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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
What do you think HN will be like when only the privileged ideologies are allowed?