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One question that interests/concerns me is making judgement calls about what is/is not a political story. Some links will be cut and dry, some will not. Some c

• dang 10y ago
  Right, it's not possible to define "politics" precisely, and it would be a mistake to try. But there's nothing new in that; the HN guidelines have always mentioned politics without defining the term, and we get by. We can clarify, though. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents. Those stories aren't going to be evicted from HN or anything like that. For this week, though, let's err on the side of flagging because it will make the experiment more interesting.
  • nerfhammer 10y ago
    So, do you mean only national politics?
    • dang 10y ago
      I don't see why we would.
      • knowtheory 10y ago
        Okay. I'll bite. What should be done about posts on 18F? Or tech policy in the government? What about stories about legislation on encryption? Are those all in the vein of things you think we should take a break from?
        • dang 10y ago
          I think I covered that in my comment upthread? To me they're in the same category as software patents: fine in principle (unless a post is just ranty), but maybe err on the side of flagging the more politicized variants for this week.
          • knowtheory 10y ago
            Yeah. <3 your motivations, but i think this is just doomed to stifle important/legit conversations. The idea that it's not possible to be thoughtful and political at the same time (and thus we should just cut out all/most the political stuff) is disheartening. The problem isn't the politics, the problem is the lack of thoughtfulness. I'm deeply ambivalent with this as an experiment. I hope it achieves what you're interested in without compromising the things I worry it will.
            • dang 10y ago
              It's just for a week, so even your worst-case scenario isn't too bad. I did see someone complain that they might not get to argue about Trump's Secretary of State though (which sort of proves the point). > The problem isn't the politics, the problem is the lack of thoughtfulness. Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness. I don't know if it's impossible to have the two together, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible at scale.
              • throwaway098345 10y ago
                > Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness. Politics isn't always tribal and many people on HN are capable on thoughtful arguments on politics. HN suffers from the "LKML-effect". Few people can or are interested in following the linux-kernel mailing list, so naturally it only gets attention when Torvalds is screaming at someone. It's the same with politics. When "diversity in tech" became more popular on the Internet it would get flagged off HN repeatedly. Some stories would get through and thoughtful discussions would start, but people quickly learned (maybe without knowing it) that if you just flame the story it would hit the controversy algorithm. So people would submit more sensationalist stories so it could get more upvotes to counter the flags and flame. Now the level of discussion is set and people don't mind how they express themselves on the topic. If instead HN would have owned the issue and moderated it heavily it would increasingly have gotten better. People would have learned that flagging or flaming wasn't a good idea and those with more reasoned arguments would formed a critical mass to self moderate comments. Programming is often tribal, yet there aren't a lot of flame over things like Erlang on HN. Because even if not a lot of people know Erlang, we haven't alienated all the Erlang programmers. So Erlang stories are generally advanced enough to not attract bad arguments and even they would someone would presumably challenge it. Yes, there are political stories that aren't relevant and/nor thoughtful. But those aren't the stories that could, presumably, be categorized as "fit for HN" anyway. But by just banning entire segments of political but relevant stories is letting the "unthoughtful" people win at the cost of the thoughtful ones. It might not be relevant enough to fight for discussions about Trump in general. But are we going to avoid to talk about e.g. surveillance, like we always have, just because the president is controversial? That would, if anything, be changing HN.
  • trowawee 10y ago
    > But there's nothing new in that; the HN guidelines have always mentioned politics without defining the term, and we get by. I mean, you clearly don't think that we have "gotten by"; generally a moratorium on a topic isn't required unless something is going wrong.
    • dang 10y ago
      HN isn't immune from macro trends.
  • tyingq 10y ago
    >The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. Am I to read that as "No Stories or Comments about Trump"? Maybe that wasn't the intention, but the specific hot buttons seem curiously chosen.
