see what the comments feel like. They're very clear that it's an experiment. Maybe when politics resume seven days from now, people will remember what quality discourse looks like. This is mods trying to keep the conversation good.
Speech is a form of power. Decisions about which speech is allowed affect the distributions of power and it's easy to see how the decision to ban politics is itself political.
In this sense it's not possible to ban politics from HN, only to change the distribution of politics.
We should examine the ways that a ban like this might change the distributions of politics and power among the HN community. I suspect we'd find it reduces the power among marginalized communities. Even if you're not from one of those communities you can really benefit by reading their writings. In that case to cut off those voices is a shame. It's a loss.
Who's deciding what counts as political and not? Moderators. We should examine that. "Banning politics" essentially becomes "Moderators politics."
Yep. I feel like my first mistake on this site was to argue with every comment I disagreed with. Unless the comment leads to an instructive discussion, it's OK to just downvote it.
When you consider HN submission rules, it does indicate "more than just hacking or startups" and things that "gratify intellectual curiosity" are in, but also that politics is generally off-topic. On a topic like this that toes the line, you probably should assume it's further off-topic than on.
The very nature of an article that is about how to talk to someone with an opposing viewpoint isn't satisfying an intellectual curiosity, but positioning someone to persuade others. Whether you phrase it as "connecting with an audience" or not, it's inherently about an argument, and how to win it.
I would argue that a discussion of new facts or research uncovered about climate change is a submission about science, and anything specifically about "climate change deniers" is politics, or at best, "argument".
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...
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."
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.
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.
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'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.
Yes, absolutely! I said this in another comment, I'm curious to see how this experiment goes but I'm also glad it's just for one week :)
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?
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
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.
Perhaps people aren't projecting so much as seeing your rules as a reflection of your beliefs, which you now say they are not.
I disagree. You cannot support intellectual curiosity without healthy, relatively unrestrained (in subject matter) debate.
Now, simply tribal displays that aren't debate where people engage with each other, are a problem and need to be corralled effectively to avoid becoming.the dominant form of activity.
But not only is "politically combative" not opposed to "intellectually curious" in a site, the former is essentially a necessitate to accept if you are going to have the latter.
Everyone on the right is calling this an affront to free speech.
When you piss off everyone, you are probably doing the right thing.
This is obviously false. For example, plenty of democracies have flourished despite having libraries where silence is golden.
> One could argue, that when you live in a democracy, politics are a necessary duty for every citizen.
HN is international and if I recall correctly, more than half of users are not from the USA. Some users don't live in a democracy and some don't believe in it.
To many, a comment that doesn't follow their personal logic or point of view is not a good comment. And you end up with echo chambers where only the comments that align with the majority of a community pop up, while the extremists (for lack of a better term) of a community are pushed to the bottom. Those extremists could easily be individuals sounding the alarm on something that's happening, such as skepticism for a story.
On Reddit and HN, I almost never downvote anyone because I think it's a terrible system that is too often abused and reduces the ability to have meaningful conversations about controversial topics.
How are things like job displacement and social media not simultaneously political and fundamentally products of hackers?
I 100% agree with this analysis, but is the answer really to avoid discussion of politics altogether? I don't agree, and I think of the forums I visit, this one has the best chance of maintaining a high percentage of rational discussion to tribal noise.
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, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-trans (etc.) - and for people who are Muslim, immigrant, women, trans and nonbinary people (etc) or allies to any of these groups. What people are telling you is that they see YC - and you personally - as siding with the bigots.
I was thinking more of the effect on me, and other users. I try to engage with people and understand why they hold the views they do. The greater the tolerance for users who are faking their viewpoints, the easier it is to fall into the habit of treating someone holding a genuine minority opinion as a troll or shill.
Other than being worried about the gaming approach, I agree with most of the rest of what you are saying.
But then, I guess, that person has every right to conflate moral and legal rights ... so sue me? :)
I understand it's a little contentious to remove an entire topic of discussion, but I also welcome this and if the experiment goes well I would like to see it go longer term. I'm guilty of engaging in political discussions on HN but I try to moderate my words, but I know there are many who don't moderate their words in part or at all and especially because of how polarized politics seems at the moment (in the US at least) it's maybe a smarter decision to not allow people the opportunity to not moderate their words.
Nope. I actually am at the receiving end. 2 of my cousins are married to illegal aliens (both Mexican women) and 1 couple has a child born here (so citizen).
Still I had a moment of clarity when I realized that
1) Trump was indeed Democratically elected, and 2) I don't gain anything by fretting over and stressing over after reading 1 bad news after another about his policies, because I really can't do anything as a single person (unless, of course, I make 1 issue my life long pursuit, then it's different).
I've chosen to focus on my Circle of Control and reduce or altogether eliminate my Circle of Concern
Related Reading: Circle of Control vs Circle of Concern: => http://www.jdroth.com/images/circle-concern-control.jpg
Even then, I scrolled back through your comments. The last time you got grayed out was over a month ago (although I'll agree that that thread was a little like what you describe, and I was really unhappy to see 'idlewords and 'tptacek say what they did, not least of all because of how much I respect them... I was in that thread too, and I'll remind you that the moderators closed it because it just turned into an all-out flamewar).
I agree with your political opinion, for what it's worth. But I don't agree that you should feel anything based on downvotes. Sometimes people will disagree with you. Sometimes they won't.
But never, ever let a little number next to your name control your life. Don't let it become who you are. Make your comments when you feel they're appropriate, and don't take it too harshly when you get knocked down.
I want you to know that you're welcome on HN.
The intention here is simply to treat political stories as off-topic for a week. The question of what counts as a political story vs. not, is pretty much an impossible one to answer in the general case, so I probably shouldn't have tried.
What do you think HN will be like when only the privileged ideologies are allowed?
It's one thing to say pogo sticks are off-topic in a unicycling forum, and quite another to say basic human drives (thought, sex, hunger, curiosity, creation, expression, socializing, prediction, story-telling, bonding, power, respect, exploration...) that pervade everything we do are "off-topic".
On the road to pathologizing and demonizing people who don't agree with us, this kind of compartmentalization is itself a mechanism we use to flatten and stereotype away the human needs, desires, and drives that animate others.
You may benefit HN (and society) more by acknowledging these entanglements and focusing instead on how to model, shape, and cultivate responsible civic discourse.
> The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity
> and thoughtful conversation.
> For one week, political stories are off-topic.
> Those things are lost when political emotions seize
> control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
I'm not aware of any other recent significant bans, so I don't know what user samstave means by ``They were like "Oh! BAM" A ban on /r/this and that.''
I appear to be the top ranked openly female member here and my experience of HN dramatically improved when Dan Gackle (aka dang) took over the role as lead moderator of the site. I have faith in his judgment, plus I have substantial soft skills myself. I do not believe he is going to do anything to shape HN into the sort of thing you are positing here.
It's time for HN to move to an independent forum.
And when are you going to use this newfound ability again? When you arbitrarily get tired of some other topic? And even if you use this responsibly, what about the person who has your job next?
I've been active on this site for over eight years now. We've managed to govern ourselves just fine. I really hope this isn't a moment we all point back to in the future.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095475
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886
What actually constructive on balance came out of these discussions? How can we improve the signal-to-noise ratio/reduce the tribal displays? This is a topic I'm genuinely interested in, so your take on it given your experience here on HN is of particular interest to me. I think it's not putting words in dang's mouth to say reducing the tribal displays (as opposed to stifle intellectual curiosity) is exactly what detox week is attempting to accomplish.
In practice, that distinction doesn't hold up—not on the public internet and not at scale. The discussions are tribal.
I'd be happy to say "No Tribalism on HN" but how would we enforce it and how could anyone comply? Tribalism is not something people have conscious control over.
I consider myself liberal, and generally in favor of things such as unions, workers'-rights, and anti-discrimination regulations, that serve to balance power in our society.
That said, I can definitely see an argument that unions are inefficient - they slow down rate of change, introduce barriers to new innovation, and require one-size-fits-all negotiation. This doesn't mean we need to remove unions, just recognize the tradeoffs.
Furthermore, I would myself argue that unions are a response (and a rational one) to an inefficient, asymmetric power structure. i.e., unions are a symptom of a problem, not a problem.
example:
Let's say there's an industry, where in a competitive, open, and rights-respecting market, workers could typically get $15/hr.
If there's a monopoly-employer and un-unioned employees, they can suppress the wage to $10/hr, concentrating profits to the employer. If there's a union, and no monopoly of employers, the union can force the wage to $20/hr, stifling the industry, and possibly preventing new employees from entering the marketplace freely. If the employers and union are at equal power levels, the wage sits around $15/hr, but there's a lot of red tape, and slowed rate of innovation, because of the nature of negotiations.
If you create a company that hires non-union workers, but treats them as well or better as unioned workers would be treated, you should have a competitive advantage.
And with power comes responsibility.
I can understand adjusting the amount of political discussion, but banning it seems like a derogation of responsibility - certainly if the ban were to persist.
Alternatively, if another leak like Snowden's comes out this week, would discussion be prohibited? What if a big tech company was found to be building a Muslim registry? Could you please clarify whether stories that are both technology and political will remain?
> What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments.
If that's the clear extent of the mission, that's a pity.
I'd argue there was always a subtext on HN, whereby hackers giving prominence to their intellectual curiosity is justified because this path also eventually produces Good Stuff, technology which solves real problems, and eventually creates wealth and makes people's lives better. I would thus recommend against drawing a bright line around 'gratify intellectual curiosity'.
If we're just clicking stories purely because it gratifies us, how's it different to just eating candy? It'd be a pity if that was all the community is intended to be.
To support your point, there's a press release circulating from Google and Facebook right now. They've launched a program to share hashes (fingerprints) through a database identifying offending ("extremist") content so it can be more efficiently removed from the web. Yet, we aren't allowed to comment on this - I just posted it and the story was flagged.
There's a huge difference between saying "No more gratuitous flamebait about the US Election", and "no technical discussion permitted about any topic that could possibly be controversial."
Perhaps a reasonable compromise could be to 'close' comments on such stories, rather than removing the links altogether?
In re your tribalism update - is 'tribalism' itself an issue? I don't think I personally mind someone being 'tribal' so long as their arguments are polite and reasoned.
The status quo is fuzzily defined at this moment so bias towards it is not as harmful as usual.
It's more like going on a week long vacation to a tropical island and deciding not to check email/go online for the entire time.
The rest of the world will still be there when you get back, and you won't have missed anything substantive by unplugging while you were away.
I'd love to understand the intent of detox week. I don't (either in terms of the intended scope of the policy or the motivation and intended goal state.)
And the issue I'm taking with elements of the description of either by dang (in a couple places in this thread) are both because I disagree with them phrased, and hope that pointing that out will lead to responses that better elucidate the whole picture.
But I suspect that the whole thing is trying to deal with a change in the political climate outside HN by modifying what is already a near-optimal policy in HN to one that is far worse.
As someone whose moderating experience was unpaid, I can tell you part of the reason for that: We resent having to deal with assholes who make our jobs difficult and don't appreciate us giving our time and energy to the site for free, because we believe in the cause.
No, it is not a neutral forum. There is no such thing.
Also, my honest feeling is "Feel free to start one." That isn't snark, but I assume it would be interpreted as such because you are asking people to start this rather than saying "Hey, guys, I am tired of this and I have started an open source version over at (THIS LINK) and if you are as fed up with HN as I am, hey, here is an alternative."
People who propose the kind of seemingly idealistic suggestions of the sort you are proposing almost never want to roll up their sleeves and do the work -- because, hey, work is hard and no one is paying them and yadda. Which is likely why HN is the place to be for so many people: Because it is well moderated by folks who get paid, because it supports a business agenda and doesn't need ads or the like to pay the bills. The business -- YC -- is plenty successful and can afford to support the forum for its purposes in a way that doesn't unduly impinge on what people can discuss here.
Hackernews articles and comments about flask, django, and mongo helped me get my first job. Ask hn helped me learn about consulting. I love reading the comments about the em drive to help me understand when the mainstream media doesnt explain or misrepresents.
Even today I still learn so much about js frameworks, and cool plugins or tips and tricks, seeing all this swamped by politics sucks.
Everyone wanting to continue these conversations, please join us there.
- what's extremist? this is just going to be used to silence my particular views
- this is anti-free speech
- some mention how this is against net neutrality
- some mention of Trump and the cabinet
- some discussion on how Facebook is not taking ownership of the problem
- Facebook echo chambers
- diversity, racism, gender, safe places, identity politics (and likely bathrooms)
- how this is needed to create a safer online community
- something about how this ties in with the views of the MSM (and likely some misrepresentation of polls)
- something about how this wouldn't be an issue if the results of the election would have been otherwise
- something about the difference between the EC and the popular vote
All of these points have been discussed ad nauseum in other threads with no appreciably constructive discussion.
And for the life of me I can't think of any technical discussion that would be made on the topic other than possibly on how calculating all of these hashes/signatures isn't really going to be technically effective to catch everything.
What's useful about that?
mini-project idea: HN discussion generator, maybe markov chain based. Provide a topic, out comes a full-fledged HN-style discussion, complete with vote/flag estimates (not for posting to HN, of course)
As my parting words from this site, I would ask that you please pay close attention to what is happening politically with regard to the laws which shape technology: the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Criminal Rule of Procedure 41, PATRIOT Act 215, FISA 702, and Executive Order 12333, but just as importantly, the individuals in the NSC, DNI, DCIA, DNSA and DIA/DCS leadership positions.
