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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: 0.21s | 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.

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minimuffins ◴[05 Dec 16 20:37 UTC] No.13109251[source]▶
The idea that we can carve out a space that exists outside of politics and ideology is delusional.

Ideology is present everywhere. It's built in to the ways we relate to each other, to our employers, to the public and private institutions and technologies we interact with all the time, and especially the way we work and conceive of work. Ideology is often tacit, baked into our assumptions even in "non-political" areas.

Squelching political discussion won't cause us all to transcend ideology, it'll just make it impossible to discuss or critique a dominant ideology whenever one shows up in someone's unstated assumptions.

This is a bad idea and a little dystopian (the world is upside down, but think happy thoughts, folks! Here's a TED talk!)

Not to mention I didn't really see a huge problem on the site, so in a time when politics and ideology are on everyone's minds for good reason, it seems you've chosen to solve a non-problem with censorship.

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dang ◴[05 Dec 16 21:04 UTC] No.13109550[source]▶
Of course it's delusional. The concepts can't be defined to begin with, nor can they be separated in any consistent way. And still we have to moderate this site.

> the world is upside down, but think happy thoughts, folks! Here's a TED talk!

It's sort of a peeve of mine that people project this onto us because I can't say how I really feel about it without breaking our own rules.

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jdp23 ◴[05 Dec 16 23:26 UTC] No.13110862[source]▶
Perhaps grounding your moderation policies around concepts you know are undefined and inseparable isn't the best basis for moderating the site.

As for how people see your actions: labeling it as "projecting" might make you feel better, but probably gets in the way of you understanding what they're saying.

In today's environment, you can't simultaneously make the site an welcoming place for people who are anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-trans (etc.) - and for people who are Muslim, immigrant, women, trans and nonbinary people (etc) or allies to any of these groups. What people are telling you is that they see YC - and you personally - as siding with the bigots.

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dang ◴[06 Dec 16 00:08 UTC] No.13111113[source]▶
It's the best basis for moderating the site because the alternative is impossible.

You're right, though, that I shouldn't use the word 'project' like that.

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throwaway098345 ◴[06 Dec 16 00:56 UTC] No.13111361[source]▶
It's not impossible to say "this is a technology site, here we discuss technology" which would make it much less arbitrary which things are politics and not. You might not want to do that, but it's certainly not impossible as an alternative. "Technology only week" is probably even an easier sell for an experiment.
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dang ◴[06 Dec 16 01:23 UTC] No.13111494[source]▶
HN is not a technology site. It's a site for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity":

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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zorpner[dead post] ◴[06 Dec 16 10:31 UTC] No.13113608[source]▶
I'll say it once and quickly -- you've allowed yourself to be tricked by the same trick the modern alt-right (bigots, racists all) have used on the rest of the internet, where they make discourse on specific topics so toxic that the topic itself becomes banned, allowing the status quo to persist. You're literally now on their side, and their side is the status quo of white supremacy.

Think about what side you want to be on.

1. Chris2048 ◴[06 Dec 16 13:08 UTC] No.13114282[source]▶
Except the topic need not be so toxic - Why does Ben Shapiro have such a hard time speaking on campus?