    • dang 10y ago
      What hot buttons did I miss? I can think of gender. I'll add that one. Edit: class, too. Perhaps I should make explicit what seems obvious (to me) and say no, this doesn't have to do specifically with Trump. This whole year has been a political game-changer—think of Brexit before it. Perhaps our societies are becoming increasingly polarized, I don't know, but lots of things are going on in the outside world and Trump is just one of them, though of course a major one. I wonder if developments on other online forums might be characterizing how this one seems to some users, but the truth is pretty mundane: I don't know about those other online forums because I don't have time to look at them. What we're talking about here is purely HN-grown.
      • tyingq 10y ago
        I'm really just curious about whatever it is that prompted this. It still sounds like "US National Politics" vs politics in general.
        • jerf 10y ago
          I'd submit that it's right there in the writeup. Politics literally activates different regions in the brain, producing a situation in which rational discussion is difficult or impossible. Being a site that chooses to avoid that would make HN much more valuable, because there are so few that do, even fewer of any size. I wouldn't support a moratorium forever, because there are topics that are both of perennial HN interest and also overlap politics, like intellectual property law and things specific to the tech industry. But I would support bumping off a lot more of the marginal stuff permanently. In general I would say that I see very little HN-specific contribution to most of those topics. (Not quite none, but hardly worth poking through the dross.)
  • mbesto 10y ago
    I have an idea - if it's in reference to a topic of CNN, NYT, WSJ, and WaPo's politics sections then it shouldn't be on HN.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It's pretty much what the guidelines have said all along.
      • mbesto 10y ago
        Yet, isn't followed.
    • karambahh 10y ago
      What if a tech topic (say the current Amazon Go thread) sparks a debate about 'is it socially acceptable or not?' If the story gets big enough, the articles about Amazon Go's impact on workers will move from the tech section to the politics section of the newspapers. Where do you draw the line on HN in that case? Once they have move in the WaPo, we should stop talking about them? I agree with others that moderating such a large online community is probably very hard and that dang and others probably experience bad times when comments thread inflame, but I think that a blanket ban on affairs of the cities is not the way to go. Actually, I find it quite funny that we are having this debate, because in essence that is a political debate. Some US posters will consider it as hampering their right to free speech, some others will consider that making that space void of any political discussions is fine, some (as myself :-) ) think it is impossible and impractical... Debate around the frontiers of that is admitted here is entirely political, in the noble sense of the word. As long as our debate is civil (and as far as I can see, it is), I think we should be allowed to have it. And what if my comments are not interesting and bring nothing to the debate? They will be downvoted to hell. HN, in contrast with Reddit, has apparently a very good track record with karma. It seems that brigading is not practiced around here. I think it is probably linked to the fact that under a certain thresold, you cannot down-vote. My karma is indeed too low to downvote for instance and at first I was uneasy with the fact that I couldn't downvote...but I think I am starting to understand why it is actually a good rule for the board ;-)
  • mattnewton 10y ago
    I respect this decision and the difficulty of moderating in this crazy climate, but I think for most people those issues aren't so clearly divided. Take, for example, privacy, where a lot of the positions are based in class and political ideologies, and the outcome of that discussion very much affects tech. Or on the ethics of technologies that replace workers (like the recently announced amazon go) - clearly we need to have a discussion based on political ideologies to talk about whether universal basic income, job retraining, or something else is a solution to real fallout from these trends. Hacker news is close to my only source of smart and civil discussion about these relevant, but politically charged discussions. I agree hatefully ranting is not working but I don't think politely steering away from the difficult part of the conversation is prudent either. I'm looking forward to hacker news being a place we can still have these difficult discussions in a civil tone after this moratorium.
  • mjg59 10y ago
    Hi dang, Quick question for clarification - would http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-companies-delay-diversity-reports-to-rethink-goals-1480933984 http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-companies-delay-diversity-r... fall into the kind of race and gender issues that you'd block this week?
    • tptacek 10y ago
      I can't answer for 'dang but I would definitely flag that post during a "political detox week". Also: HN threads on that particular topic (statistical evidence for diversity in the industry and its impact) are invariably a shitshow here. I am guessing your political leanings w/r/t/ industry diversity are identical to mine, and I do not see what HN generally gains from the trolling and nastiness that occurs on "diversity as a phenomenon" threads.