Community members, remember it is crucial for engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to have a voice in the forthcoming discussions of digital privacy, the extent of state power, and the policies that will be chosen. If you wish to conduct this experiment, perhaps a different time period would be better, as these officials are being chosen now, and the policies will be decided very soon.
Moderators, I ask you to use your power judiciously, and allow the maximum free discourse that you feel appropriate. Remember that you yourselves are not immune to the cognitive defects inherent in human nature. If you do adopt a more narrow curation policy, please guard against those passions carefully. Protect well this place you have built. It is more special than you realize.
Founders, design your technologies with an eye to how they shape public discourse, promote fact, and expose deception. Be better than my generation. Pursue ideals more noble than mere monetary profit. Don't just make something people want. Make something that matters.
Build the change you wish to see in the world. You did not risk everything to sell digital sugar water.
Others of greater tact than I will shape these discussions as they evolve here. But I myself will not abet censorship without objection, particularly at this moment in time. The time has come to vote with my feet. It has been a pleasure to know you all.
I wish you well in the days to come.
I think you missed the part where this was mostly one guy, evading their ban by re-registering new accounts. So it looks like dang was very ban-happy to just one of the sides, but it was one guy.
Apart from the multiple bans of one guy, I see comments from both sides of the argument getting called out about their tone.
>I don't understand why people on the left assume he was lying all of the times he delivered toned down statements and was only telling the truth when at the most extreme.
As someone on the left, it bothers me too. The guy has said many, sometimes mutually contradictory or impossible things, and has never given any indication of having reached some final disposition on anything. People somehow ignore everything he says that they could agree with as random lies, but analyze every year old tossed off tweet where he references some irrational policy or false fact as established policy of the next administration.
He creates a precarious environment for businesses that rely on established relationships with the traditional Republican and Democratic leadership group, and a precarious environment for minority groups due to his white identity politics pandering during the campaign. It's created such a distorted public discourse around the man that somehow Ted Cruz got painted as a more reasonable alternative. The institutional media attacks him in order to defend their business interests, and the majority (who are each a minority in some way), defend any media critique uncritically. The guy is not the devil, it's just in your interests to paint him as the devil if he isn't friends with the congresspeople that you own, and he's said enough contradictory stuff that your job is easy. Really, on social issues he ran as a mainstream Republican but with faux straight talk rhetoric that felt like it went further when it really didn't - if you're terrified of him, you should have been terrified of any of them. There are Muslim registries, they're just locked within accountable and unexaminable intelligence organizations, large and small. There is a wall. These were institutions born from bipartisanship.
Nevertheless, he's dangerous as any president could be, and more unpredictable than any president we have ever had. It's more important that we talk about the stuff he has said, not less. Whether or not you take it at face value is irrelevant when it's all you have to plan around. What's the alternative; to wait and see, and after it happens, start thinking about it? You shouldn't need to assume the earthquake will result in a tsunami to start preparing for it.
Your comment shows something that does disturb me on HN, though - comments that are being flagged for disagreement, rather than downvoted.
We should probably try to stay on the descriptive side as much as possible. Whenever making normative statements, we should probably make sure they are based on an unbiased collection of facts (and not ignoring inconvenient facts), with solid and clearly explained reasoning, and assumptions made explicit.
+1 - also an HN discussion auto-up/down-voter.
What's useful about that?
Personally, I've been struggling with the question of, are mega-services like Google and Facebook compatible with an open Internet? This helps to clarify my thinking.
Up to now I've been thinking about what evil they might do individually. Now I see the obvious: just like in any other industry, the objective is to reduce the market to a few major players (3-7). Then these become the only companies who can get "copyright clearances" or "non-fake news certification" in exchange for supporting their patrons' programs.
The idea that the two can be extricated from one another is absurd on its face.
But what's also notable is the boldness of saying it out loud. It has always been the policy of HN to flag out the majority of "politics" before it resides in the new queue for more than an hour or two.
This "experiment" will surely quash conflict, but by banning anyone who has any reason to express contention. The burden of social censure has always been placed firmly on the head of the aggrieved on HN, but it's been an unofficial policy until now. People like me are rate limited for being "too contentious" on political subjects already. Now we're outright forbidden from talking about it.
You don't get problems with large swaths of demographic groups being disenfranchised/turned away from the polls, because everyone is on the electoral roll.
And oh look, this is how a technical discussion about voting machines will drift in to non-technical political discussion. Viva la detox week I say.
But the truth is that engineering is intrinsically linked to the impacts it has on the environment, its social impacts, its political impacts, and everything else that it affects in this complex web that is reality. When engineering is taught in schools now, these impacts are a major focus. In civil engineering this means that projects are planned that at least take into account the people and communities they are displacing. In industrial engineering, it means sourcing materials from the right places, focusing on environmental impact, etc.
It's absolutely no different in software engineering, or high tech in general. By enforcing an 'apolitical' atmosphere in a tech discussion, you're consciously shifting the intelligence and nuance of the discussion back to a period before we started to consider the impact that technology has on society. This is a dangerous shift, and dumbs down the level of discussion that's achievable by muting voices that connect the discussion with its impacts in other areas. In effect, this actively enforces the status quo, and doesn't allow our discussion here to progress the industry as a whole.
I come to HN because it's a great resource to find interesting tech articles. It's also a great way to stay informed with the latest tech related news. But equally, I find discussion so engaging here because it seems to be so deeply ingrained the heart of the tech community, and because of that, can affect the way the tech world operates as a whole (even just slightly). Stripping down the discussion to a frankly old-fashioned apolitical "tech doesn't affect anything except tech" would be a sad thing for me to witness happen to HN.
They through out more baby, but do nothing additional about the bathwater we want to deal with.
https://medium.com/projectinclude/peter-thiel-yc-and-hard-de...
> But Thiel’s actions are in direct conflict with our values at Project Include. Because of his continued connection to YC, we are compelled to break off our relationship with YC. =Ellen Pao
I think it's a good think that people are indignant on both side. Let's organise ourself. We have the tools, the concepts, the technology. I am sure it's possible to find some common ground and have some data-driven debates/discussions and form some more balance opinions/belief.
I don't think this is the problem.
The problem is the echo chambers people surround themselves with (and tech companies explicitly try to cultivate) and a slowly dying news media desperate for views, and whipping up outrage in order to get them.
One hitch perhaps: topics that start off non-political but veer into politics … happens often enough.
A more democratic way would be for the community to either enable the hot-buttoning or be able to disable it with enough flagging.
When you think about it you're suggesting something akin to Wikipedia's sensitive page rules where extremely divisive pages are locked down and subject to higher scrutiny.
> Some users don't live in a democracy and some don't believe in it.
I look forward to arguing with monarchists about their views at some point in the future, then.
Places like /r/politics are often devoid of any real debate or critical argument, and are stressful and tiring to involve oneself in.
I do welcome a week without politics on HN, though I would not like to see it permanently in place such an exercise lets us fall back on what makes us happy.
Short answer: Because oftentimes a thread about a technology is about its concrete operational characteristics and applications, not it's social effects.
When you start dragging those into the topic, there's shockingly little depth to probe. AI will automate people out of jobs eventually - okay, and? You've moved the thread off topic. I came to read about how OpenAI works, not what the left, right, center, and upside-down think about the larger concept of AI, rather than the specific implementation called out in the thread title.
Here's the thread I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103742
A cursory reading suggests that somehow, that particular rabbit hole was avoided by everyone there. This kind of goes into what dang was saying, broaching the topic you just did in that thread would have just been unwelcome noise.
Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? Is that really an interesting discussion to have in every thread?
If that cup of coffee is from a civet[1], for example, then it does behoove you to consider the social ramifications of your actions.
And that sandwich, depending on who you are, what you look like, and where you are, could be considered extremely political.[2]
[1] http://world.time.com/2013/10/02/the-worlds-most-expensive-c...
[2] http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/6-legacy/freedom...
I don't think I can say why it is important to engage better than Charles Krauthammer, so I'll just put his words here.
"While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933… Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns."
Virtually any interaction between two people could be put into this bucket. If you want to just talk about adjust-your-pince-nez tech stuff, Lambda the Ultimate exists. Pretty much everything with more of a human element than that is intractably political--you just may not have a dog in the fight.
Hiring is political. Firing is political. Performance reviews are political. Getting funded is political. SOPA is political. Hate speech is political. Wikipedia NPOV is political. The surveillance state is political. Facebook's content filtering to show you what you want to see is...political.
This isn't stuff that "barely shows up". It's the core of the culture. Computers, ultimately, barely matter to tech--people do. And people are intractably political.
> I don't think it is reasonable to feel uncomfortable about not being able to discuss two sided issues on one board out of millions on the internet.
I'm being careful not to frame your arguments poorly; I would appreciate the same charity. I feel uncomfortable with tacit support for a white, male status quo on one of the more read, more important culture sites that are in the tech community of which I am a part.
Thank you for saying this.
It feels like what we're seeing here from HN leadership is denial - or abdication – of moral responsibility. That's a choice you can make, and it's known to be an argument going on within Facebook right now. It doesn't impress me much, but in all honesty, HN doesn't; this place has real problems with sexism and racism.
Speaking personally, I guess it means I'm unlikely to ever apply to YC, because I weigh these moral – call it social justice, that's fine with me – considerations pretty highly in choosing who I work with. Other people will find different personal calculuses here. Many YC founders are my friends and they speak highly of the people involved; this just happens to be over my personal line.
Nevertheless, I'm still just... disappointed.
HN certainly isn't a representative sample of the (global or US) population, ideologically speaking, but the idea that HN is a pure representation of any single ideology, either in general or at any particular karma threshold where there are more than a handful of users, is absurd.
Ok, this is reasonable. There have been some indications that Trump might be softening on the issue. Language alluding to this policy was removed from his campaign website on election night, for instance, and it hasn't really come up since (at least from him). I'm still very concerned that it was said at all, but you can certainly make an argument that this statement doesn't represent the current state of things.
> well then why is Obama so highly regarded by the left?
You have veered into defensive tribalism. We are not discussing in what regard Trump is held, but rather the likelihood of him implementing a particular policy based on what he has said about it. Whether or not liberals forgave Obama's transgressions is irrelevant to a muslim registry.
There are other things that I am not willing to comment on publicly, but which inform my opinion.
I am sorry your experience has been so negative. I certainly had a pretty difficult time at one time, but I have always had a pretty good opinion of HN and I felt I had reason to work on the problem from my end, since I am good at certain things. I believe it is generally getting better and women are generally being received differently here than what happened at one time.
Many comments have pointed out that there are plenty of places on the web to have discussions about political topics, so let's keep the HN about tech.
I see the merit in this sentiment, but for me reading the political discussions within this community is something I value greatly. For one thing, there are a great many non-US based people here. In my experience I have been exposed to a relatively balanced set of perspectives, and generally commenters are thoughtful and un-troll-like.
In short, I learn many things from other folks in this community, and that includes political topics.
This is insane. Why are people worried about internet points. I'm guessing you are an adult right? and you don't want to express your points of views because someone might click the little arrow?
Why? Please, honestly, explain this to me.
The words people pick tell you a lot about them, don't they? ;) Almost like they mean things...
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.
That said, sure, not every thread should re-hash the same conversation, but that's neither exclusive to politics (see the discussions in every thread about JS frameworks) nor is it the problem being called out by the moderator.
Again. Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? What if there are sites that are not Hacker News that are better for that kind of discussion?
But...
The media and technology revolution that we are both living through and shaping with the technologies that we deploy should be something that we actively discuss and wrestle with. I've recently been reading more history of the impact of the printing press (scientific revolution, monarchy => democracy, reformation, and a lot of war).
"This is not a new issue and it is not something that the people who read this site are responsible for."
I could not disagree more strongly. The web is quite new, and we don't understand its impact on society. Certainly the people on this site are not entirely responsible for it, but I think that we should feel some responsibility for it. I certainly do.
As for other sites, no, absolutely not. Politics is unavoidable. You can enforce a silent acceptance of the status quo, but that's in itself a strong political (reactionary) position.
Thank you! That felt like pulling teeth, and I didn't think was controversial at all. I'm not trying to score points.
[Edit to add: For me, this is part of finding common ground, and "they are perhaps predictably problem threads" is perfectly in keeping with your earlier statement about the existing guidelines and policies being "near optimal". No human social system is going to be perfect.]
I think that detox week (note: week, not permanent forever) is an attempt to reduce the problems these threads represent. You obviously disagree that detox week will do anything to improve this, which is fine. I think it's understandable that the mods would want to reduce these types of threads if they can.
You've also said that the current guidelines are near-optimal. Does that mean that any attempt to improve on the guidelines shouldn't be attempted? That's a legitimate position to hold. I think it's also understandable for the mods to try to improve the behavior on the site to more closely cleave to "civil and substantive". Hard to fault them for trying.
Thanks again for your contributing to this thread. I appreciate it.
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.
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
These two views are mutually exclusive. Either technology discussion can be separated from politics discussion (and given the other thread, we have evidence that it can), or it can not.
You're telling me that I can't discuss a topic without touching this other topic, and yet here that is happening right in front of us.
