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.
How is anyone supposed to realistically draw the line between what is political and what is not? Couldn't any topic in the world be related back to politics one way or another?
This seems like a blatant plot to censor 'unwanted' topics and articles. A huge downvote from me.
The article was not "how to argue with people you disagree with" but how to connect with an audience who does not believe in a scientific consensus due to misinformation. In fact the point of the article had nothing to do with arguing (or political parties), but rather empathetically connecting with an opposing viewpoint.
This is exactly what I meant from my parent comment. Because a topic has been hijacked by political parties we can't bring it up? Climate change = science topic. It is a well documented phenomenon that 97% of the world's climate scientists agree on [1].
Being on either side of the political spectrum is irrelevant here, as at its core this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with science.
When you consider HN submission rules, it does indicate "more than just hacking or startups" and things that "gratify intellectual curiosity" are in, but also that politics is generally off-topic. On a topic like this that toes the line, you probably should assume it's further off-topic than on.
The very nature of an article that is about how to talk to someone with an opposing viewpoint isn't satisfying an intellectual curiosity, but positioning someone to persuade others. Whether you phrase it as "connecting with an audience" or not, it's inherently about an argument, and how to win it.
I would argue that a discussion of new facts or research uncovered about climate change is a submission about science, and anything specifically about "climate change deniers" is politics, or at best, "argument".