      • mjg59 10y ago
        The solution to "Certain types of story result in unpleasant arguments" doesn't have to be "Prevent that type of story from being visible". Media sites will happily disable comments on certain stories, but haven't extended that to not reporting on those stories in the first place.
        • ekiru 10y ago
          It doesn't have to be, but it may be that it still should be the solution to that problem. It makes sense for, for example, news sites to disable comments on some stories because the comments aren't the most valuable portion of the site: the news is. But I think that in large part the value of HN is in the comments. If HN isn't able to discuss a story productively, what's the point of that story being on HN?
          • mjg59 10y ago
            Because the subject is interesting and the content informative?
  • ben0x539 10y ago
    > The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers. There is no neutral option around this kind of politics and I'll be sad to see HN throw marginalized people under the bus to ensure the comfort of the privileged.
    • FT_intern 10y ago
      >I feel like trying to ban discussion of these conflicts will lead to the same outcome that reddit's weird "free speech" policy had, if more subtly. If Hacker News is the place where racist, misogynist, fascist hackers can feel particularly safe, that's going to be the kind of people you attract, at the expense of marginalized hackers. How are marginalized people "thrown under a bus" here? Not allowing discussions about race and gender is not equivalent to that at all. I can barely tell the gender or race of anyone here.
      • eropple 10y ago
        I know a lot of people here. I know their genders, I know their races, in some cases I know their sexual orientations. Because they have talked about personal experiences here. But the world is fundamentally and inescapably political and this policy will, full-stop, be used as a bat to silence those people and prevent them from sharing their personal experiences when those experiences threaten the white-empowering, male-empowering status quo. There is no world in which it won't be. Consider an article about discrimination in the hiring practices of startups. Is that "political" under this policy? My guess it is. And so out come the flags and the status quo is reinforced by the thunderous claim that it's Just Not A Problem--because, whether or not flags mean "this is bad and obviously unimportant" to 'dang, that's what they mean to the audience. And so, incrementally, the culture here gets worse. And worse. And worse.
        • 10y ago
  • gambogi 10y ago
    I don't understand how race, gender, and class in particular can possibly be separated out from tech any more so than software patents. A community that has been so obsessed with disrupting any and all aspects of life can't ethically refuse to discuss the consequences of doing so.
    • pessimizer 10y ago
      I would assume that discussion about software patents would fall under the ban, too. You can conceivably draw a line between discussions about implementation and discussions about the laws affecting different implementation. Wouldn't all discussions of the law fall under politics? Maybe just all discussion of potential changes in laws?
      • gambogi 10y ago
        GP suggested otherwise. Either way the bit about ethics was the point I'd prefer to discuss
  • venomsnake 10y ago
    I think a detox with clearer rules would have been better No Trump/Clinton stories for a week. These are the ones that are the major trouble makers. And since there is no chance of an article on the culture war not mentioning those people - this will rid of the second tier stories too.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • denom 10y ago
    Man, this strikes me as a really lopsided exercise. And to what end? The visceral reactions about politics are a part of US society. Hiding what's going on only makes things worse. As hackers, we should be finding a shared language to work these problems out.
    • dang 10y ago
      Yes we should, but the creative energy you're alluding to is the first thing to leave when the vitriol starts flowing. What should we do? I don't know, but I don't think a week off is going to hurt anybody.
  • wpietri 10y ago
    > pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion I'm very sad to see this, dang. Complaining about identity politics is a form of identity politics. Because we white people are the default, banning discussion of non-whiteness reinforces whiteness. Banning discussion of gender similarly favors men, especially in tech. You and I might experience this experiment as a detox. But it is increasing toxicity for those whose identities and concerns you are trying to erase. In normal times, I might shrug. But these are not normal times. Tech companies are having to consider whether they'll be making lists of Muslims and turning them over to the authorities. We are having to ask ourselves, "Do we really need to store all this user data if we might have to give it up in secret?" Refusing to discuss politics when these issues are on the table is actively supporting a side. I object in the strongest terms and will not participate. I won't be back for a week. If it keeps up, I'll be closing my account.
