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

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.

I too find this to be an argumentum ad absurdum.

    > The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity
    > and thoughtful conversation.

    > For one week, political stories are off-topic.

That said, I can support:

    > Those things are lost when political emotions seize
    > control.

This ban should be on political emotions seizing control; not on intellectual conversation surrounding political stories.

In theory, yes, of course.

In practice, that distinction doesn't hold up—not on the public internet and not at scale. The discussions are tribal.

I'd be happy to say "No Tribalism on HN" but how would we enforce it and how could anyone comply? Tribalism is not something people have conscious control over.

You can enforce "no tribalism" by (a) requiring all users to either declare a tribe, or neutrality; and (b) requiring all posts containing tribal content to be self-marked as such.

For instance, suppose users can select in their profiles that they are either apolitical, SJWs, or shitlords. When an SJW or shitlord posts, they are offered a check box which indicates whether the post contains any virtue-signaling or shitposting, respectively.

Obviously, shitposts should be seen only by shitlords and so on. Political signaling at your peers is normal discourse and part of benign human social behavior. Political signaling at your enemies, or at neutral parties who just don't care, is normal human warfare behavior.

So the box is a self-reported box. But etiquette can easily render it mandatory. The chimps on each side of the river can and must suppress their own tribal instinct to throw turds over it, or the gods will rain down fire on the offending chimps or possibly even the whole tribe.

And of course, apolitical users shouldn't see any political crap at all...