HN is one of the few places where informed discussion is actually possible and even opposing views (as long as they are objective and well reasoned) are adding to the discussion (and often upvoted). Shutting that off just because of some unfounded downvotes or trolling in times where such discussions are extremely important is cowardly and a very sad move in my opinion. HN is better (and more important) than you think.
My wife and I, on several occasions each day, will say to one another, "we're describing two different things. We need to take this discussion far deeper, or end it altogether." That's the person with whom I talk more than any other person, and we aren't on the same page on divisive issues tens of times each week.
Without unpacking an issue to a level far beyond the length of forum posts, we cannot possibly hope to be on the same page in our discussions here when they veer into politics. It's better to favor the format of discussing interesting issues about which most of us are unfamiliar. That way, we get fresh eyes thinking about the issue, more polite discourse, and a more educational experience.
(More of this and less mud slinging) on HN might actually move the needle
as opposed to
(More of this) and (less mud slinging on HN) might actually move the needle
I agree. I would like to figure out a way to encourage civil and constructive discourse on line in the interest of reaching and engaging more people. Offline is very important—probably more important—, as it reinforces the face-to-face social interaction.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/librarians-act-now-pro...
Is this political?
There are times and places to have political discussions - the fact that I do not engage with my mom on political topics over Thanksgiving turkey does not mean I am not interested in politics, it means I am not interested in politics in that particular context.
Mostly because I know that the discussion will end in anger, hurt feelings, and not a single changed mind. It has happened enough on this board that people, myself included, start getting very flag-happy when they get a whiff of partisanship in the air.
I especially do not appreciate the implication that not wanting to have the discussion "here" is a political statement of anything other than wanting to avoid a headache. I must point out that insisting that X be talked about when someone has expressed disinterest in the topic is hard to interpret in any way other than hostile disregard.
It's "startup news": computing for capitalism. We work on social media without knowing anything about sociology. We work on advertising, which is corporate propaganda. We have no vision of the future, unlike technologists in a sane world, so we build a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare where I'm literally filling out a form right now.
Anyway, politics is for billionaires.
For example "why did Trump win" is a political topic that can be discussed on HN the HN way: share confirmed figures and stats, links to informed opinions, bundle these together to form an explanation and test its predictiveness on other similar cases. All of that can happen without anyone ever stating their own personal (dis)taste for Trump. (Edited for typos)
"Fashion is mistaken for good design;
moral fashion is mistaken for good."
"Moral fashions more often seem to be
created deliberately. When there's
something we can't say, it's often
because some group doesn't want us to."
[0] "What you can't Say" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
> There seems to be less flagging of these as the election gets close, as it's more relevant to everyone involved, but trying to cut back after the election is past seems appropriate to me.
I go back and forth on this one for a few reasons. Political diatribes are irritating and usually fruitless, but this is a very different election (and so far post election). The mere fact that the president-elect wants to increase tariffs, limit H1B visas, penalize moving business off-shore is very pertinent to the tech industry, so I think discussion on those topics are 'fair game' in the HN-sphere of discussion. In one hand I see what dang is trying to accomplish, at least I think I do, by making comments on HN less sharp and more tolerable/friendly, but in the other hand for the most part HN users have intelligent, useful conversations and as long as there is civil discussion a ban seems unnecessary.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter, but if there is an ulterior motive I'd be more comfortable knowing that it exists and why it exists... it's always helpful to 'know your audience'. I didnt mean to be accusatory in any manner, more just curious.
They want political traction too.
Personally, I don't plan to discuss politics any more or less than when this topic was posted, so I guess I'm not part of the experiment.
> [...] for permitting doxing
Given how much DNC/HRC was promoted on Reddit, I do not accept that reason without second thought. Some basic "education by moderation" would have taught the sub not to dox while enjoying the conspiracy digging. For more info no that Pizzagate is about, see /r/conspiracy.
I feel like healthy political discussion would be a meaningful change. If thoughtful people all abstain from the topic, it will surely get worse. The immediate goal isn't to "win" arguments. It's not to be confused about why someone would disagree. Or even agree! Maybe they do but there's no place to say that.
I don't think so: the difference is that the crybully wants to silence his opponent, while the one using the term wants his opponent to stop silencing him. I.e., one wants to suppress liberty and one wants to preserve it.
I have no problem with your right to say that I'm wrong, or odious, or that my speech is completely offensive and inimical (although of course I disagree): where I draw the line is if you attempt to silence me altogether.
Unless grounded and significant structured, discussion about discrimination aren't going to bring any new ways of addressing things. What it commonly do is just expanding the battlefield and pushing people further apart. Even between those that agree on the goal, people can and do still disagree on how to reach it. I have described it in the past as comparing left and right politics, with both side wanting prosperity and liberty. Each side has fundamental different views and values for how that will be accomplished, so the discussion circles around the disagreement rather than the agreements.
I am afraid that potential benefits of this policy are easier to measure (I.e. less flame wars) and the bad parts are not (less deep and critical discussion), we will lead to the conclusion that it is better to keep such a policy in place without a good sense of what we are losing in the process.
How about a devops person, working with all the latest tech? Does it matter if they reside in Virginia and work for the CIA?
How about a GPGPU and FPGA programmer in Kansas? Does it matter if the code they write is for cruise missiles and they attend Westboro Baptist?
Politics isn't always tribal and many people on HN are capable on thoughtful arguments on politics. HN suffers from the "LKML-effect". Few people can or are interested in following the linux-kernel mailing list, so naturally it only gets attention when Torvalds is screaming at someone. It's the same with politics.
When "diversity in tech" became more popular on the Internet it would get flagged off HN repeatedly. Some stories would get through and thoughtful discussions would start, but people quickly learned (maybe without knowing it) that if you just flame the story it would hit the controversy algorithm. So people would submit more sensationalist stories so it could get more upvotes to counter the flags and flame. Now the level of discussion is set and people don't mind how they express themselves on the topic.
If instead HN would have owned the issue and moderated it heavily it would increasingly have gotten better. People would have learned that flagging or flaming wasn't a good idea and those with more reasoned arguments would formed a critical mass to self moderate comments.
Programming is often tribal, yet there aren't a lot of flame over things like Erlang on HN. Because even if not a lot of people know Erlang, we haven't alienated all the Erlang programmers. So Erlang stories are generally advanced enough to not attract bad arguments and even they would someone would presumably challenge it.
Yes, there are political stories that aren't relevant and/nor thoughtful. But those aren't the stories that could, presumably, be categorized as "fit for HN" anyway. But by just banning entire segments of political but relevant stories is letting the "unthoughtful" people win at the cost of the thoughtful ones.
It might not be relevant enough to fight for discussions about Trump in general. But are we going to avoid to talk about e.g. surveillance, like we always have, just because the president is controversial? That would, if anything, be changing HN.
To perhaps abuse an analogy, when a neighborhood gets well known for arson, people will move away. At some point it may make sense to forbid certain types of structures in the neighborhood to see if it reduces the instances of arson. (okay, that's admittedly pretty tortured :)
It's a trade off, and while I'd like the world to be perfect and people talk about everything calmly and with respect, empirically this is very much not the case for certain topics. A limited test (detox week) makes sense to me. And it might not work, which is why it's a test.
This undermines the progress that some people here have work incredibly hard for.
I also don't see how it is impossible to restrict discussion to technical issues that are not politically relevant. Here's a few things on the front page receiving quite a bit of discussion right now:
- R vs. Python for Data Science
- Why does calloc exist?
- Mux – A lightweight, fast HTTP request router for Go
I don't know about 'actionable items', but political conversation isn't any different than other conversations -- civility, the assumption of good faith, and an open mind are more common factors as to whether a discussion is good or bad versus topic.
The problem with political discussion isn't that it's political, it's that America (and possibly elsewhere that I can't speak to) has decided that "my side is good, the other side is bad". This leads to conversations that assume bad faith, and are close-minded, which makes those discussions "bad". You can't fix that with a set of rules, but you can enforce the same rules around those discussions -- people being rude, snarky or dismissive would be subject to censure, while people who are being courteous, informative and civil would not.
In short, I maintain that the problem with political discussions versus other discussions is that we treat them as different than other discussions. At their best, they can be a productive means of informing others to facts they may not have been aware, or elevating one's opinion from a basic understanding to a more nuanced understanding. But the more special we treat politics, the more the regular rules suffer, and blanket policies banning politics foster this special status in which vitriol becomes normalized, regimented and de rigueur.
So long as incivility is normal, the greater our partisan divides will grow.
Don't confuse yourselves: your tribe doesn't feel in immanent danger, doesn't think this community is in a unique position to help the world in a dangerous moment, and wants to stop being bothered by the imposition of reality on the dominant tribe that seems able to weather the storm and continue peacefully enriching itself. That is the tribe that owns HN, that seems to be the tribe that is in control of Silicon Valley's immense resources which are, to the profound shame of the entire industry, not being used to try to save its country.
The president is deeply unstable, lies constantly and has hired a team of bigoted, addled, corrupt old white men to serve him. Autocracy is incredibly dangerous. But it won't affect the leaders of the tribe who wrote this shameful post. Rich straight white people will almost certainly be safe from suffering. My family won't be and already isn't in vast swaths of the country.
This post and others in the last month have taught me that HN is not a community of smart people interested in technology. It is an apparatus of a few privileged people and their businesses that serves mostly one narrow community (engineers who are focused on earning money and/or luxuriating in their own preoccupations) that the owners want things from (talent and money). We can't learn together by hiding from this moment.
When talking politics means talking about the internment of muslims, talking about a conspiracy of Jews puppeteering the global economy, talking about refusing to enforce any civil rights laws that happen to mostly protect black people, when politics means the destabilization of the global economy and the global military equilibrium established since Workd War II, well then enforcing the state of not talking about politics is itself an act of violence.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, albeit in a slightly different context than pure politics.
When you say "encourage civil and constructive discourse", it implies that you wish to engage people who disagree. One conclusion I've reached is that it is best to instead engage like-minded people.
The idea of "reaching across" to form consensus or stimulate constructive debate among people who don't agree sounds really good on paper. But, at the end of the day--if you actually want to get anything done--then you don't want to spend your energy convincing people of the rightness of your beliefs. And, looking at this last U.S. election, there seem to be vanishingly few folks for whom facts matter. So much is emotionally-driven that convincing others becomes all the more difficult. It's not impossible, but the ROI just isn't there.
Even if you're not looking into doing something, but just want stimulating discussion, it's a trap at virtually any significant scale. It will inevitably devolve into something emotional and non-constructive. It's unfortunate, but it only takes a few trolls to trash an online community.
I'll take the bait.
About a little of a year ago, when I worked in a lab, some of my colleagues routinely laughed and mocked Trump and boasted how he had no chance in hell (as well as fueling fire with continued patronage of sites and news that gave them more of the same "entertainment" [in their words]), and no amount of me pointing out to them the environment that enabled a such a persona to exist/rise to fame/power should be the topic of conversation rather than on the team $x circus ring leader de jour.
From where I stand, the problem with a ban on political discussion isn't really the content of it, just the intellectual naivety that one can shield themselves political discussion while ignoring all the not so hidden influences of such on ones culture, thought processes, and etc is laughable will only end in rude awakenings, because in reality such a ban can only be superficial, and never really cut to the heart of such issues that underpin political discussion.
Like another commentator said: "Talk is cheap and political discussion is especially cheap" and I'd add that superficial bans to hide or sideline political discussion, are can be incredibly expensive (filter bubbles, walled gardens, deep packet inspections, paid "moderators", "cultural fit" selectors) in the search of temporarily being in control, yet ultimately futile.
Whether personal or no, submarining comments simply because people disagree with them has always struck me as an intellectually awful "feature". I mean, think about that. People are actively encouraged to effectively censor comments simply because they disagree. What else can that do but encourage a pernicious group-think?
In fact, we should be doing the opposite: if it's stimulating discussion we want, then people should be encouraged to upvote well-made points, even if they don't agree with them.
And, if there's a downvote at all, then it should be for poorly constructed arguments that don't contribute to the quality of the discussion.
On these sorts of discussions, talking about what is actionable, what we can do to reach common goals.
Though there are pretty fundamental disagreements among people on these as well, and I'm not sure where the discussion can go (for example University quotas).
But trying to get HN to be more positive overall would be encouraging. I believe this was done for Show HN stuff, having it done overall seems like an interesting next step.
Even just a msg above the reply box like "Hey, you're talking to another human being! And probably agree on a lot of things"
I don't understand how so many people have missed the word "week" in this sentence.
This is an experiment, and it's going to last a very short period of time; I support it. I oppose banning political articles & discussion on HN in the long-term, but that's not what this is. It seems the distinction has been missed in most of the comments.
One option I would like to suggest is an option whereby people can enable or disable a filter for political stories. This way if you just want to come and geek out about tech, you can do so, or if you want to follow political issues you have that option as well. I'd use both modes at different times depending on my mood.
Why don't I qualify as part of the community? Politics is now more and more bearing down on my family, oppressing us, threatening us. We are afraid and depressed every day, even while probably cowering from fully facing the gravity of the threat this administration poses. It is hard to code when you are terrified.
Why doesn't HN care about me? Why aren't its powerful, its brilliant, its wealthy, abandoning all other projects to protect me? Why? I need you to save my family. Please.
