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

1630 points dang | 4 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.679s | source

Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it's Political Detox Week on HN.

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.

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s_q_b ◴[05 Dec 16 20:35 UTC] No.13109226[source]▶
I live in Northwest Washington, D.C. I am a technologist, a government contractor, and an HN member for many years under various accounts since 2008.

I respectfully disagree.

Yesterday someone motivated by the "Pizzagate" story, spread and enabled by the social media systems we designed, fired multiple shots from a semi-automatic weapon into a crowded restaurant near my home.

My partner and I passed the crime scene 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.

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s_q_b ◴[05 Dec 16 21:11 UTC] No.13109632[source]▶
I want to be clear about three aspects of this:

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.

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1. dang ◴[05 Dec 16 21:21 UTC] No.13109750[source]▶
Your comment was rightly flagged because it broke the rules, and in the thread about the rules to boot.

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.

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2. s_q_b ◴[05 Dec 16 21:37 UTC] No.13109902[source]▶
The community was asked whether there were specific concerns regarding the timing of the experiment. I expressed a particular, relevant, and time sensitive issue, which yes, happened to deal with a particular individual.

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...

3. CalChris ◴[05 Dec 16 21:37 UTC] No.13109905[source]▶
> Have at this in the thread

What rule was broken?

4. eropple ◴[05 Dec 16 21:39 UTC] No.13109923[source]▶
You can't have a discussion about these issues without getting to brass tacks at some point.

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.