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

1630 points dang | 1 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.448s | 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
idlewords ◴[05 Dec 16 21:13 UTC] No.13109656[source]▶
This is a terrible decision. The tech industry has built powerful tools of social control, and runs vast databases of private data on pretty much everyone in the country. We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry.

We need to be talking about the political implications of what we've built, and figuring out how to fix our mess. This is like the period before the hurricane: everyone should be busy boarding up windows, and you can't do that if you decide you're just not going to talk about the coming storm because it makes you feel bad.

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olalonde ◴[06 Dec 16 00:16 UTC] No.13111154[source]▶
And this type of comment is precisely why I support a ban on political discussion on HN. You're just preaching to the choir. I've read this same comment in one form or another for hundreds, if not thousands of times on HN. If anything, a dissenting opinion (e.g. one in favor of Trump or the NSA) could add something new to the conversation but it would get down voted to hell and get ugly pretty fast.
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1. cinquemb ◴[06 Dec 16 02:40 UTC] No.13111842[source]▶
>If anything, a dissenting opinion (e.g. one in favor of Trump or the NSA) could add something new to the conversation but it would get down voted to hell and get ugly pretty fast.

I'll take the bait.

About a little of a year ago, when I worked in a lab, some of my colleagues routinely laughed and mocked Trump and boasted how he had no chance in hell (as well as fueling fire with continued patronage of sites and news that gave them more of the same "entertainment" [in their words]), and no amount of me pointing out to them the environment that enabled a such a persona to exist/rise to fame/power should be the topic of conversation rather than on the team $x circus ring leader de jour.

From where I stand, the problem with a ban on political discussion isn't really the content of it, just the intellectual naivety that one can shield themselves political discussion while ignoring all the not so hidden influences of such on ones culture, thought processes, and etc is laughable will only end in rude awakenings, because in reality such a ban can only be superficial, and never really cut to the heart of such issues that underpin political discussion.

Like another commentator said: "Talk is cheap and political discussion is especially cheap" and I'd add that superficial bans to hide or sideline political discussion, are can be incredibly expensive (filter bubbles, walled gardens, deep packet inspections, paid "moderators", "cultural fit" selectors) in the search of temporarily being in control, yet ultimately futile.

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