I'm not sure what you mean by "this policy". Do you mean this one-week experiment to try something for a week and see what happens? I wouldn't call that a policy. To me that word implies something intended to be permanent, which is precisely what we're not proposing.
Either way, though, the answer can only be "maybe", because any one of your descriptions could cover a huge range along the axis we're talking about (intellectual interest vs. political battle). So it would depend on the specific stories.
Since we've asked people to err on the side of flagging for just this week, obviously the odds of a story being flagged become higher, for just this week. That doesn't make those odds 100% on those topics. And since the way things normally work is erring on the side of not flagging them, it's hard for me to see this week as very significant. That's actually why we're doing it this way: a week should be enough to learn something and not enough to be that big a deal, even in the worst case.
In the view you've put forward, you say that politics is the problem, a topic that when discussed causes fights and it can damage the culture of HN. I disagree. If we don't know how to talk about politics with strangers, we stop trying to persuade each other, and we bottle up our disagreement, and we go online and yell at someone else, or we vote for the candidate who screams our view... because we don't know how else to express it, to find the nuance in it, and ask ourselves hard questions. We'd rather have an opinion than not stand for something. All of the flaming is a way of expressing it...
We can suppress the conversations on HN to focus only on specific science or technology, but on a technology website in this age, and right now that seems like we'd be the website equivalent of a child covering their ears when they don't want to hear something. Blockchain tech, cryto, AI, mesh networking, job loss from automation, cyberwar, Quantum C. Seems incorrect to suggest that technology and politics can be separated easily (especially at a big picture).
Of course this is the internet, people come here to troll and fight. But we as individuals can always walk away. We can douse the flames by not engaging in it ourselves. We can always handle a conversation with care, it's not the topic that is emotional, it's us. It isn't up to the community to stop people from talking about touchy subjects, so that we all get along, it's up to us to learn how to talk about these things better. On the net, just like in the world.
The experiment shouldn't be to stop political discourse, but encourage it. See where we go, go forth and be critical thinkers and talk about the hardest topics facing human civ right now. Lets see what happens. Maybe that is naive, but we gotta start somewhere. Discouraging the conversation isn't a start, its an end.
Edit: Looks like the two of us have discussed this before :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12974834
And both times I've appreciated the civil discussion. Thanks for that!
Thanks for the policy, although I honestly just thought this had always been the policy anyway.
From a British perspective, I find most of the political discussion on HN to be useful, although perhaps I just instinctively avoid some topics. There are a lot of global issues which are being discussed, whether that's climate change, transport, tech and data regulation, job automation, money in politics, licensing and intellectual property, electronic surveillance, global trade, etc.
These are all issues which are relevant to the technology community, as big social issues which are targets for innovation, as moral issues which we have to grapple with, or as concrete barriers which directly impinge on us. I'd say having a space for the technology community to discuss these things is a source of a fair amount of the value of this discussion board.
Having said that, political discussion does have to be subsidiary to technology discussion. Once political discussion gets over a certain level, you're just appealing to a general audience and the forum loses its distinctiveness.
So I sympathize with the moderators. You always have to draw a line in the sand, unfortunately attempting a total ban is going to be just as subjective as what goes on at the moment, which is moderators removing or flagging thread-by-thread (presumably to avoid general topics dominating, or to kill off those particular comment threads which have become toxic). I suggest they just keep on muddling through, and we just acknowledge the process is necessary but messy, and cut them some slack.
I was pretty let down that HN did not do more to protect political discussions during the US election cycle and I really didn't see all that much vitriolic behavior in the first place. Even if there is bad behavior though, is that something that we need to be protected from at all times? Maybe it is better to let it happen, point it out when we see it, and then hopefully learn to discuss more civilly as a community in the future.
- As online discourse/experience becomes an increasing part of people's lives, the more important it will be to be able to have these types of discussions (and not just pure politics).
- People aren't as binary as the US Presidential election or right/left or whatever other labels would have us believe. There are things people disagree on, and if we're only to engage with people that we agree 100% with, we're not going to have very many people to talk to. It's not so much convincing others as it is finding the commonalities we already share and can easily forget when we see things as black and white.
Anyway, I'm not asking you to agree with those points. Just wanted to elaborate. And I agree with you on the "few trolls" point.
So, having said all that, where do you stand on Political Detox Week? Worth doing?
Does political discussion not gratify intellectual curiosity? I'd say that I'm definetly curious to see others political opinions. This is a ban on a discussion topic as arbitrary as banning discussion of IC vs Passives.
Not letting people hear opposing view points is more detrimental then seeing a view point you disagree with.
I respectfully disagree that discussion of politics on HN cannot "meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive". Indeed, I have witnessed proof that this is not so. I have seen numerous occurrences in comment threads where there has been spirited factual debate which ended up informing both sides. I have seen minds changed. I have experienced my own mind being changed.
I don't deny, of course, that there has been some...less useful discussion, as well. But I feel that overall, it has been positive.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/785769454516916228?lang=en
And we, in turn, were criticized for daring to express our thoughts that, if Trump were elected, YC would play the typical role of the moneyed, comfortable, and powerful, and not use any of its significant power to work towards a better end.
Anyways, cool to put a moratorium on political discussion < 15 days before the electors vote and 45 days before Inauguration. I feel relieved, and not proven right at all.
"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.
The long-term plan is to protect the values of this site (intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation), or at least, it's our intention to find such a plan. But there's no longer term plan to ban politics. I understand why people would react with that concern, of course, but it really is just an experiment for a week.
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.
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.
----------
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
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.
I definitely understand electoral politics fatigue. We're all having that. But 'dang explicitly said the intended scope of the ban/"detox" is wider than that, over in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614
"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."
So apparently literally anything about race, gender, or class (which are really important issues both in terms of the tech industry and in terms of who technology is for) are considered off-limits for the week. (And at least one relevant story - about big tech companies releasing diversity reports - has already been killed under the policy.) That is one reason I am taking this as such a clear signal of the values of the mods, rather than simply a reaction to election stuff. I could be wrong, of course, but i wanted to try to let you see what i - and many others, i think? - are seeing that concerns us.
I hope you take it in good faith that I'm not saying this in anger or in any way except a desire to make this community something worth continuing to participate in: you've made it, and publicly trumpeted that you've made it, more risky and more difficult for someone to be something other than a straight white male here. (That's not one from me; I am paraphrasing a friend who has pulled the ripcord. She expressed to me that the alt-right movement here would use telling you this herself as a way to hurt her either personally or professionally or both, because that's the world she has to live in because of how tech works.) You're tacitly accepting that this helps to silence those folks because their lives are inherently and inescapably "political" due to the deviance from the straight-white-dude status quo represented in tech. That's why I formed those questions as I did. They're not "gotcha" questions. They are hard questions in the gray areas of what you're saying, where you are--I believe not with malice, but you are--giving people who wish those elements of your community would go away forever can under your own policies (and I did use the word intentionally, because "experiment" is much more innocuous than I think this effectively becomes) silence them. Because when you aren't a straight white dude, your life is "political" by the standards of the tech world.
People look to this place for a kind of cultural leadership in tech. (Whether or not you want them to or whether they should!) You're taking a stand on the issues of the marginalized and the underrepresented whether you want to or not. I would ask that you consider whether it's the stand you actually want to be taking. 'Cause, I mean...silence means status quo wins.
a) we should not abandon the general rules, unless under the most exceptional circumstances [ ie. unless these posts threaten to kill the HN site or render it unusable in the main, we should not adopt a special rule ]
b) its un-needed, in the sense we can choose to self impose this by not upvoting overly political stories/comments
c) HN is already practicing too much self-censorship - we need to tolerate some extremes / ugly points of view, in order to keep a healthy community where free speech is highly valued and where any subject can be discussed
d) imo HN is equally susceptible to hostile takeover by ugly "trumpism"'s as it is by political-correctness / overly tolerant relativism. It is for each of us to upvote/downvote/comment in order to fight against memes that might enslave this community and its freedoms.
I don't think that should be political, I don't think it should be red-versus-blue. But it is. Should that be banned?
1. Present a new data analysis tool used by police
2. Comment about disproportionately affect minorities
3. Response with FBI data explaining it's because certain minorities commit more crime
4. (devolves into flame fest)
... n. Complains marginalized people might not read the site
n+1. That's their personal choice
n+m. (more flame fest)
And hence why suggesting the content here stay technical instead of political is the best of several non-perfect choices.
Yes, political discussion can gratify intellectual curiosity. Empirically it hasn't worked out very well on HN.
To me, your comment completely ignores the paragraphs written by dang in the submission, both the content, and the fact that it's temporary. What do you think of the intent? Do you disagree? Have you seen or participated in any of the recent (past two or three months) of political threads on HN? Do you have showdead on so you can see what's being posted and flagged? Do you think it's okay? If you don't agree with the intent or think there is an issue, that would put your comment in one context. If you agree it's an issue and disagree with the political detox week, then that's another. Would you elaborate on your comment?
not that you asked, but both as a clearer moderation policy than we've seen before and as an experiment, I think this is a good move. there is some regret that you're lagging well behind Reddit's knowledgebase, as this sort of thing has been done many times there, and there's not much new information to be found.
That said, it does exacerbate the filter bubble of this place: based on how subreddits' experiments have gone, expect the moderate center to support you and press to make it permanent, expect a little bit of grumbling that might make you think that you've made your point and don't need to make it permanent, and expect... a few more people to leave silently.
You're a prop for the VC establishment, but damn if you aren't an earnest human, too.
You jumped to conclusion about what "matter in real world" actually means that wasn't in the comment.
And of course, we'd never know if the people who aren't banned would stoop to the foul crime of ban evasion. As they used to say, the law in its majesty commands that neither the rich man nor the poor sleep under the bridge.
Moreover, I was describing a general pattern of discourse, not just this one thread. If you don't feel you see this pattern, there's not much to argue about...
And of course, it is not just the mods. Downvoting polite discourse for content is something some people feel a social responsibility to do. We certainly can't avoid the consequences of the secular growth in this popular sense of responsibility.
For instance, suppose users can select in their profiles that they are either apolitical, SJWs, or shitlords. When an SJW or shitlord posts, they are offered a check box which indicates whether the post contains any virtue-signaling or shitposting, respectively.
Obviously, shitposts should be seen only by shitlords and so on. Political signaling at your peers is normal discourse and part of benign human social behavior. Political signaling at your enemies, or at neutral parties who just don't care, is normal human warfare behavior.
So the box is a self-reported box. But etiquette can easily render it mandatory. The chimps on each side of the river can and must suppress their own tribal instinct to throw turds over it, or the gods will rain down fire on the offending chimps or possibly even the whole tribe.
And of course, apolitical users shouldn't see any political crap at all...
The world is political and everybody's trying to sell you something. You can't opt out of it. Sorry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13111026
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn...
Had you stopped at "Oriental is not an offensive word", individuals may have downvoted you to express their disagreement, but I doubt you would have been banned. Personally, I think 'Oriental' sounds a bit dated, but not of itself offensive.
Instead, you were banned because you followed it with "anyone who thinks it is should grow a pair and get a life. The hypersensitive PC social justice crap is so wearisome." It's the insult in this second part that went over the line.
The equation in their minds is essentially power == good. They want power over you, and over us, so that they can use this power to do good -- for the quite large set of human beings they feel themselves the protectors of (pretty much anyone but a "straight white dude").
No one has really found a limit on how much power they want, or how much good they think they can do. What we do know is: when you feed them, they get hungrier.
Objectively, HN has a huge problem with leftists and socialists downvoting conservative/libertarian comments.
Dang knows this. I haven't read all the comments, but if he denies that simple fact, then HN has bigger problems.
You can't have legitimate conversations if the other side is openly hostile to the very idea of even displaying contrarian to their beliefs opinions.
There was a big bubble that many on HN lived in until election day, when they must've realized that there's another half of the country that doesn't think like them.
Here's a perfect example of living in the bubble. Look at all the car hatred on HN, where people are almost giddy over ideas to ban them, limit them, etc...
The vast majority of the people in the world don't think that way.
HN is just a bubble and why it's a parody.
The problem I have is that you seem to set at zero the other set of concerns here—the ones I described at the top—intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive conversation. Those things are the raison d'etre of this site. Do you think I'm wrong that political flamewars don't threaten them? Or that they don't matter?
I understand why a politically committed person might say "screw those values, the cause is too important", but that amounts to a scorched earth approach that doesn't see this place as much worth protecting and can easily progress to other battlefields for further scorching. My job is to make sure this place doesn't burn, so it's hard to take advice from that quarter. I'm all for suggestions about how better to serve the site's values—and by the way, 'civil' includes being welcoming to others—but objections that don't think they matter are harder to credit. It's pretty easy to say what we should do if you don't share our goals; not so easy to struggle with the tradeoffs if you do.
It's my view that for all its flaws, this community has something worth protecting. Perhaps it only lives up to 40% of its values, but that's still a lot, and it's the reason why people are attracted here to talk about things, some of which are inevitably political, in the first place. If you think significantly better is possible on the open internet, show me where; from what I've seen, everyplace else is so much worse that this one is clearly worth protecting, in the hope of achieving better. And if you think we're not interested in welcoming people who suffer from social or political disadvantages, I don't know what to tell you, other than that you'd be misappraising well-wishers. I hear you that it might happen anyway as an unwanted effect, maybe even is happening, and we care about that and take it seriously. But that information tends to come in complex political and ideological packages, and it can be hard, even for a well-wisher, to decipher signal from noise. The discourse around these things tends to be all-or-nothing, indeed extremely so. For us that's a double bind, because HN can't be either.
