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

Hacker News has never been an anything-goes site. Tight moderation, considerate rules, and low tolerance for bullshit have made this a great site to talk about interesting technical topics and ideas. Remember that we all abide by the rules of the site, and that this isn't a magic free speech zone. If you want to talk political topics, the Internet has more than enough outlets.

Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. This is not an opinion; look only to sites that allow political discourse (Slashdot?), or even our own comments to see how quickly rational discussion can devolve into flaming. One of the major selling points when I introduce HN to other people is the _absence_ of political topics or discussion: leaving the politics out just produces better technical content.

Also, please consider the idea that politics are regional and differ between countries. In Canada, where I'm from, many of the US political topics would never come up; many European countries might feel even more strongly. As a Canadian, I find American political musings and arguments even less relevant and noisy. By contrast, technological topics are always interesting to me - I can appreciate these, and I love that there's this corner of the Internet where I can participate in a reasoned, interesting technical community. Please don't ruin it with politics, especially the polarizing American variant.

I appreciate that the site is willing to take this step, and I sincerely hope it can keep this site useful, interesting and level-headed for the future.

HN doesn't add much to politics (it looks just like that kind of discussion would look anywhere else) but politics does detract from HN (firstly because you get less of what HN has that is less prevalent elsewhere, and secondly because politics is great at distracting attention from everything else.)

This would not be a controversial statement if "politics" were replaced with "pornography" and I think the two are, in this context, very much a like - you can have none, or you can have just that one thing as they do in many places and that too "works" in its own way, but having a little works badly.

(And if anything, if HN had porn it'd be easier to ignore it than politics because with politics, not only do you need to avoid the temptation to read about it but also to argue with the harebrained viewpoint in the comments that threatens your family, country and the entire humanity, and then they have to avoid the temptation to push back against my harebrained arguments threatening their family, country and the entire humanity. And just standing there and doing nothing when humanity is at risk, for the sake of a goal so narrow and insignificant as keeping HN about one thing and not another, is very, very hard.)