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

1630 points dang | 5 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 1.145s | 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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flashman ◴[05 Dec 16 22:22 UTC] No.13110318[source]▶
Not to mention that "can we please stop with all the politics" is not political neutrality, it's a position that supports the status quo.

Silence assists certain forms of repression.

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3131s ◴[06 Dec 16 03:15 UTC] No.13111952[source]▶
And it's already the case on HN that political discussions are quickly flagged into oblivion, so I'm not sure how this current week will be any different.

I was pretty let down that HN did not do more to protect political discussions during the US election cycle and I really didn't see all that much vitriolic behavior in the first place. Even if there is bad behavior though, is that something that we need to be protected from at all times? Maybe it is better to let it happen, point it out when we see it, and then hopefully learn to discuss more civilly as a community in the future.

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1. Chris2048 ◴[06 Dec 16 11:40 UTC] No.13113861[source]▶
A much better course of action would be attempts to improve political discourse, rather than demonize the adjective.
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2. DanBC ◴[06 Dec 16 11:50 UTC] No.13113913[source]▶
They've tried, hard, for some time now. Look through dang's and sctb's comment history to see how hard they've tried to improve the discourse.
replies(1): >>13114540 #
3. Chris2048 ◴[06 Dec 16 13:53 UTC] No.13114540[source]▶
I think a reform of the guidelines would be more effective. Not every mod-comment is seen.

I also think that specific flags would help, i.e. flag a comment that is against some guideline, with reference to the rule it broke.

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4. dang ◴[06 Dec 16 23:25 UTC] No.13119171{3}[source]▶
What guidelines would you suggest?
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5. Chris2048 ◴[06 Dec 16 23:54 UTC] No.13119327{4}[source]▶
You would be in a better position to notice common fallacies etc, but any "list of logical fallacies" is a good starting point, especially those fallacies that can be used to insult, or insinuate, E.g. Specific guidelines about ad-homs. This would also include advice not to use personal information/ circumstances in an argument, unless you are happy to see them criticised.

One of the worst fallacies, us probably the kind that removed the civility from a discussion, and hence the good faith.

As a side note, the worst kinds of guideline is an ambiguous one, that leaves a lot to interpretation, e.g "act civil" is itself a nice rule, but otherwise useless, better off as a heading above specific clarifications.

HN doesn't need to be Wikipedia wrt comment rules, but a few Wikipedia style rules might be good.