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-the-alt-right-is
Don't know about you, but I always trust content from Teen Vogue...
I have no idea why you feel so much more comfortable at this place than MeFi - MeFi isn't good, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least when people get banned for horrific misogyny or anti-Semitism people don't come along later and say "but they had great technical contributions!"
While I agree that posts about election results or political leadership changes are mostly unrelated to topics I come to HN to read about, I think that there are many ostensibly political posts that are very relevant (e.g. Snowden or Wikileaks related posts). I would hope that they will not be subject to exclusion.
It's funny how partisans on the right often say this, and partisans on the left often say the same thing, with the sides reversed.
The fact is, HN has sizable and active contigents from all parts if the political spectrum, and partisan voting (up and down) comes from all sides.
Long term, politics is inseperable from many other issues, so I suspect this isn't a viable long-term rule. However, insisting on thoughtful discussion may be easier after some "detox".
I for one certainly miss the functional programming articles that used to be so much more common on the front page. Here's hoping for a week of new and non-political food for thought!
Make sense now?
For one to disagree with your point of view is an affront to your liberty, but the suppression of such disagreement is not an affront to mine?
This is true. However, you can observe here that one side petitions you; the other bullies you. This would be unusual in a genuinely symmetric situation...
I do not need to justify to you why I think mefi is far worse than hn. Feel free to go hang there and stop adding your toxic comments to hn, like you said you would prior to deciding to come back and dump on me some more.
Or maybe they are.
> Leftists aren't so keen on free speech anyway.
And many leftists would say the same thing about rightists, with the same amount of justification.
Both the right and left have large factions with little devotion to free speech beyond what agrees with them. And both have factions that view disagreement and criticism as suppression.
I'm very sad to see this, dang. Complaining about identity politics is a form of identity politics. Because we white people are the default, banning discussion of non-whiteness reinforces whiteness. Banning discussion of gender similarly favors men, especially in tech.
You and I might experience this experiment as a detox. But it is increasing toxicity for those whose identities and concerns you are trying to erase.
In normal times, I might shrug. But these are not normal times. Tech companies are having to consider whether they'll be making lists of Muslims and turning them over to the authorities. We are having to ask ourselves, "Do we really need to store all this user data if we might have to give it up in secret?" Refusing to discuss politics when these issues are on the table is actively supporting a side.
I object in the strongest terms and will not participate. I won't be back for a week. If it keeps up, I'll be closing my account.
This is the same attitude YC showed the world when it kept Thiel on board. If Silicon Valley as a whole really cared about diversity (and it's becoming clear in many cases that it's only for PR), then you should find ways to facilitate constructive discourse (as HN has done with many other topics) and not ignore politics outright.
I disagree. It's worked out smashingly well on HN (judgingnit context of 25 or so years of engagement in online fora of various types); the appearance that it has not is due to unrealistic standards, and radical reconfigurations to deal with the supposed failures are likely to lead to more harm to HNs goal of providing a forum for gratifying intellectual curiosity than benefit.
You discuss it the same way you discuss any other idea in good faith:
by evaluating the content on its message, not on the presuppositions you might have for its messenger;
by evaluating each topic in isolation on its own, and trying to determine whether or not any individual point has merit or not, how much merit it may have, and where it does not have merit, explaining why you consider it meritless;
by being open-minded enough to not dismiss individual points because you disagree with the central thesis;
by putting forth your best arguments, and letting the stronger argument win the day, unblemished by vitriol;
by being civil and courteous to your fellow man because as humans, they're deserving of at least a civil, open minded discussion.
This is Hacker News. It's not the front page of Reddit, it's a niche site with a clear remit. I'm absolutely fine with any general political discussion being permanently flagged as off topic. If people want to discuss something like internet censorship or science funding, I think this may be an appropriate venue. Discussions about the technology of politics like econometrics, polling error or voting machine design may also be relevant. Beyond that, the internet has no shortage of places to discuss politics; many of them have a vastly higher calibre of political discourse than HN.
Can you (or anyone) point us to these? Not being sarcastic, but also somewhat skeptical - I've never encountered another public forum of HN's overall quality.
I think the metaphor about the geology lecture is misleading - HN isn't a lecture hall, it's an exhibition hall, and if the only criteria for something being an exhibit is a capacity to intellectually stimulate, then I don't see why political discussion should be precluded.
The comments you claim would not happen on mefi would likely get deleted. They don't here. That does not make mefi better. It just makes it easier to pretend it is or to be fooled by appearances.
You express a fear that Trump is going to somehow strongarm, subpoena, or otherwise force tech companies to roll over and give over private data on every Muslim in the US. Notwithstanding the massive technical challenge involved there, I'm fairly certain such a request would be met with significant opposition at some stage - from judicial challenges, to company refusal, to public backlash. It simply is not a situation that can reasonably happen (especially quietly), no matter how loudly Trump might yell about it.
Additionally, you must keep in mind that a sizeable fraction of the population had very similar fears (re: gun control, healthcare, socialism, etc.) when Obama was elected in 2008. These folks were scared of what Obama would do based on what he promised to do. In the end, checks and balances won out, and Obama didn't end up doing many of the things he promised to do. (He's still a great president, though - in my opinion of course).
It's normal to be scared in these times, but it's not a good idea to lose your head. Trump can say a lot of terrible, terrible things - people are literally entitled to say whatever they want in this country - but if you rationally analyze the feasibility of his plans you'll realize that most of them aren't actually doable. And, you may also realize that some of his plans are even good for the country - for example, infrastructure spending is a proven way to improve the economy, and it is something that the US quite desperately needs (see: John Oliver).
Now, I shouldn't need to say this on a forum like this, but I am by no means a fan of Trump. I think that his rhetoric is dangerous, but he _is_ going to be president, and that means working with him to establish the best policies and compromises going forward, rather than stubbornly refusing outright to work with him.
I think that's just because people are natural cynics, and as such default to the assumption that a temporary state of emergency will be permanent.
Also, I've gotten in trouble using that word "experiment" before. It turns out to mean weirdly, wildly different things to different people. But I'm attached to it.
How can technology be separated from the subject of power when the future of democracy in the most powerful nation in the World is at stake?
This seems like the right move for now. But we should be able to discuss political matters when they intersect with the topic at hand.
Since we asked people to err on the side of flagging for just this week, I don't think we can ask them not to flag that one. It would be fine to post it next week though.
HN doesn't add much to politics (it looks just like that kind of discussion would look anywhere else) but politics does detract from HN (firstly because you get less of what HN has that is less prevalent elsewhere, and secondly because politics is great at distracting attention from everything else.)
This would not be a controversial statement if "politics" were replaced with "pornography" and I think the two are, in this context, very much a like - you can have none, or you can have just that one thing as they do in many places and that too "works" in its own way, but having a little works badly.
(And if anything, if HN had porn it'd be easier to ignore it than politics because with politics, not only do you need to avoid the temptation to read about it but also to argue with the harebrained viewpoint in the comments that threatens your family, country and the entire humanity, and then they have to avoid the temptation to push back against my harebrained arguments threatening their family, country and the entire humanity. And just standing there and doing nothing when humanity is at risk, for the sake of a goal so narrow and insignificant as keeping HN about one thing and not another, is very, very hard.)
I say this as someone whose been that spectator.
That's definitely not true, and we're very careful about it. It's literally the first thing pg blurted out to me, before I even had a chance to sit down, on my first morning as an HN moderator. I do my bit by blurting it to everyone else in turn.
You can argue that e.g. "Obama was a great president!" or that "Obama was an awful president!" and there are arguments to back both sides of the discussion depending on where you're coming from.
And as many others have said, this is a horrible idea. ESPECIALLY for a site oriented toward start-ups (or, at least, people who like to talk about start-ups). Guess who is going to be signing off on the regulations that determine what is and isn't allowed? Guess who is going to determine where research money goes and what gets subsidies or tax breaks?
Oh yeah, that thing which you don't want anyone to discuss.
A few years old and more geared toward HPC and scientific computing, but Michio Kaku gave a great talk at SC about how politics and lobbying are very important and are actually vital and that if technology wants to advance it needs to not plug its ears and hide but actually be involved and fight for our interests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_MbkVozydE
Rather than sit around, gazing at our navels, and talking about how amazingly smart and above it all we all are maybe, just maybe, people should actually consider "disrupting" the world into an "agile" state that can actually result in a government and laws that aren't a hindrance. And you sure as sugar don't get that by talking about how nobody else knows how to communicate with anyone because they aren't "hackers".
But hey, gotta make sure you don't alienate anyone who might be a good business partner.
---
Maybe, just maybe, enforce rules about not making emotional and unfounded posts. Because that is largely independent of politics and is the kind of thing that makes it hard to take this place seriously as a "meeting of the minds" and mostly causes it to feel like "A marginally less meme filled reddit".
I've recently realised I was upvoting comments (across various sites) that I agreed with and sometimes vice-versa, and I have started making a concrete effort to ensure that I upvote views I disagree with, if they add to the discussion.
I agree with the proposal of a one-week political moratorium here because I think that experiments can make good science. Let's also try to change the way we vote (and comment) for a week, by trying to ensure quality discourse is promoted, not just our views.
It's sometimes good for the soul to respect what you disagree with.
For example, let's look at Google's Trusted Contacts. For obvious reasons, a lot of HN are very opposed to it. One topic that was brought up was the Google Buzz disaster and how google pre-built the community based on who we had emailed and talked to. Which was very dangerous for people who had an abusive ex.
If that were to launch today (and something similar will...), white nationalism becomes a huge problem. All of those bloggers and twitter folk who decide to NOT shove their head in the sand and actually engage and speak up are suddenly going to have their other contacts exposed. The people who have friends who speak against Breitbart are now directly exposed.
And that is a pretty big tech AND social issue. And to ignore the problem with a large movement of people who tend to be more armed than their political spectrum counterparts and who have a long history of getting their way through abuse is horrifically negligent.
And considering that white nationalist parties/candidates are gaining political office in many western nations, it becomes even more of an issue. Can we discuss political legislature that seems to specifically target tech geared toward helping inner city youths (who tend to be black)? What about a marked tendency for facial recognition and profiling software that applies a color wheel to determine threats to gain funding?
All of that is political, all of that is very heavily influenced by understanding that it is white nationalist parties pushing it, and all of that MUST be discussed.
The political opposition is likely to collapse in waves: public opinion seems to be moving towards intolerance, and any additional terrorist attacks related to Islam would continue the shift; the GOP controlled Congress may support Trump as vehemently as they have opposed Obama; the 105 federal judicial vacancies that should have been filled by Obama will instead be filled by Trump, possibly including multiple Supreme Court seats; and it will be very difficult for the companies themselves to fail to comply with court orders. For example, look at the huge battle to coerce Apple to unlock a single phone. Under a Trump presidency there would be substantially more pressure on tech companies.
My experience with conservative, religiously-motivated Americans (including many dear friend and family members) while growing up in a red state makes me think that (some subset) may be willing to tolerate substantial harm to themselves, the economy, and the founding principals of the USA so long as the "greater good" is achieved: prohibiting abortion, increasing the influence of Christianity on government, increased need for religious charity due to reduced social welfare programs, and the lower taxes that they've been told are a panacea. This makes me believe that compromising with Trump will look more like acquiescing to him.
I also think that some portion of the the conservative-leaning public was misled about Obama and were afraid of what they thought he would do, not what he said he would do. What could have been reasonable compromises about restricting certain types of gun sales and ownership, controlling healthcare costs through single payer policies or some other government intervention (which are considered mainstream in other first world countries) were opposed as a slippery slope to elimination of private gun ownership and destruction of American capitalism. These were not rational fears, but were effective at catalyzing conservative voters.
But it is no secret that US conservatives are a lot more pro-fossil fuels and US liberals are less anti-renewables. In that context, who is in power determines who is approving budgets and who is giving subsidiaries and incentives.
To remove the ability to acknowledge the political aspect of things would lead to
"I wish we spent more on wind power." being responded to with "Well, we would if <COMMENT REMOVED DUE TO RULE VIOLATION>"
An extreme case would be a Dr Evil figure who will not examine his own heart and needs the world to burn just so he can pretend to himself that he's a good person. So he makes the world burn. At every stage convinced of his own righteousness.
This explains why 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'. What passes for peace is trench warfare where the only progress is sideways. Improving the machinery may be desirable but in practice politics is dominated by preventing inevitable perturbations from escalating into open hatred and violence.
(More parochially one can tell when politics is influencing the discussion because there is always blaming going on.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614
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.
HN is a complex system of community, software, and moderation. We like to place the emphasis on community too, but those other things also have their places.
This is true, but I suspect the biggest reason is that politics is more prone to Crony Beliefs ( http://www.meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/ ) than almost any other field of discussion.
This is a false premise. I've spent my week at a large scientific conference.
We have continually had panels re: our role and responsibility as scientists in the current political environment. Talks on hard technical issues have often included comments alluding to these roles and responsibilities.
Technologists are so deeply involved in the way that modern society perceives the world outside their immediate community that it's absurd to believe they can be apolitical.