    • dang 10y ago
      That comment was a mistake on my part. The point I was trying to make was a lesser one, and the misunderstanding it gave rise to was much greater, so I should have thought of a completely different angle or just not bothered. Usually I can spot that sort of bug in advance, but a discussion this prolonged and intense fries the brain.
• hood_syntax 10y ago
  Very fair points you bring up, particularly the examples. I share your optimism however
• wccrawford 10y ago
  I think this is exactly how we got into this situation in the first place. Politics absolutely has a lot of effect on the other things that we talk about here. Trying to eliminate all talk of politics will see a huge void in the data needed to make intelligent decisions, IMO. You've pointed out some good examples above, and while you can talk about those things without any politics, it's a very shallow-feeling conversation, IMO. Still, it'll be interesting to see how this week goes.
• trjordan 10y ago
  Agreed, this is hard. My personal benchmark is: does this article have information that would change a political viewpoint? If so, then political talk feels like fair game. Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means. Story where a researcher makes incremental progress towards a quantum computer? Let's not talk about how long it will be until the NSA can break all crypto. It's definitely a grey area, but I do there there are tiers of political talk. The best discussions have reactions to new information, not re-hashed and pre-established opinions.
  • davidw 10y ago
    > does this article have information that would change a political viewpoint? Now that is a "unicorn" in the sense of a mythical beast! You can dig into usenet archives from the 80ies, and find people debating a lot of the same stuff they do today. People mostly do not change their minds about things.
  • drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    >Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means. And who is going to keep the comments on track? The typical anti-US people will come out in droves to derail. So we'll end up with the same issues, but instead we'll have political filtering done on the accepted articles themselves that could generate bias. Its not like all these people will suddenly stick to the topic. In fact, I find many articles that involve India, China, Russia, Brazil, etc usually have a top comment of "But the US is worse." There's a lot of knee-jerk anti-US sentiment here and filtering things out isn't going to change that.
    • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      Perhaps you missed where they are moderating comments, not just stories.
• drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  > On a story about cryptography Or Net Neutrality. Or research/tech about Climate Change. It seems like this could easily be abused by partisans who want to deflect the issues. Requests to have mods delete climate change articles about a hot startup doing solar power seems to empower climate deniers. Requests to have mods delete Trump's anti-net neutrality appointments seems to empower Trump supporters.
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    I don't think this is too hard. Cool tech about cheap, efficient solar power: Tech. The "how to talk to climate change deniers" submission I flagged a few minutes ago: Not tech.
• redthrowaway 10y ago
  You don't even have to hit tangents in comment threads to run into issues. Crypto backdoors? H1B changes? There are a lot of topics that are both political and of very high interest to hackers generally and HN specifically. If Congress rams through a crypto backdoor bill in the lame duck session, are we seriously not going to have a thread about it on HN?
• wav-part 10y ago
  > what is/is not a political story. How about everything in the form of: We should XYZ. There should be designted place for these type of discussions. So we can 1. Avoid repetitiveness. 2. See others response. 3. Reach conclusions.
• derefr 10y ago
  Interestingly, I don't think this is actually a "discrete logic" kind of problem—i.e. it's not the kind of problem where (doing the moral equivalent of) tagging everything and having an expert system/business rules engine (as instantiated in a moderation staff) do something according to the tags is the optimal way to go about things. The thing about political discussion—the identifying feature of it, which is the same thing that makes it such a problem—is that it sucks people into it. There can be four productive subthreads of a discussion all peacefully chatting, and then a political subthread gets started and from then on, all the comments end up on the political tangent subthread and discussion of the original non-tangential topic is forgotten. This is a structural pattern to how posts happen—the kind of thing you can identify with linear regression on time series of post metadata. Politics is almost literally a "black hole": it has greater "mass" than other subjects, sucking commenters away from their original intent toward political subthreads. If you model subthreads as having that sort of "gravitational force", you can predict the ones with the highest "pull" will be political in nature. (Well, that, or a subthread indulging HN's fun habit of primary sources showing up to make comments on stories about them. But those subthreads likely have very low "controversy" metrics [in the Reddit ranking algorithm sense], which can be used to filter those out from political consideration.)