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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: 0.467s | 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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tarikjn ◴[05 Dec 16 19:44 UTC] No.13108655[source]▶
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.

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chrissnell ◴[05 Dec 16 20:23 UTC] No.13109085[source]▶
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.

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7952 ◴[05 Dec 16 22:18 UTC] No.13110268[source]▶
A trouble I have with HN is the casual assumption that a subject actually has an objective truth that can be debated. Often we just don't agree on the basics of what is actually important in a philosophical sense. So every fact is just a proxy for a particular world view. It is better to question the underlying assumptions than the facts themselves. We don't need to do this with technology or buisness because we already share the same sort of world view.

You see this kind of problem on debates about climate change. Once people learn about environment and ecology they tend to assume that humans have an unavoidable impact on the planet. Climate change "deniers" simply have a different intuition. All the science in the world is not going to change that. Which is why it is political, and not objective.

Really the entire point of politics is to debate things that lack definitive truth. Of course that is probably true of anything that is discussed on a forum to a lesser or greater extent. Otherwise the answer would already be on Wikipedia.

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tripzilch ◴[05 Dec 16 23:27 UTC] No.13110872[source]▶
I also often see this when someone argues that a certain action by a company isn't ethical--which has no objective truth, but that makes the debate only more fruitful, IMO--and someone else then replies that this company has every (legal) right to act this way, which has more of an objective truth by most standards, but isn't very interesting at all if you don't live in the same jurisdiction, nor has it much relevance to whether the action was "right" (in the ethical sense) or not.

But then, I guess, that person has every right to conflate moral and legal rights ... so sue me? :)

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1. 7952 ◴[06 Dec 16 17:31 UTC] No.13116441[source]▶
Yes, I have lost count of the rants against "natural products". People develop these buying habits in response to an inabilty to hold complete information about a product. So you have to have shortcuts based on your world view. For every organic lover there is someone slurping Soylant.