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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: 0s | 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.

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KineticLensman ◴[05 Dec 16 19:58 UTC] No.13108826[source]▶
> I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.

I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea. Sure, in a week we can get back into the grim reality, the tech-noir crapsack future, but perhaps for one week we can focus on a positive future and its soaring aspirations. Go Dang!

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toomuchtodo ◴[05 Dec 16 20:19 UTC] No.13109037[source]▶
At least allow us to opt out of the artificial safe space.

Technology and politics go hand in hand, unless we'd like to head back into the dark ages.

EDIT: I'm not hear to offend or persuade with politics talk. I'm here to provide or obtain new perspectives and understanding. If I want an echo chamber that reinforces my perspectives and beliefs, I can head back to Facebook.

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Karunamon ◴[05 Dec 16 20:35 UTC] No.13109223[source]▶
Technology and politics go hand in hand

This just reads like a cop-out to me, in the same way that large media orgs have been parroting the "it's impossible to be truly unbiased" line as if it were an excuse to throw up their hands and stop trying altogether.

Not that I'm saying you're being disingenuous here, mind, it just reads like defeatism. "All tech is politics so it's pointless to try delineating them". This mentality gets worse and worse as you go down the main thread...

Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking down the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..

Those topics aren't even tangentially political in nature.

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icebraining ◴[05 Dec 16 20:59 UTC] No.13109496[source]▶
OpenAI is one of the tools that might be used to replace whole swaths of people from their jobs. How can it not be political?
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Karunamon ◴[06 Dec 16 00:29 UTC] No.13111229[source]▶
>How can it not be political?

Short answer: Because oftentimes a thread about a technology is about its concrete operational characteristics and applications, not it's social effects.

When you start dragging those into the topic, there's shockingly little depth to probe. AI will automate people out of jobs eventually - okay, and? You've moved the thread off topic. I came to read about how OpenAI works, not what the left, right, center, and upside-down think about the larger concept of AI, rather than the specific implementation called out in the thread title.

Here's the thread I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103742

A cursory reading suggests that somehow, that particular rabbit hole was avoided by everyone there. This kind of goes into what dang was saying, broaching the topic you just did in that thread would have just been unwelcome noise.

Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? Is that really an interesting discussion to have in every thread?

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icebraining ◴[06 Dec 16 00:45 UTC] No.13111308[source]▶
One can refuse to approach the inherent political nature of the topic, but not deny it exists, which was what I was responding to.

That said, sure, not every thread should re-hash the same conversation, but that's neither exclusive to politics (see the discussions in every thread about JS frameworks) nor is it the problem being called out by the moderator.

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Karunamon ◴[06 Dec 16 00:48 UTC] No.13111324[source]▶
If they go "hand in hand", they are inextricable in all ways that matter. Yet somehow, here is a very healthy discussion thread where it isn't brought up, at all, ever. That tells me that they are not as inextricable as people seem to think.

Again. Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? What if there are sites that are not Hacker News that are better for that kind of discussion?

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icebraining ◴[06 Dec 16 00:55 UTC] No.13111357[source]▶
Sorry, I edit my post, so the answer to the relitigation problem is above :)

As for other sites, no, absolutely not. Politics is unavoidable. You can enforce a silent acceptance of the status quo, but that's in itself a strong political (reactionary) position.

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Karunamon ◴[06 Dec 16 01:01 UTC] No.13111389[source]▶
And yet the other thread somehow managed to discuss the technical nature of OpenAI without touching any of this other stuff, absent any enforcement (the political cooling-off period was started after that thread was submitted), or obvious attempts to not touch it.

These two views are mutually exclusive. Either technology discussion can be separated from politics discussion (and given the other thread, we have evidence that it can), or it can not.

You're telling me that I can't discuss a topic without touching this other topic, and yet here that is happening right in front of us.

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1. icebraining ◴[06 Dec 16 01:07 UTC] No.13111426[source]▶
No, I'm saying that lack of discussion is a political position, and a community-wide ban, or even refusal to discuss it is yet another - in particular, one that silences everyone who is not okay with the social impact of the topic.
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2. Karunamon ◴[06 Dec 16 01:16 UTC] No.13111463[source]▶
What if I am not interested, at a meta level, in discussion on the social impact of the topic? (Note: Please appreciate the distinction between topic X in general, and discussion of topic X on board Y)

There are times and places to have political discussions - the fact that I do not engage with my mom on political topics over Thanksgiving turkey does not mean I am not interested in politics, it means I am not interested in politics in that particular context.

Mostly because I know that the discussion will end in anger, hurt feelings, and not a single changed mind. It has happened enough on this board that people, myself included, start getting very flag-happy when they get a whiff of partisanship in the air.

I especially do not appreciate the implication that not wanting to have the discussion "here" is a political statement of anything other than wanting to avoid a headache. I must point out that insisting that X be talked about when someone has expressed disinterest in the topic is hard to interpret in any way other than hostile disregard.