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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: 0.265s | 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.

1. CmdrSprinkles ◴[06 Dec 16 08:48 UTC] No.13113154[source]▶
So I assume this means that yc is now concerned over alienating a certain political party/faction that tends to have a lot of money but not a lot of support among college grads.

And as many others have said, this is a horrible idea. ESPECIALLY for a site oriented toward start-ups (or, at least, people who like to talk about start-ups). Guess who is going to be signing off on the regulations that determine what is and isn't allowed? Guess who is going to determine where research money goes and what gets subsidies or tax breaks?

Oh yeah, that thing which you don't want anyone to discuss.

A few years old and more geared toward HPC and scientific computing, but Michio Kaku gave a great talk at SC about how politics and lobbying are very important and are actually vital and that if technology wants to advance it needs to not plug its ears and hide but actually be involved and fight for our interests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_MbkVozydE

Rather than sit around, gazing at our navels, and talking about how amazingly smart and above it all we all are maybe, just maybe, people should actually consider "disrupting" the world into an "agile" state that can actually result in a government and laws that aren't a hindrance. And you sure as sugar don't get that by talking about how nobody else knows how to communicate with anyone because they aren't "hackers".

But hey, gotta make sure you don't alienate anyone who might be a good business partner.

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Maybe, just maybe, enforce rules about not making emotional and unfounded posts. Because that is largely independent of politics and is the kind of thing that makes it hard to take this place seriously as a "meeting of the minds" and mostly causes it to feel like "A marginally less meme filled reddit".