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 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.

As someone whose views don't align with a good chunk of HN readers (or don't align, period), I've grown to love reading about differing ideas through the eyes of others computing/tech enthusiasts. There's common ground to start from and most importantly, even if it turns out to be a viewpoint that deeply goes against my values I can still respect this fellow human because of their tech expertise.

I have to admit, it really irked me at first when I came here. How can all these people that like the same things as me, have ideas that are so ... "wrong?!" (just kidding, honest :) ) But then I learned to listen and realize that these opinions will be here whether I engage them or not.

Of course, I see subthreads that aren't very "objective in the way I want them to be". But I don't share your experience with downvotes. I try to refrain from trying to convince the person I'm directly replying to if their view is directly opposed to mine, that never works any way. I just state my own personal position and how it reflects. Sure I get the occasional downvote but that's almost always when I've let myself be confrontational about it. Also, there's a big difference between providing a link to some facts that a person might not know, and a very opinionated link (that may also have facts and numbers) that is arguing your point.

So yeah, while I support the experiment (it'll be interesting to see), I really hope they don't extend this to forever, but just occasionally after particularly turbulent US elections.

Finally:

> fair treatment to minority opinions

Come on what does that even mean? I don't know what your opinions are. You don't know what mine are (you can read my comment history but good luck). I have no idea what "fair treatment to minority opinions" should even mean. My opinions are minority opinions too (I'll change them if you don't believe me), but I know this; People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio.

> Come on what does that even mean?

> People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio.

Downvoted comments are subject to being greyed out here, which is a stigma. Yes, it happens. The downvote in a political story has such a different meaning than downvotes in other stories. I feel like people use them as an agree/disagree vote in political threads, whereas they serve as an informed/uninformed vote normally.

I think you're taking these downvotes way too personally.

Also, yes, in a strongly charged political thread, up and downvotes are used very differently (compared to the wide variety of ways people use up/down otherwise, definitely not just "un/informed", take a breath and a step back and you can see that). I've seen it, and it seemed mostly there was wild voting going on, and if it changes the meaning in any sense, only to make the votes less meaningful, so just don't worry about it.

I've personally seen maybe two of those threads, cause as a non-US citizen I don't have much of a beef in it. I think stuff like that is what prompted this detox-week.

But from what I saw, the up/downvotes really went both ways. I know for sure, because that's when I realized the voting was going wild, reasonable comments on both sides voted in to greyness.

BTW the recent discussions about the new Macbook being sufficiently "Pro" or not, followed pretty much the same pattern and I'd love to have a detox week for those as well.

edit: Hey. So, we were explicitly not talking about our personal political points of view, but just about dealing with opposing views and reactions there on. Now I see you're getting greyed out. While I'm getting mad upvotes (you guys). Can we maybe agree that it's maybe perhaps not the political points of view that make the difference here, but rather the earlier-mentioned S2B ratio?