Technologists need to discuss their roles and responsibilities as well.
So no -- you would not be thrown out of a room for bringing up politics in a Geology lecture.
HN isn't a Geology lecture at all. It's more like a quad at an engineering school. We're here because we're curious, we like to build things, we want to help create a better world. We cannot do that while insulating ourselves from the reality of our world's most powerful organizations and their leaders.
There is a difference between "not allowed to speak" and "not allowed to speak about politics". You can't speak under water, but a pond isn't the proof that democracy can't exist.
Couldn't you also enable an enhanced slow mode on threads that seem political in nature? Maybe something like the "hate tax" system proposed here[1].
I feel as though political topics tend to generate a knee-jerk response in people, especially when they are in an...shall we say, altered state of mind. The more controversial a topic is, the slower the pace of discussion should be IMHO. Exponentially so.
There are tons of political forums where ppl can express their opinions and discuss them.
It just does not have to be here.
What we have is a future president (ugh...) who has repeatedly shown himself to change his mind at the drop of a hat, be easily engaged and enraged on social media, and who has a long career (since long before he even considered running or POTUS in the 90s) of racism and misogyny (not to mention admitting to and taking pride in sexual assault...).
The fact that we DON'T know what he truly intends to do is terrifying, and that is why people discuss it. We know what he has said he intends to do .We know that some stuff he has backpedaled on, only to come back a few days later. That is exactly why people feel a need to discuss it.
And we also know that his vice president and growing cabinet are much more consistently "on message".
Political discussion in many technical stories irks me, especially if it goes to the top. But I understand that it is sometimes valuable. Just like offtopic mentions of technical issues of the medium (horrible font etc.). Maybe it would be good to put it all to big bag called "offtopic" or something and put it always at the bottom of comment threads and stories list with ability to hid them in profile settings.
What Hacker News really is: a community of smart, mostly rational, tech-interested people of the world, impacted by world politics, who share stories and ideas.
Nobody asks for it to be an ideological or political battlefield - common sense and moderation should be able prevent this. But if this somewhat like-minded community can have a political impact in any way (anywhere in the world) by sharing and discussing political ideas, I cannot see why you would stand in the way of that.
How about a meta-discussion concerning tactics for countering young-Earth creationism claims?
So...I can't come up with a better way to put this: do you really think that there are intellectually satisfying, civil discussions to be had when your existence is a matter of debate? Like... 'hga wasn't alone. You know that. He was just an idiot who went straight at it straight instead of hiding behind cites of The Bell Curve, instead of "but why should there be programs for black people or women?". I get your focus on "civil, substantiative conversation" and I respect that, but you gotta know as well as anyone that harm happens behind the "civil, substantiative conversation" of just-asking-questions and oh-it-can't-be-that-bad,-can-it?, the soup of toxic sexism and racism that's all over here over the last year or two. The functional result of "no politics" is that that won't be challenged, not that it'll go away. I agree with 'tptacek when he says that most political comments on HN are alt-right trolls; "hey guys, subtext rather than text" leaves a lot of shadows.
You and I are effectively re-litigating the same arguments that have come up in many other places. What would be awesome and a change of pace would be to learn what HN plans to do to make itself civil and welcoming to underrepresented folks, if that's the ethos you want to have. And you say you do, so I believe you. I mean, hell, I'd love to help out if I can; you have a bigger stake, but you're sure not the only person who thinks there's something worth having here.
(As far as other places on the internet--I have a few that come to mind. Open ones, but not ones on which I want to sic the jerkier part of HN just to prove a point in an argument. Shoot me an email if you're curious.)
1. Internet Points are a social signal.
2. Some HN features are restricted to users that have more than a certain number of Internet Points.
3. If you are expressing yourself in a comment with the aim of communicating, having the comment downvoted enough to grey it out (making it harder to read) will frustrate you.
There is a setting in your options called "showdead". Is that on or off for you? If it's set to off HN will hide some comments that have been killed by userflags. Thus, you may well have not seen the worst examples.
But this week someone (with more than 10k karma and an account that's over 3000 days old) called for Jews to relocate:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
> But, yes, to the extent the inchoate Alt Right has a position on it, one of them is that Jews are to be "excluded if not eliminated from society", as in all societies that are not Israel. You've got your own homeland now, which we of the Alt West fully support, relocate yourself there. Specifically "diversity + proximity = war", and we want to avoid "war" such as it is or will be.
> friends who speak against Breitbart
> people who tend to be more armed
> a long history of getting their way through abuse
> white nationalist parties/candidates
Are you talking about white nationalists, or actually about conservatives/Trump/Breitbart, tarring them as violent and abusive along the way?
That's your choice. The importance of Dang and the other moderators to this forum astronomically dwarfs the importance of individuals like yourself or myself.
And no one here is solving how to put dinner on the table for anyone when ranting about Trump, Clinton, BLM, KKK, inequality, immigration, or any of dozens of other political hot topics. It's just childish your-team-vs-my-team railing against each other. You can find that sort of thing endlessly on other forums and I resoundingly applaud the HN team for taking a step to experiment with avoiding the waste of everyone's time for a week.
There's a severe danger that you would lose. For a commentary on emotionally charged and intellectually devoid arguments about a technical subject, I give you http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488235).
But that's not the whole of it, by a long chalk. There have been "the OS Wars", "the editor wars", "the archiver wars", and others. One particularly extreme example that I personally encountered was a group of people in comp.os.os2.advocacy . They did all of the petty and stupid Usenet tricks such as rudely and impatiently splitting paragraphs and sentences to reply to all of the individual words. Much of the level of "argument" was the sort of thing that I'd expect from six-year-olds in a playground: parroting, insults, and general childishness.
I didn't read the newsgroup for the better part of a decade. When I went back to look at it I was astounded to see that the group was still at it, in (as far as I could tell) the same threads with exactly the same content-free taunting and rubbish.
Going back to that newsgroup again today, and picking stuff at random, here's an example of this sort of discourse. From 2011!
* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.os2.advocacy...
Here's a comparison thread randomly selected from the 1990s.
* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.os2.advocacy...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/...
"No, he would not rule out a database on all Muslims. But for now, he wants a database for refugees."
And most importantly - it wasn't him that brought up the idea, he was asked this "John F. Kennedy is not a homosexual"-style. The fact that he failed to clarify either way was then reported in ambiguous snippets giving the impression that he had brought this up.
Even an insinuation that someone has a connection with an undesirable group apparently makes it legitimate to repeatedly ask them about it. I think such a low-bar to interrogation is not enough; sometime even being repeatedly asked something can give the impression that it might be true (or more likely), "big lie"-style.
For anyone else, the original article discussing the graphic: is here [0].
Another interpretation: this is political, literally. "abortions for some, mini american flags for others" can sort of work. We just know as little about what Trump flim-flams about as we do other candidates consistently lie about.
Care to elaborate? Or is this more second-hand media?
> The fact that we DON'T know what he truly intends to do is terrifying
Depends if you're happy with the status-quo, or unhappy with it. For some, the idea of things staying the same are terrifying.
Incidentally, were you not worried about a Dem war with Russia?
NYTimes didn't provide those, right?
"While many headlines came out after this exchange saying Trump would "absolutely" require Muslims to register in a database, it’s not entirely clear that’s what he said."
"Through the end of the conversation, it’s possible Trump thought the exchange was about illegal immigration."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/...
Tell me what you think of Trumps reply wrt that last "Nazi Germany" question from NBC?
Are terms like "racist", "facist" etc fine in comparison? If I described them as above, I doubt it would be well recieved;
" The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.' The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. " http://examples.yourdictionary.com/loaded-language-examples....
In any event its an editorial decision: HN is a medium/tool of ycombinator and they decided that this is necessary in order to preserve its value.
I disagree completely with this. This is I'd say the one place online where people will actually try to provide a rebuttle to your statements. This is the perfect platform for debate on political subjects, adhominems are not taken lightly here and everyone seems able to keep a reasoned mind on what's being said.
>To me, your comment completely ignores the paragraphs written by dang in the submission, both the content, and the fact that it's temporary
dang's comments and posts are, as usual to me, completely indefensable and naive. To think that a site filled with well rounded people should the off limits to discussing politics? That's insane.
And on another note: it being temporary is not the issue. The issue is the idea behind the action. If we had "Temporary Slavery Week", or "Temporary Nazi/KKK Week", "Temporary Japanese Internment Week", or even "Temporary Ignore Reality Week" I would ABSOLUTLY not support these. So why should I, or anyone for that matter, support an idea or experiment devoid of any valid rationalization that would explain it's existance.
The only reasons I see to avoid political discussions are 1) You feel your community is too stupid to carry out this discussion, 2) You are afraid your ideas will be attacked and you won't be able to self-examin them, 3) You're too lazy to moderate your site, so to make it easier you're going to stop a hole class of discussion (that in my opinion is the most important form of discussion in a governed society) just to cut a bit of work off your plate.
All of these are positions I cannot agree with and SURELY I hope no one would expect a little bit of a vacancy of thought on topics of limited application. These are the times when thought is most critical. Wether it comes from banning politics for a week to court rulings who's only base to stand on is it's blatent "for the children" mentality.
> What do you think of the intent?
It's either intense laziness, malice, or ignorance (on a meta note, I intend for the "intense" modifier to apply to all these of these). None of these are good in my book.
> Do you disagree?
It seems like most people think that just because it's temporary it means it's ok. That's insanse. I absolutly do not agree.
> Have you seen or participated in any of the recent (past two or three months) of political threads on HN?
I regularly participate in political discussions about property rights, firearms laws, and in general scientific statistics that will provide political sway. I love these discussions as they often have to most complex and well rooted arguments from all sides of the spectrums.
> Do you have showdead on so you can see what's being posted and flagged?
I consider those who don't have this enabled to be burrying their heads in the sand. I've also got a custom CSS sheet on that removes the downvote-fade.
> Do you think it's okay?
What's ok? Do I think being coddled by admins saying "it's ok, I'll make the bad bad wrong-thinkers go away"? Not at all.
Do I think it's ok that people post their own opinions and others judge them? Of course. That's how discussion works.
> If you don't agree with the intent or think there is an issue, that would put your comment in one context. If you agree it's an issue and disagree with the political detox week, then that's another.
I haven't seen a problem but I do feel that there is likely one although this is all conjecture on my part. Find me a sample size of 30 comments that have been demonstrably downvoted because of opinion then I'll agree with you that it is an issue. Otherwise it is just speculation without data which is useless.
I ofcourse also have an issue with a detox week. That can just be called "Horse Blinders Week".
Those are beliefs vs identity, a particularly tricky subject. The problem is when, I for example, don't see it that way; I see many of those "identities" to be beliefs also, beliefs about self.
As an example, to a Creationist, arguments about evolution are about identity - there are few boundaries to which subjects people involve their own self-worth/identity. A similar argument arises wrt trans people and the various proposed categories that have arisen - simply saying "this is who we are" is not enough, since exactly that is what is debated.
That said, I suspect you mean "you can't welcome both women, and people who hold anti-woman beliefs". But the labeling of any belief is itself a belief. Some of those idea you call "anti-women" can both be considered not anti-woman and be held by women e.g. not all feminist believe sexual content to be harmful to women, or the idea to be productive.
If you had no intent to push this for longer, why even try it in the first place? What if I, and everyone else in this thread, is wrong and this turns out to be a magnificent idea and makes the site a better for everyone.
Now since this is so amazing, why not make it perminent?
The cynical in me is also asking, who gets to judge if this is a success or a failure? The community? The vocal portion of the community? The YC staff? You?
I trust none of those groups with as important of a disition as this nor do I want a precident set on any social media platform I use that a specific topic can be completely banned from discussion.
Searching[0] comments for user:gravypod and stem word fragments like divers, sexi, raci, or discr return 0 hits. Searching for other hot button[1] words like abortion, jew, islam, muslim, gun, SJW, leftist, clinton, hillary, trump, right, women, Israel, iraq, vote etc etc return 0[2] hits.
What political discussions are you having on HN that you won't still be able to have? Can you link to a comment you've made that you think you won't be able to make during this experiment?
[0] It's possible that I'm using the Algolia search wrong, but I can return other comments by gravypod.
[1] I'm not saying these are always bad comments! But if I'm looking for the political comments that dang is talking about these searches should return them.
[2] Some hits, but nothing relevant, for vote and right.
> Each side has fundamental different views and values for how that will be accomplished
counter this though: the left (at least at the moment) feel pretty comfortable flinging labels around? Is this just a vocal minority calling Trump/supporters a fascist(s)?
I also think that specific flags would help, i.e. flag a comment that is against some guideline, with reference to the rule it broke.
But I think that in large part the value of HN is in the comments. If HN isn't able to discuss a story productively, what's the point of that story being on HN?
The downvotes are not because of the word "project", or anything in the two first sentences. Its because you called people "as siding with the bigots" because they disagree.
There is also some extrapolation that result in insults. Are anti-religion people bigots? Are Egalitarianism bigots because they don't agree with new feminism? Is the illegal vs legal-immigration discussions bigotry?
