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

1630 points dang | 17 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 1.312s | 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.

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nneonneo ◴[05 Dec 16 20:16 UTC] No.13109012[source]▶
Many of the top-level comments here are against this move. I, on the other hand, would like to express my strong support for this 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.

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1. reflexive ◴[05 Dec 16 21:22 UTC] No.13109760[source]▶
Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion.

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.

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2. qntty ◴[05 Dec 16 21:35 UTC] No.13109883[source]▶
Yeah if this were true then most modern governments are doomed because they depend on intelligent political discussions happening.
3. cloverich ◴[05 Dec 16 21:56 UTC] No.13110079[source]▶
> The topic doesn't matter

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.

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4. reflexive ◴[05 Dec 16 22:04 UTC] No.13110144[source]▶
I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others.

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.

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5. flashman ◴[05 Dec 16 22:24 UTC] No.13110333[source]▶
I'd wager that we're all more qualified to talk about tech topics than political ones, which is what leads to emotion and bad arguments.
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6. sixothree ◴[05 Dec 16 22:59 UTC] No.13110647[source]▶
Maybe we should be addressing just that, the larger issue here, in addition to political comments.

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.

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7. reflexive ◴[05 Dec 16 23:08 UTC] No.13110725[source]▶
Maybe we should be addressing just that, the larger issue here, in addition to political comments.

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.

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8. brudgers ◴[06 Dec 16 03:04 UTC] No.13111919[source]▶
For me, the more relevant political theorist when it comes to HN's governance is Plato.
9. viraptor ◴[06 Dec 16 04:14 UTC] No.13112208{4}[source]▶
That's not what the parent comment said. They only claimed "pretend to understand politics -> easy", "pretend to understand specific advanced tech -> hard", "HN is great, because comments mostly come from people trying to understand things".

You jumped to conclusion about what "matter in real world" actually means that wasn't in the comment.

10. goalieca ◴[06 Dec 16 05:21 UTC] No.13112441[source]▶
Agreed. The recent hate for apple is such an instance of this phenomenon. Every day i see posts about how horrible the new macbook pros are. It's just a damn computer people!
11. ctchocula ◴[06 Dec 16 09:02 UTC] No.13113225{3}[source]▶
Compulsory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/451/
12. tomhoward ◴[06 Dec 16 09:49 UTC] No.13113457{4}[source]▶
Aaron Swartz died on January 11.
13. cabalamat ◴[06 Dec 16 09:50 UTC] No.13113461{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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.

14. JdeBP ◴[06 Dec 16 12:26 UTC] No.13114067[source]▶
> I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others.

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...

15. alphapapa ◴[06 Dec 16 23:14 UTC] No.13119111{3}[source]▶
This is one of the biggest problems on HN. All it takes is for five people to disagree with a comment and it gets disappeared, as if no one said anything. It's the epitome of an echo chamber. It's the virtual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears--except it's worse, because it essentially plugs the ears of everyone who visits afterwards. How patronizing to those people, preventing them from even hearing ideas that you disagree with.

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.

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16. dec0dedab0de ◴[07 Dec 16 00:56 UTC] No.13119672{4}[source]▶
Those four paragraphs could have been expressed as a downvote without any loss of meaning.
17. Turing_Machine ◴[07 Dec 16 04:33 UTC] No.13120487[source]▶
Hobbes once published a book entitled Stigmai ageōmetrias, agroichias, antipoliteas, amatheias, or, Markes of the absurd geometry, rural language, Scottish church-politicks, and barbarismes of John Wallis professor of geometry and doctor of divinity, so he, too, had his intemperate moments.

(Wallis was a political adversary of Hobbes, in case that's not clear)