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

1630 points dang | 4 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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.

Show context
idlewords ◴[05 Dec 16 21:13 UTC] No.13109656[source]▶
This is a terrible decision. The tech industry has built powerful tools of social control, and runs vast databases of private data on pretty much everyone in the country. We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry.

We need to be talking about the political implications of what we've built, and figuring out how to fix our mess. This is like the period before the hurricane: everyone should be busy boarding up windows, and you can't do that if you decide you're just not going to talk about the coming storm because it makes you feel bad.

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ucarion ◴[05 Dec 16 23:07 UTC] No.13110715[source]▶
This moratorium will only last a week. I think our discourse will survive. Though political discussion is essential, I think you'd agree it has downsides when there's too much of it or when everyone considers it high-stakes.

The way I see it, the mods are asking us all to hold our political tongues and see what the comments feel like. They're very clear that it's an experiment. Maybe when politics resume seven days from now, people will remember what quality discourse looks like. This is mods trying to keep the conversation good.

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1. ubernostrum ◴[07 Dec 16 03:10 UTC] No.13120164[source]▶
It will only last a week... a week in which the president-elect is meeting with some top Silicon Valley people. And a week in which any discussion or stories about that will be conveniently automatically off-topic.
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2. aaron695 ◴[07 Dec 16 07:32 UTC] No.13121099[source]▶
Write it up as an article with proof or a convincing argument. Submit it and it'll be front page on HN pretty quick.
3. dang ◴[07 Dec 16 09:33 UTC] No.13121446[source]▶
Obviously that's a pure coincidence. The idea that HN moderators have prior information about presidential meetings is (from where I sit) completely silly, and certainly totally wrong.
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4. webmaven ◴[13 Dec 16 09:37 UTC] No.13165668[source]▶
> The idea that HN moderators have prior information about presidential meetings is (from where I sit) completely silly,

It is silly, but not completely silly.

One doesn't have to cross over into tinfoil-hat territory to wonder if sama, paulg, or other YC partners knew about the meeting ahead of time. Assuming they knew, it then isn't outlandish to wonder if they nudged the moderators into doing the experiment now as opposed to some other time without disclosing the reason.

That said, I don't subscribe to this chain of suppositions (or at least, I don't assign it more than ~10% chance of being true).

In any case, even if any YC partners did know about the meeting, I imagine they would be paying more attention to the absence of YC portfolio companies from the invitation list rather than considering new moderation policies to shape discourse on HN to their (supposed) advantage.

> and certainly totally wrong.

Having little reason to doubt you, and considerably more to take you at your word, this is more than good enough for me under the circumstances.