If you want to influence people, take Confucius' advice and live a model public life that inspires (or shames) others into behaving ethically. Don't waste time dragging yourself down into arguments with base people, live a life that contrasts yourself with base people in the eyes of others. Let you successes, your intelligence and your quality of life, sell your politics. I make sure all my friends, especially my politically- and religiously-extreme ones, know how great my life is. Every time I post a picture of my smiling happy family and our successes, I am advertising my moderately-liberal politics and my Humanist philosophy. And when my conservative Christian friends do the same, they are successfully influencing me to have a more positive outlook of their politics and religion. Be a friendly, caring representative of your side of the aisle and you will constructively influence others.
My gut reaction is one of disappointment. I've enjoyed and appreciated the political discussion on HN, which has stood out from other political discussion on the web. My experience has been that the HN community respects facts and evidence-based discourse and that's been refreshing in an environment swirling with fake news.
Further, as a community interested in startups that often seeks "disruption" we need to think more about the social impact and ramifications of technology on society and on those who are disrupted.
Edit: I agree with the idea of holding the HN community to a high standard of civil dialog for political discussion or any topic like tabs vs spaces or language vs language. A tech-infused alternative to this thread might be, "Ask HN: Chat bot for managing / extinguishing flame wars?"
It's sort of like saying "oh, I don't see race". Well, everyone else does, and not acknowledging racism is just about as bad as actually being racist. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.
And another analogy, telling people there are more appropriate places to discuss politics is sort of like people telling Black Lives Matter/Colin Kaepernick/etc. to please protest in a more appropriate manner. There's no point in "appropriate" protests and appropriate forums, they are ignored. You have to bring this stuff up in places where people want to ignore it, otherwise nothing will ever change.
Which is kind of why I think this entire "detox", much like just about every detox that is about getting rid of the antioxidants or whatever the hell people go to spas for, is a load of bull. The problem isn't the topic, it is how people discuss it. And people discuss plenty of topics in overly emotional and pedantic ways. Often times while extolling their own intelligence in a way that makes you REALLY glad they aren't in the same room as you (HN may be even worse than reddit on that last point).
Respond to posts that can have a discussion. Ignore the ones that can't.
Why? If it's a valid criticism, why not. Sure, reading into things that take the thread into some tangent is bad; but otherwise, a call for clarification, even if nit-picking, is hard to judge objectively.
> The problem isn't the topic, it is how people discuss it
I agree, but only through objective and explicit guidelines can this be fixed.
> Ignore the ones that can't.
What I dislike more than a topic that is uninteresting to me, is people who also find it uninteresting, and yet comment on the fact. I don't dislike HN posts about apple, because I never read those posts, and it's usually obvious from the title what they are about.
The problem isn't topics. The problem is posters. If it was even tangentially related to tech (a new start-up community in a ghetto?), someone could post a well thought out and reasoned statement arguing against ethnic diversity. I would be amazed if they did, but anything is possible. Just like people can post incredibly shortsighted and emotional crap about what text editor to use.
So rather than make a blanket (and half-assed, at that) statement on a topic being banned (will be interesting to see what gets removed and what/who YC are financing or partnering with in the near future...), remove the negative posts while leaving the good.
I think you're right that both of those are problems, but they're not the only problem. Incivility is also a problem in political discussions here lately. Another problem lately is that discussions to which a political discussion is only tangentially relevant get derailed by political discussions that exhibit these problems.
> 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
I disagree with this for two reasons. Firstly, if people could civilly propose the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews, then that wouldn't show that people proposing either that or innocuous things incivilly is not a problem (only that incivility is not the only problem). But here specifically, I don't think that commenter spoke civilly, any more than "No offense, but <some insulting or offensive thing>" is polite (indeed, less so, as the commenter made even less pretense). The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.
One side wants to exist. The other side wants the other to stop existing. It's about as symmetric as lions and buffaloes, although a buffalo will kill a careless lion now and then...
Still, the points I was making ''aren't'' tricky.
- For the dimensions that I listed (and implied with the "etc"), in today's environment, HN is kidding themselves by thinking they can welcome "both sides"
- the feedback they're getting is from people (including me) who see YC and 'dang personally as aligning themselves with the antis by blocking political discussion
> That said, I suspect you mean "you can't welcome both women, and people who hold anti-woman beliefs".
No, I meant very specifically that in today's context HN - and by extension YC - can't simultaneously be welcoming to anti-feminists - and welcoming to women and allies.
Still, if you read more closely, I didn't call people bigoted because they disagree. I called the people who are "anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-trans (etc)" bigots. That seems like the right word to me.
> can't simultaneously be welcoming to anti-feminists - and welcoming to women and allies.
ally is a feminist term, but why can't women be anti-feminist? Are you describing this to be the case, or prescribing it?
Privacy issues, opinions on hiring practices, etc. are all topics that have heavy polarized sides with little to bridge the divide and would likely benefit from a shift in separating those topics from the solidly tech related ones.
Although, to be honest, I'm more concerned with the fact you are oblivious to this than I am about the fact you call change ignorance. I guess it does not really matter, I'll be off HN for a long while.
HN will get really messy if the comment board becomes a place to protest.
IMO bringing your political grievance de jour to a tech site like HN is a sign of immaturity. Telling these people to grow up or leave isn't a bad thing. Conservatives lived through Obama and liberals will do fine under President Trump.
Yes, women can be anti-feminist. As you said, these are tricky issues.
If you haven't yet understood why many people see the political ban as aligning with this, then either you haven't tried very hard or your belief system is preventing you from understanding. There's plenty of information here and in other discussions, so give it another try.
I disagree.
All I'm trying to say is that it's important to recognize that you are adopting a political position here, even though it doesn't feel like it. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, just that you have to acknowledge you have a position, and you can't escape by calling something a "political grievance de jour". That itself is a political statement.
If this is something you really want to understand (whether or not you agree), invest the effort (which may also mean finding a way to get beyond any limits your belief system is leading to).
If you do that, you don't need any further explanation from me.
If you don't do that, nothing I say will help you understand.
> I don't see it as a good use of my time or energy to try to explain it to you
Is pretty arrogant, you have such high esteem for your perspective you don't think it could be wrong, in fact I'm biased for not understanding it;
You're suggesting, instead, that I must have to go on some mysterious journey-of-self, as if you were a wise zen master furnishing me with enlightenment; rather than supporting your own, somewhat basic, claim that "the ban supports the antis"...
Why lump an explicitly extreme group in with one that isn't so? Would you do the same with Muslims and Muslim extremists?
> sites like Breitbart who push these racially charged stories
A few examples? The daily mail, yes, but what of Breitbart in particular?
Thank you for the good conversation.
It's an interesting suggestion, and of course one that major media sites have run with.
In an HN context, it feels to me like one of those 'easy' fixes that make short-term pain go away, but at the expense of something valuable in the long run. My sense is that, uncomfortable as it is, it's best to stay within the contradictory situation and look for small improvements.
HN is in a position to do that where larger sites are not, so we might be able to make a contribution here.
"Censored" is one of those words that mean so many different things it becomes hard to communicate with them. Use it if you like, but don't forget we're talking about just a one-week breather from politics. Or let's say "most politics" if the imprecision there is bothersome.
Those who favor allowing political discourse, however, are angry, since there is no substitute, other way to approximate "discussing politics with the HN community" other than doing so on the HN site.
> Thanks for the reply.
Also passive-aggressive?
For a site that is ostensibly focused on intellectual curiosity, this is antithetical to that goal. A robust, informed discussion requires exposure to a variety of perspectives, especially ones that seem challenging or uncomfortable.
If you do not agree with a comment--so what? Either refute it or move on. Just because you are unable or unwilling to refute it does not mean that someone else will not come along after you and do so. Downvoting should be reserved for comments which are truly useless, not comments that you merely disagree with.
And, yes, I am aware that downvoting for disagreement has been promoted and accepted by some on HN, but it's wrong--at least, it is if your actual goal is to have robust, informed discussion of intellectually interesting topics.
Of course. Yet there are obvious correlations to certain topics, and there might be a connection between the "how people discuss it" and the capacity to take a week off from it once in a while.
For the reasons I gave: (1) taking a one-week breather from the kind of stories that erupt into flamewars seemed like a good way to remind us all of the values of this site (intellectual curiosity and civil discussion), and (2) we hoped we'd learn some things. As indeed we have.
This is a new account of mine but I have accounts going back many years. I usually flip [showdead] to 'yes' as soon as I get reminded by seeing a [flagged] comment.
> But this week someone (with more than 10k karma and an account that's over 3000 days old) called for Jews to relocate
I don't like that comment either at all, but I'm glad I saw it. I'm glad to know that someone who is solidly part of our community thinks that way and that someone who's probably very smart otherwise can simultaneously hold an opinion like that.
If we just ban that person or even worse disallow a wide swath of conversation topics, what good does it do? hga will still believe that (and he mostly expressed himself civilly, I guess). Are you worried that his ideas will spread? This may be where our mindset differs, but I believe the best and only course of action is for people like you and me respond civilly and with reason, and to prove why hga is misguided.
One of the worst fallacies, us probably the kind that removed the civility from a discussion, and hence the good faith.
As a side note, the worst kinds of guideline is an ambiguous one, that leaves a lot to interpretation, e.g "act civil" is itself a nice rule, but otherwise useless, better off as a heading above specific clarifications.
HN doesn't need to be Wikipedia wrt comment rules, but a few Wikipedia style rules might be good.
Another issue: when do some topics go beyond the pale and must not be tolerated? Is there such a point?
Perhaps these are off-topic for this thread, but they've been on my mind as part of the larger issues "detox week" is intended to address.
Consider how that would sound to someone who's "karma-poor," i.e. anyone new to HN.
> But I don't agree that you should feel anything based on downvotes....never, ever let a little number next to your name control your life. Don't let it become who you are.
Yes, Eleanor Roosevelt was right, of course. However, the fact remains that people are people, and people are social animals, and, despite being virtual, these are social interactions with real consequences.
One of the problems with downvotes is that they have no cost for the voter, but they inflict a social penalty upon the receiver. Their being anonymous-yet-public is part of that problem.
Imagine being in an office environment that had a corkboard on the wall divided into columns, one for each employee. Anyone can anonymously post a card, and anyone can read posted cards. Downvotes are the equivalent of someone posting a card saying, "You're wrong and stupid and you should feel bad for saying that thing you said earlier today at lunch." The person making the accusation incurs no social cost, expends no social capital, but the person about whom the comment is made suffers a social penalty, an anonymous-yet-public shaming, without even an opportunity to defend himself or face his accuser.
Would anyone deny that such an environment would have extremely negative consequences for social interactions in the group? Imagine walking up to the board and seeing a number of cards equivalent to over half the group in your column, all of them shaming you for something that happened earlier. Who in the group hates you now? When you interact with someone, and they seem nice, are they putting on an act? Are they talking about you behind your back? Are they one of the ones who posted those cards?
Yet here on HN, people think this kind of interaction is acceptable, even good. It makes no sense.
Another serious problem with downvoting (or, at least, the way downvoting is implemented here) is that it discourages discussion. Every time someone takes the time to write a thoughtful comment, and it gets downvoted into invisibility, that person is discouraged from doing so in the future, because it would effectively be a waste of his time. Why should he bother, when it only takes a few people to click a button and make his words vanish. And in this way, the whole community is worse off.
For example, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13118453 I made a relevant comment with a good point supported by a clear example. Then someone responds with a bunch of strawmen that have no relevance to what I said and my comment starts getting downvotes. His comment wasn't even relevant, which is exactly the kind of comment that should be downvoted--but does his get downvoted? No, of course not--he gets approbation, and I get shamed. A few more downvotes and my comment won't even be seen by anyone who might have something interesting to say about it, which disenfranchises me of the opportunity to have a discussion at all.
I wanted to have an interesting discussion on the topic, but a handful of people have the power to deny me that opportunity, while remaining anonymous and refusing to even engage in the discussion themselves. It's just plain cowardly. So why should I bother? It's a waste of my time. HN becomes a read-only medium to me. But of course, to them, that's a good thing, because I'm an outsider, and they don't want to hear from me.
> I want you to know that you're welcome on HN.
That's nice of you to say, but it's not the case according to the people who downvoted him, because such downvoting is directly discouraging further such participation, i.e. saying, "Don't do that again," which is exactly not welcoming.
This statement should probably become a part of civility rules in most communities.
(Unsurprisingly, Arkady is my favorite character.)
I think it's fair to say that we can't be totally certain what the intention of his administrations are; though this is trivially true in all cases, I never seriously questioned the possibility of such a thing with previous administrations. As I mentioned in another comment, failing to distance himself from such a comment when given the opportunity later does alarm me.
> Tell me what you think of Trumps reply wrt that last "Nazi Germany" question from NBC?
I read it as ducking the question. What do you make of it?
Most humans believe in your viewpoint, but the truth is power is gained from groups. We are all simply a node in a larger network. Accepting and embracing that is the key to growing the Circle of Control. Becoming part of the right network alters the Circle of Control of the individual.
Don't get mad, get organized.
Should we also ban discussion on Javascript frameworks? How about we ban all discussion on the founder of Soylent? Those threads tend to lay on the side of ideological bullying.
> seemed like a good way to remind us all of the values of this site (intellectual curiosity and civil discussion)
No sufficiently intelligent group would avoid the biological imperatives that set in motion the basis for political events or discussion.
> we hoped we'd learn some things. As indeed we have
Comeing from a company as YC this is very scary. I'm glad that it has become evident that this, at least currently, won't fly with a large portion of the community. In the future I see the "innocently" minded as being the playthings of you and your friends at YC.
