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

1630 points dang | 7 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom

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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nneonneo ◴[05 Dec 16 20:16 UTC] No.13109012[source]▶
Many of the top-level comments here are against this move. I, on the other hand, would like to express my strong support for this move.

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.

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morgante ◴[06 Dec 16 03:37 UTC] No.13112052[source]▶
I definitely support having a detox.

In the longer run, I think it is good to have some politics on the site. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum and has a huge amount of intersection with politics. In the past, it has been possible to have rational and nuanced conversations about political issues on HN.

In the recent election cycle, that's been destroyed. It seems to have emboldened people to derail threads with political mud-slinging and the crazies have come out of the woodwork.

To put it simply, I never thought HN would be the place where I was first told to leave the country or get killed. The fact that it was (and not Reddit) honestly depresses me, and I hope that a detox period will force the worst politics out of the forum.

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That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.

If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816

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ekiru ◴[06 Dec 16 15:44 UTC] No.13115373[source]▶
> That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.

I think you're right that both of those are problems, but they're not the only problem. Incivility is also a problem in political discussions here lately. Another problem lately is that discussions to which a political discussion is only tangentially relevant get derailed by political discussions that exhibit these problems.

> If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816

I disagree with this for two reasons. Firstly, if people could civilly propose the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews, then that wouldn't show that people proposing either that or innocuous things incivilly is not a problem (only that incivility is not the only problem). But here specifically, I don't think that commenter spoke civilly, any more than "No offense, but <some insulting or offensive thing>" is polite (indeed, less so, as the commenter made even less pretense). The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.

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1. eli_gottlieb ◴[06 Dec 16 23:58 UTC] No.13119349[source]▶
>The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.

This statement should probably become a part of civility rules in most communities.

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2. grzm ◴[07 Dec 16 03:17 UTC] No.13120180[source]▶
I like the "civil and substantive" aspect of moderation here at HN. I'd also like to see something along the lines of Rapoport's Rules[0] and the Principles of Charity[1] embodied in the community.

Rapoport's Rules:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

- You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

- You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

[0]: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...

[1]: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

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3. morgante ◴[07 Dec 16 04:39 UTC] No.13120515[source]▶
I know that dang has been making a concerted effort to encourage the Principle of Charity, something which I definitely commend.

That actually could be a good way to moderate political threads by requiring an even higher standard of conduct. So you must not merely be civil, but actively apply Rapoport's Rules.

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4. grzm ◴[07 Dec 16 04:42 UTC] No.13120521{3}[source]▶
Cool! Wonder if it would be worth mentioning it in the guidelines. I can see keeping them relatively brief is worth something, as well.

I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to. That said, I think keeping them in mind is worth it.

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5. morgante ◴[07 Dec 16 04:53 UTC] No.13120548{4}[source]▶
> I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to.

That's why I suggest this higher standard for only political threads. It's a lot better than banning them entirely.

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6. grzm ◴[07 Dec 16 05:06 UTC] No.13120592{5}[source]▶
Oh, yeah, I understood that. Even some of the long-established users on the site react strongly when they feel their free speech is being encroached upon. I still think it'd be worth a try. (After all, I brought them up :) I know it makes me more understanding of others arguments, not dismissing them in a knee-jerk fashion.
7. eli_gottlieb ◴[07 Dec 16 18:23 UTC] No.13124799[source]▶
I'm not sure that can work in the cases when Alice and Bob have genuinely different worldviews. Consider, say, economics: the Austrian School and the neo-Keynesian school cannot really be mutually charitable. They're just working in fundamentally different ways. The Austrians believe economics to be a formal science dealing with axiomatic definitions of rational agency and their consequences, while the neo-Keynesian synthesis not only have specific beliefs about "what happens when you do that", they also paradigmatically believe themselves to be engaging in an empirical social science.

Nonetheless, both of them make object-level claims about exactly the same sorts of stuff: which way the markets will go, public policy, etc.

We need a clear, courteous way to talk about situations in which more than one person is trying to predict or prescribe the same object-level thing, but each person in the conversation is bringing completely different paradigms, assumptions, and prior knowledge to the table.

Or to cut to the example that made dang put in the moratorium, an everyday person and a white nationalist are living in extremely different worldviews with extremely different paradigms. This would also be the case where I want content to count for civility: if one side of the conversation is trying to make a courteous, civil, well-written case that the other side should cease to exist, then the line of incivility is crossed, period. There's just not going to be any way for a non-white-nationalist to restate the white-nationalist (ie: neo-Nazi) worldview eloquently, give credit to neo-Nazis where credit is due, and then deconstruct that worldview.

Maybe, in an ideal society, we would expect every citizen to be able to eloquently refute every bad idea. However, in our existing society, our heuristic is to require that citizens only put in the effort to politely discuss or debate content that does not incite or entail violence. When it comes to violence, our heuristic as a society is to protect people first, and ask for justification only much later if at all. We assume that somewhere a philosophy professor, a priest, or a public official can retrieve the arguments against mass violence.

And nowadays, I'm worrying that with the living memory of such violence dying, people are starting to slip into forgetting that there are very good reasons we don't ask for counterarguments against violence.