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

1630 points dang | 3 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | 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.

1. kristianc ◴[05 Dec 16 21:35 UTC] No.13109885[source]▶
It's not possible for HN to have "no political position" on issues such as tech.

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.

replies(2): >>13110977 #>>13111763 #
2. Yen ◴[05 Dec 16 23:45 UTC] No.13110977[source]▶
I think we can read PG's tweet a little more favorably.

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.

3. johncolanduoni ◴[06 Dec 16 02:24 UTC] No.13111763[source]▶
Do you really feel the political discussion here advances the interests of any of those marginalized groups? I've seen people explicitly change their minds on technical issues due to comments here; politics, not so much. Whatever the solution is, I don't think it can be found on HN. The recent flare up in politics here seems far more likely to make things worse if anything.

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 haven't read all the comments, but I think you'd have to try really hard to discuss anything political on those, unless you consider language flamewars political. So there appears to be plenty of things to discuss on HN other than politics without moving to a malignant "default position".