Probably to just stop replying to them. Sum up your thoughts and respectfully let them know that you've made your point as well as you can, and that this will be your last response. Or, the site could have a feature to block certain users for a period of time so that you just don't have to see it.
> Another issue: when do some topics go beyond the pale and must not be tolerated? Is there such a point?
Not for me, though I know I have a radical view on what should be the limits (or lack thereof) of freedom of speech. In reality though, there are certain types of speech that are illegal and so I understand that moderators will do what they have to in those situations.
I've also been thinking about these things. I am making a real-time reddit clone for fun and I am trying to strike upon a system that keeps discussion civil and substantive with as little need as possible for moderation. Not saying that every place on the internet should be a haven for freedom of speech though, and I really appreciate what dang and the other mods do here. By and large, I have few complaints about how HN is run and they've come up with many good ideas for algorithmically cooling down the flame wars (e.g. not allowing immediate replies when discussion gets heated).
I look forward to the Show HN for your project! :)
Rapoport's Rules:
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
- You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
- You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
[0]: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
... absolutely not. You can sign out of Hacker News whenever you please, and none of the people here follow you into your real life. Posting here has very few "real consequences". You might get a boost on traffic to your blog or find someone interesting to start a company with. But I won't pity you for getting downvoted. No one picks up a resume and says "that's interesting, but how much karma do you have on HN?"
> [downvotes] have no cost for the voter
Well, perhaps, but they're not free either. Voting down is a privilege, one that many people on this site have earned.
Also, many users will vote up a comment that's been grayed out if they feel that it shouldn't have been. If your comment is good, it will get rescued by passersby.
> Downvotes are the equivalent of someone posting a card saying, "You're wrong and stupid and you should feel bad for saying that thing you said earlier today at lunch."
Downvotes are the equivalent of someone posting "I don't think your opinion is valid/interesting."
And I scrolled back through your comments, like I did with the other guy. And I actually agree with many of your comments being downvoted. Being in the middle of a flamewar three weeks ago (and not stopping until 'dang prodded you), being factually wrong, and mentioning downvotes over and over again (seriously, I had to scroll back three pages of comments to not find "downvote" in the page somewhere): none of these things are interesting.
Especially amusing was the comment you posted before this. You posted four paragraphs that would have been better expressed with a downvote. There is a reason that they exist, and a reason that they have no cost per use. You can signal your opinion in a way that doesn't require you to post many paragraphs. (Humorously enough, I can't vote your post down, as it's in reply to me. I guess I have to post many paragraphs then.)
Sometimes you will randomly see a single downvote here and there on a comment that you thought might be legitimate. Don't overthink it. It's just a little internet number. Move on.
> For example, see here:
You post a relevant comment with a good point, supported by a clear example. Someone points out one way that your argument's premise might be flawed (although that person doesn't refute the argument you made).
Your mistake was posting an overlong recap of your previous comment, in a cynical and near-polemic tone, instead of pointing out the flaws in that person's argument. You get "shamed" for not furthering the discussion.
> [...] he gets approbation, and I get shamed.
The intent isn't to shame you. It's to filter communications that most people don't find useful.
People can still see your comments. They're not gone. If you feel disenfranchised, that's on you; you're still welcome to continue posting, just as long as you don't continue posting in the way that you did.
> a handful of people have the power to deny me that opportunity
Deny you what opportunity? You're still able to continue posting. In your linked thread, for example, you were the one who didn't respond.
> because I'm an outsider, and they don't want to hear from me.
It's not you, it's your comments. You're implicitly reading this as an ad hominem argument. I want you too to know that you're welcome on HN. You even seem like a reasonable person. But in my opinion, some of your comments are overlong tirades that generally don't lead to productive discussion (and I hope I don't offend you by saying so).
You're being told, both passively (through downvotes) and directly (by moderators), that certain kinds of comments are not acceptable here. Hopefully you'll see the pattern. I know it took me some time to find the correct commenting pattern too. Don't feel bad about it.
.
With that setup, we can finally tackle the first point you presented:
>> You've got over 2k karma. You can afford to lose some.
> Consider how that would sound to someone who's "karma-poor," i.e. anyone new to HN.
I wouldn't tell that to someone new to HN. If they haven't earned much karma, they probably haven't learned the ropes yet. In which case, they should learn to walk (make directly on-topic and guaranteed constructive comments) before they run (make comments that deviate slightly but still lead to respectful and interesting conversation).
Don't take HN too seriously. It's just a website that people talk to each other on.
.
PS:
> [...] all of them shaming you for something that happened earlier.
"Shaming" you for something that isn't related to your comment?
> Who in the group hates you now? When you interact with someone, and they seem nice, are they putting on an act? Are they talking about you behind your back? Are they one of the ones who posted those cards?
I'm trying to read this charitably and failing. Are you intentionally accusing people of voting your comments down because of the user they're attached to, or am I simply failing to read your comment in the way you intended?
(Wallis was a political adversary of Hobbes, in case that's not clear)
That actually could be a good way to moderate political threads by requiring an even higher standard of conduct. So you must not merely be civil, but actively apply Rapoport's Rules.
I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to. That said, I think keeping them in mind is worth it.
That's why I suggest this higher standard for only political threads. It's a lot better than banning them entirely.
Ok. When did he say he would build a list of Muslims from Facebook? What is that based on?
Obama actually did target conservatives with the IRS[1] and nobody on here wasting time speculating what he might or might not do even though he clearly does things that weren't in his campaign speeches and lied about other things ("you can keep your plan"[2]).
My point is that suddenly a ton of young liberal people that lived most of their adult life with Democrat in the white house have someone they didn't vote for in office and they don't have the maturity to deal with it. It's constant over-the-top messaging about the end of the country and when Republicans did the same thing during Obama's presidency ("death panels", "secret muslim", etc), they were laughed out of the room as they should have been. It's embarrassing coming from the side that touted things like "facts tend to be liberal".
(While you're here I'll remind you about turning off flagging on some overly-politicised stories that were being flagkilled earlier this year - if you're worried about HN becoming overly political then that sent the opposite message)
Also, are you really taking the correlation route in the pseudo-intellectual argument for why there is a ban?
Because if we are just going by correlation: Any time security or privacy is a topic, people stop reading anything and just start speaking from The Heart (just look at the Google Trusted Contacts thread where a significant chunk of the posters have no idea what the app even is...). So clearly that topic should be banned too, right? I mean, there is a clear and obvious correlation between topics about security and privacy and people having emotional discussions. So ban it
In all seriousness: It is your product and you do with it as you see fit. Just understand that people used to love Google and Facebook until they decided (rightly or wrongly) that they were just a commodity and that they were giving their personal information and opinions to an entity that had no problems doing experiments to figure out how to better target them. And with crap like this, it won't take long for people to realize that the company built around knowing what tech to invest in may have an ulterior motive for hosting a board for Cutting Edge Tech (TM) and may be using the data for less than kosher reasons. And crap like this is a good way to trigger a burst of thought from people.
Since dang sees all the user flags he probably has a better idea of which discussions get flagged -- which discussions trigger heated arguments.
Would you expand on this? What ulterior motives do you have in mind? What do you think HN is using the data for? Most of the data is available through the API, so pretty much anyone can use the data for whatever purpose they'd like.
Nonetheless, both of them make object-level claims about exactly the same sorts of stuff: which way the markets will go, public policy, etc.
We need a clear, courteous way to talk about situations in which more than one person is trying to predict or prescribe the same object-level thing, but each person in the conversation is bringing completely different paradigms, assumptions, and prior knowledge to the table.
Or to cut to the example that made dang put in the moratorium, an everyday person and a white nationalist are living in extremely different worldviews with extremely different paradigms. This would also be the case where I want content to count for civility: if one side of the conversation is trying to make a courteous, civil, well-written case that the other side should cease to exist, then the line of incivility is crossed, period. There's just not going to be any way for a non-white-nationalist to restate the white-nationalist (ie: neo-Nazi) worldview eloquently, give credit to neo-Nazis where credit is due, and then deconstruct that worldview.
Maybe, in an ideal society, we would expect every citizen to be able to eloquently refute every bad idea. However, in our existing society, our heuristic is to require that citizens only put in the effort to politely discuss or debate content that does not incite or entail violence. When it comes to violence, our heuristic as a society is to protect people first, and ask for justification only much later if at all. We assume that somewhere a philosophy professor, a priest, or a public official can retrieve the arguments against mass violence.
And nowadays, I'm worrying that with the living memory of such violence dying, people are starting to slip into forgetting that there are very good reasons we don't ask for counterarguments against violence.
Trump and his cabinet directly effect everything HN stands for: the planet, space exploration, online surveillance. These are not "off-topic" at all. In fact, I'd go as far to argue that even this week-long ban should not touch anything to do with climate change. Climate change is science, not politics, and what Trump does now (see: EPA pick) affects this like nothing else.
Please let this be an experiment and nothing more. I come to HN to have a discussion on a wide range of topics, including politics.
Thanks.
Sorry, but I don't think hga is merely "misguided."
He believes I should be forcibly deported to Israel and, if I refuse, should be killed. This isn't a belief that you argue with people about. We fought a world war against this belief.
You don't deal with neonazis by arguing with them. Whether Jews are equal humans or not should not be open to debate. You deal with neonazis by ignoring and/or banning them.
As much as I hate the doctrine of safe spaces, there's also the fact that I believe I should be able to come on Hacker News and expect to not have people calling for me to be murdered. Sorry if that's too much to ask.
Most importantly, this change was made before dang became moderator, to try and fix certain ways the community worked, and nearly all of those ways have changed a lot because of the changes in moderation, so I wouldn't mind seeing that decision to be revisited. I doubt that'll happen though, it's just too safe and easy not to show vote numbers.
As for actual greying, I dislike the fact that it makes reading harder very much. If some people have downvoted it, doesn't mean I don't want to read it. For the same reason I have 'showdead' on in my profile settings (I really wonder how many people have this btw), also because (as I have explained in older comments of mine) I am very much against the concept of hellbanning as it is applied on HN. Again only last week I saw a few 'dead' accounts posting just reasonable (not super-informative or upvote-worthy, but just "fine") comments. Checking their post history I could see some "bad" comments that surely deserved all the downvotes they got, that probably triggered the hellban, but that doesn't excuse in any way to waste these people's time like that, writing reasonable comments, thinking they are participating in conversation, unknowing that the large majority of users won't even see their posts. There's no justification for that, if they need some kind of lasting sanction, have them be notified about it, maybe a posting timeout or something.
What would be better if comments with a certain number of downvotes would auto-collapse, like Reddit does. Even better, adjust the threshold per subthread so the total number of visible direct replies is between 10 and 15, or some number. I'd have locally scripted this myself a long time ago if the downvote-numbers were available.
However, you also seem to have a problem with the greying that it's signalling "unpopular opinion!" to other users, if I understand your remark about "stigma" correctly. Meaning that even if it didn't hamper legibility, if they used a different colour or perhaps a sad smiley in various states of desperation (I dunno), you'd still find a problem with that? Cause I'm not very concerned about that at all. IMO, the signal is the message, like say your posts in this thread, came off to me as somewhat whiny, regardless of the actual opinions in your post history that you were complaining about getting downvotes (which I still haven't looked at, btw, but I'm not sure I would want to), that kind of tone signals a lot stronger to me, downvotes or no, grey or no, opinion that I agree with or no. But maybe once you manage to take downvotes less personally, this particular side of the issue will become less of a concern for you as well.
Unless you mean something different, maybe the line could have used some qualifiers. So it's not the opinions themselves that aren't worth listening to, to be clear. It's just that given two people of the same position, the one that's not complaining their opinions aren't getting fair treatment is usually one that can argue their position a lot more clearly and therefore is just generally more worth listening to. Although that's the less-accurate positive version of that preference of mine. In my personal experience, the negative version is almost always on point.
The only people who care about flaming are the flamed. They should be able to take a good argument, and besides the flamers get modded down. Slashdot is a great example that HN would well to emulate in my opinion. It is in no way an echo chamber.
> given two people of the same position, the one that's not complaining their opinions aren't getting fair treatment is usually one that can argue their position a lot more clearly and therefore is just generally more worth listening to
You didn't say "more" or "less" worth listening to, you said "not"
It is silly, but not completely silly.
One doesn't have to cross over into tinfoil-hat territory to wonder if sama, paulg, or other YC partners knew about the meeting ahead of time. Assuming they knew, it then isn't outlandish to wonder if they nudged the moderators into doing the experiment now as opposed to some other time without disclosing the reason.
That said, I don't subscribe to this chain of suppositions (or at least, I don't assign it more than ~10% chance of being true).
In any case, even if any YC partners did know about the meeting, I imagine they would be paying more attention to the absence of YC portfolio companies from the invitation list rather than considering new moderation policies to shape discourse on HN to their (supposed) advantage.
> and certainly totally wrong.
Having little reason to doubt you, and considerably more to take you at your word, this is more than good enough for me under the circumstances.
It expresses, succinctly, the problem with 'either you are with me or against me', and its evily-more-persuasive cousin 'there is no apolitical speech'.
Sometimes I wish I was more apolitical, for my own sake, and if this defends the status-quo, so be it. What was the chance of making any difference anyway?