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

One question that interests/concerns me is making judgement calls about what is/is not a political story.

Some links will be cut and dry, some will not. Some comments will be immediately identified as political, some will just be politics adjacent.

For instance, on a story about self driving cars, will it be appropriate to talk about UBI? On a story about cryptography, will it be acceptable to talk about how it applies to political dissidents?

Still, I have always found HN moderation to be reasonable, and I expect this to be the same. This is also something I think is desperately needed, we could all use a cooling off period, and it'll be nice not to be bombarded with US politics from yet another angle.

Hoping for the best, thanks dang + crew!

Right, it's not possible to define "politics" precisely, and it would be a mistake to try. But there's nothing new in that; the HN guidelines have always mentioned politics without defining the term, and we get by.

We can clarify, though. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents. Those stories aren't going to be evicted from HN or anything like that. For this week, though, let's err on the side of flagging because it will make the experiment more interesting.

> The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion

I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.

There is no neutral option around this kind of politics and I'll be sad to see HN throw marginalized people under the bus to ensure the comfort of the privileged.

>I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers.

How are marginalized people "thrown under a bus" here? Not allowing discussions about race and gender is not equivalent to that at all.

I can barely tell the gender or race of anyone here.

I know a lot of people here. I know their genders, I know their races, in some cases I know their sexual orientations. Because they have talked about personal experiences here. But the world is fundamentally and inescapably political and this policy will, full-stop, be used as a bat to silence those people and prevent them from sharing their personal experiences when those experiences threaten the white-empowering, male-empowering status quo. There is no world in which it won't be.

Consider an article about discrimination in the hiring practices of startups. Is that "political" under this policy? My guess it is. And so out come the flags and the status quo is reinforced by the thunderous claim that it's Just Not A Problem--because, whether or not flags mean "this is bad and obviously unimportant" to 'dang, that's what they mean to the audience. And so, incrementally, the culture here gets worse. And worse. And worse.

Hacker news does not have the responsibility to improve or stop discrimination that happens outside the website. There is barely any discrimination that occurs on this website. Again, the majority of people cannot tell the race or gender of others unless it is explicitly stated.

And those issues are not just a one sided affair. It is politics after all. HN is impartial in that it silences both sides of that story (the other side being affirmative action or racial discrimination in favor of those who are supposedly oppressed).

With an assumption of good faith, let me try another way to express this to you: silence is, functionally even if not intentionally, support of the status quo. As such, the experiences of white men are implicitly apolitical under this policy and will be allowed. The experiences of women and minorities are implicitly political under this policy and will be flagged as such.

Is the incipient problem, for those not so fortunate as to be born white and male, perhaps a little clearer now? (And, to be clear, I am a white male. I'm just not blind to the concerns of others.)

Most of Hacker News contains shared experiences where identity level experiences are irrelevant. That appears to be the point of Hacker News becoming apolitical to me, to avoid bringing in experiences that can differ between people and cause arguments.

I'm not a white male and I never think to bring up issues affecting my group to the discussion. It doesn't brother me that those issues are barely brought up.