←back to thread

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

1630 points dang | 2 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.403s | 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.

Show context
tarikjn ◴[05 Dec 16 19:44 UTC] No.13108655[source]▶
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.

replies(36): >>13108789 #>>13108826 #>>13108956 #>>13109024 #>>13109085 #>>13109124 #>>13109126 #>>13109160 #>>13109168 #>>13109250 #>>13109253 #>>13109552 #>>13109613 #>>13109650 #>>13109771 #>>13109861 #>>13109881 #>>13110130 #>>13110143 #>>13110264 #>>13110288 #>>13110291 #>>13110317 #>>13110358 #>>13110359 #>>13110619 #>>13110735 #>>13110742 #>>13110784 #>>13110864 #>>13110921 #>>13110996 #>>13111010 #>>13111196 #>>13111315 #>>13111420 #
chrissnell ◴[05 Dec 16 20:23 UTC] No.13109085[source]▶
I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion.

I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. Frankly, it may be impossible to expect objectivity within political discussion because our political feelings are so deeply-held and tied to our individual upbringings, culture, and locale.

Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.

replies(27): >>13109166 #>>13109187 #>>13109207 #>>13109377 #>>13109449 #>>13109535 #>>13109549 #>>13109575 #>>13109687 #>>13109769 #>>13109841 #>>13109886 #>>13109945 #>>13110009 #>>13110197 #>>13110247 #>>13110268 #>>13110346 #>>13110436 #>>13110458 #>>13110486 #>>13110506 #>>13110627 #>>13110714 #>>13111256 #>>13111282 #>>13112442 #
mattnewton ◴[05 Dec 16 20:30 UTC] No.13109166[source]▶
The rub is, a lot of difficult conversations lead to what are effectively political answers. Take the amazon go which is on the front page right now. We need to be able to have a conversation about job displacing technologies, and hacker news has been a good venue for smart, civilized discussion on the topic.

I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but eliminating discussions outright because they might make people feel uncomfortable or might turn uncivil seems like we are missing a really important piece to the news we discuss here.

Minority opinions are never going to have "fair treatment" by the majority. I've been down voted several times for my opinions and I'll take it again just to be able to have the discussion here.

replies(6): >>13109213 #>>13109329 #>>13109332 #>>13109792 #>>13111493 #>>13112426 #
chrissnell ◴[05 Dec 16 20:33 UTC] No.13109213[source]▶
Perhaps the upvote/downvote could be removed from political stories and in its place, an "abuse" flag could be substituted?
replies(2): >>13109287 #>>13111644 #
jish ◴[05 Dec 16 20:40 UTC] No.13109287[source]▶
Perhaps upvote/downvote could be replaced with ontopic/offtopic. Or goodpoint/badargument.
replies(3): >>13109761 #>>13110078 #>>13110957 #
pera ◴[05 Dec 16 21:55 UTC] No.13110078[source]▶
Or remove comment voting altogether (a voting detox week experiment? :)). I'm a bit skeptic about how much comment voting improves the discussion quality... maybe it's completely useless, or maybe it harms more than it helps. A sort by responses may be enough if you are looking for interesting points.
replies(3): >>13110501 #>>13110559 #>>13110572 #
gus_massa ◴[05 Dec 16 22:49 UTC] No.13110559[source]▶
Removing votes will transform this in something like the comment threads of youtube. The vote system is not perfect, but in technical discussions it usually is helpful to make the good comments float to the top.
replies(2): >>13110677 #>>13110850 #
1. colmvp ◴[05 Dec 16 23:25 UTC] No.13110850[source]▶
The problem is defining good comments and having users actually follow that protocol.

To many, a comment that doesn't follow their personal logic or point of view is not a good comment. And you end up with echo chambers where only the comments that align with the majority of a community pop up, while the extremists (for lack of a better term) of a community are pushed to the bottom. Those extremists could easily be individuals sounding the alarm on something that's happening, such as skepticism for a story.

On Reddit and HN, I almost never downvote anyone because I think it's a terrible system that is too often abused and reduces the ability to have meaningful conversations about controversial topics.

replies(1): >>13111627 #
2. gus_massa ◴[06 Dec 16 01:51 UTC] No.13111627[source]▶
As a personal rule I don't downvote grey comments unless they are very offensive or extremely wrong. And I usually upvote grey comments in spite I disagree with them, unless they are offensive or very wrong.