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

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.

I actually haven't seen very many political stories on here. I've personally avoided most of the political crap too, so maybe I just didn't click on a lot of it (and therefore selectively un-memoryed it).

I don't feel this need to be an explicit policy. I mean it gets into the entire "what is politics debate."

Hackernews is about hacking (software, hardware, life), and I still see tons of that on here -- well that and Amazon spam, but that's mostly due to their recent conference/product announcements and will probably die down soon.

Yeah, I'm with you. Are there political threads here that I have been missing?

Many. They get flagged off the front page, but that doesn't mean they aren't still very active. Here's a recent example that helped convince me we needed to do this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095475

You'll need 'showdead' set to 'yes' in your profile if you want to see all the comments in it.

I think this thread is actually a great example, though maybe not in the way you intend it.

When I look at the tone of the downvoted/flagged "dissident" comments (not a value judgment, just an objective description of perspectives that are not generally well-tolerated in intelligent, cultured, Western circles today), and compare it to the tone of the "normative" comments, I see very little difference.

They are both slightly snarky, hostile, exasperated and dismissive. If I was moderating on tone to oppose conflict, I would not like seeing either kind of comment. But I would not consider this tone level worthy of the Giant Banhammer.

But the banhammer is applied very asymmetrically -- both by voters/flaggers, and by moderators. Or so it appears to me.

The result is a context in which "dissidents" feel like they're essentially sitting in the back row next to the teacher's pet. Any time Jamal has a spat with Andrew, the teacher's response is the same: "Jamal, why did you hit Andrew!" "Jamal, stop being mean to Andrew!" But Andrew can say pretty much anything to Jamal.

And both sides argue vociferously that the teacher is unfair. Jamal feels it's unfair that the rules seem to be different for him and Andrew. Andrew feels it's unfair that Jamal, that annoying idiot, is even allowed to be in the same class as him.

It's relatively easy to adopt "both sides complain about the teacher" as the definition of "the teacher is just enforcing fairness and good behavior." But in fact, whatever the teacher draws the line, one side will always want it farther to the left, and the other side will always want it farther to the right.