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

1630 points dang | 6 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.733s | source | bottom

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.

Show context
tarikjn ◴[05 Dec 16 19:44 UTC] No.13108655[source]▶
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).

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.

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md224 ◴[05 Dec 16 20:27 UTC] No.13109124[source]▶
> I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.

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.

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ythn ◴[05 Dec 16 21:09 UTC] No.13109611[source]▶
I already get TONS of political crap thrown at me on facebook and reddit, why would I want my last bastion of pure, unadulterated technology news also tainted by the very thing I'm trying to avoid? I want to come here to discuss code and technology, not to argue about Trump or Clinton.
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madaxe_again ◴[05 Dec 16 21:19 UTC] No.13109721[source]▶
So, where would a story about the code in voting machines sit? Anathema?

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.

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1. ythn ◴[05 Dec 16 21:22 UTC] No.13109751[source]▶
I don't see any reason a story about voting machines couldn't be strictly technical. What politics would you even want to discuss?
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2. madaxe_again ◴[05 Dec 16 21:26 UTC] No.13109787[source]▶
Well, for instance, one might want to discuss whether it would be right that an unaudited private entity would have access to voter data - or is that on the taboo side of the line?
3. bduerst ◴[05 Dec 16 21:50 UTC] No.13110029[source]▶
That entirely depends on the requirement priority for the user experience being based on agnostic fact, not opinion.

But as we know, some parties prefer more stringer voter identification at the expense of supression, and vice versa.

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4. nickodell ◴[05 Dec 16 22:26 UTC] No.13110354[source]▶
You can have a discussion about how to implement voter ID without deciding whether it's a good idea overall, or whether it violates the VRA.

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.)

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5. bduerst ◴[05 Dec 16 22:38 UTC] No.13110460{3}[source]▶
Whether or not they have it now is irrelevant (it's an example) - any proposed technology would inevitably see this requirement, and others, being identified based on opinion, not fact.
6. imron ◴[06 Dec 16 00:06 UTC] No.13111092[source]▶
Voter ID is not necessarily a bad thing and doesn't necessarily lead to suppression you just also need balances like making it mandatory for citizens over 18 to be enrolled to vote - that's what we do in Australia and it solves a whole bunch of issues.

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.