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

1630 points dang | 4 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.636s | 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.

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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.

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1. reflexive ◴[05 Dec 16 23:49 UTC] No.13110996[source]▶
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.

To support your point, there's a press release circulating from Google and Facebook right now. They've launched a program to share hashes (fingerprints) through a database identifying offending ("extremist") content so it can be more efficiently removed from the web. Yet, we aren't allowed to comment on this - I just posted it and the story was flagged.

There's a huge difference between saying "No more gratuitous flamebait about the US Election", and "no technical discussion permitted about any topic that could possibly be controversial."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110823

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2. dang ◴[05 Dec 16 23:56 UTC] No.13111036[source]▶
Maybe post it next week?
3. grzm ◴[06 Dec 16 00:00 UTC] No.13111054[source]▶
Prediction of any discussion on this topic:

- what's extremist? this is just going to be used to silence my particular views

- this is anti-free speech

- some mention how this is against net neutrality

- some mention of Trump and the cabinet

- some discussion on how Facebook is not taking ownership of the problem

- Facebook echo chambers

- diversity, racism, gender, safe places, identity politics (and likely bathrooms)

- how this is needed to create a safer online community

- something about how this ties in with the views of the MSM (and likely some misrepresentation of polls)

- something about how this wouldn't be an issue if the results of the election would have been otherwise

- something about the difference between the EC and the popular vote

All of these points have been discussed ad nauseum in other threads with no appreciably constructive discussion.

And for the life of me I can't think of any technical discussion that would be made on the topic other than possibly on how calculating all of these hashes/signatures isn't really going to be technically effective to catch everything.

What's useful about that?

mini-project idea: HN discussion generator, maybe markov chain based. Provide a topic, out comes a full-fledged HN-style discussion, complete with vote/flag estimates (not for posting to HN, of course)

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4. reflexive ◴[06 Dec 16 00:04 UTC] No.13111083[source]▶
mini-project idea: HN discussion generator

+1 - also an HN discussion auto-up/down-voter.

What's useful about that?

Personally, I've been struggling with the question of, are mega-services like Google and Facebook compatible with an open Internet? This helps to clarify my thinking.

Up to now I've been thinking about what evil they might do individually. Now I see the obvious: just like in any other industry, the objective is to reduce the market to a few major players (3-7). Then these become the only companies who can get "copyright clearances" or "non-fake news certification" in exchange for supporting their patrons' programs.