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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 b

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.

ythn 10y ago
Thank you. I have a million places I can go for political discussion. Why does HN have to be one of them?
- daptaq 10y ago
  One could argue, that when you live in a democracy, politics are a necessary duty for every citizen. For a democracy to flourish, no place, no topic, no time should be unfit for discussion, because if you forbid politics, you just manifest the status quo, which doesn't have to be a-political!
  - olalonde 10y ago
    > For a democracy to flourish, no place should be unfit for discussion This is obviously false. For example, plenty of democracies have flourished despite having libraries where silence is golden. > One could argue, that when you live in a democracy, politics are a necessary duty for every citizen. HN is international and if I recall correctly, more than half of users are not from the USA. Some users don't live in a democracy and some don't believe in it.
    - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
      Libraries and librarians tend to be opposed to censorship of what they may contain. > Some users don't live in a democracy and some don't believe in it. I look forward to arguing with monarchists about their views at some point in the future, then.
    - daptaq 10y ago
      >For example, plenty of democracies have flourished despite having libraries where silence is golden. There is a difference between "not allowed to speak" and "not allowed to speak about politics". You can't speak under water, but a pond isn't the proof that democracy can't exist.
reflexive 10y ago
Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. In fact, what is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion is: emotionally charged, poorly-considered, and dishonest discussion. The topic doesn't matter: health fads, operating systems, or taxes. I agree, many people have terrible style in their approach to political discussion - but see also, e.g. Hobbes and Rousseau for more thoughtful representatives.
- qntty 10y ago
  Yeah if this were true then most modern governments are doomed because they depend on intelligent political discussions happening.
- cloverich 10y ago
  > The topic doesn't matter Technically true. But practically speaking, I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others. If that's true, then this moderation should boost the general quality of HN comments and topics, which is why most of us come here in the first place. As a comparison, I was initially annoyed that simple jokes / witty remarks that were void of other content were down voted on HN. But long-term I compare it to reddit and agree with the method: I can still go to reddit if I want wit (I often do). I (ideally) come here for high quality technical content.
  - reflexive 10y ago
    I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others. This may be partly because so many thoughtless people feel qualified to enter a political discussion (e.g., about basic income, or immigration), whereas they couldn't even pretend to understand real-time operating systems or functional programming enough to have an opinion. Part of the beauty of HN is getting opinions about things that matter in the real world, from people who really think about things.
    - JonnieCache 10y ago
droopybuns 10y ago
/agree One benefit of this community is that technical discussion is exclusive. Not everyone is ready to understand why a relational database might be better than a key value store. This hopefully results in discussion that is based on experience earned expertise. Politics has virtually no barrier to entry. Consequently, the comment quality declines.
andrewtbham 10y ago
I am so glad about this. The unwashed masses are ruining this site with political drivel.
- Mz 10y ago
  Some of us unwashed masses [1] loathe political drivel and totally support [2] this move. 1 I only refer to myself as part of the unwashed masses because: A) I am not actually a programmer B) I am incredibly poor and C) I literally do not bathe frequently due to said extreme poverty as I am homeless. ;-) 2 Evidence of total support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692
  - pauloday 10y ago
    You seem exactly like the type of person that should be here, don't worry :) I don't know what they meant by "unwashed masses", but it kind of seems like there have been a lot of new posters coming here to talk about politics and nothing else. Honestly I think this site started getting mentioned a lot more on Reddit (especially the technology sub), and more people from there started posting here because they felt it was a more civilized place to discuss politics. That's true, but it's also specifically not a politics focused forum (unlike /r/technology) and I think that's messing some people up.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
scotch_drinker 10y ago
I really wish this top level comment could get some traction. People seem to think that because something is important to them, it should be important to the community but that's not how communities work. I for one feel that no amount of discussion of politics on HN is going to meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive to people who have already made up their minds. What I love about HN is that it's mostly rational. People aren't being rational right now in the political world and while I could see an argument being made for enforcing rationality through strong moderation here, I also think an experiment like this provides value. It would be interesting to know how they will judge the results of this experiment when it concludes.
- gkafkg8y8 10y ago
  > It would be interesting to know how they will judge the results of this experiment when it concludes. Personally, I don't plan to discuss politics any more or less than when this topic was posted, so I guess I'm not part of the experiment.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > I for one feel that no amount of discussion of politics on HN is going to meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive to people who have already made up their minds. I feel like healthy political discussion would be a meaningful change. If thoughtful people all abstain from the topic, it will surely get worse. The immediate goal isn't to "win" arguments. It's not to be confused about why someone would disagree. Or even agree! Maybe they do but there's no place to say that.
- Bud 10y ago
  Removing one of the most intelligent and rational communities from the political debate (albeit temporarily, although I fear that a permanent ban might be considered) will only make the overall political debate even less rational, in addition to taking away a space where technologists can discuss these matters. I respectfully disagree that discussion of politics on HN cannot "meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive". Indeed, I have witnessed proof that this is not so. I have seen numerous occurrences in comment threads where there has been spirited factual debate which ended up informing both sides. I have seen minds changed. I have experienced my own mind being changed. I don't deny, of course, that there has been some...less useful discussion, as well. But I feel that overall, it has been positive.
fusiongyro 10y ago
Not only do I completely agree, this used to be the policy here, long long ago. Around the time that Aaron Swartz was gaining influence and the Snowden leak happened, it suddenly became a political free-for-all around here and a lot of highly political people showed up and started commenting. I don't agree that everything is political, unlike most of the protesters above. We have sister sites like lobste.rs that have even less politics than we do and seem to have some useful dialog. I have always missed the less political atmosphere we used to have and am really glad to see this "cleanse." I hope it helps reinstate some of our culture, even if it is temporary.
- dang 10y ago
  No, that's a misunderstanding. The policy hadn't changed, circumstances did. We had to learn from that, and we're still learning.
  - fusiongyro 10y ago
    I appreciate that. Thanks!
grandalf 10y ago
> Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. Not terribly different from discussions of MongoDB, is it?
yladiz 10y ago
Your point about regional politics is a really good argument for keeping political discussions out of Hacker News, for the most part. While (I'd guess) the majority of HN users are from the states, there's probably a healthy minority that are not and political discussions, which are almost always US-centric, generally do become noise and have low relevance to them. Even to myself as an American I already see too much political discussion on other sites like Reddit and Facebook that a place that is proactive in disallowing the discussions is a breath of fresh air (or bits, I guess). I understand it's a little contentious to remove an entire topic of discussion, but I also welcome this and if the experiment goes well I would like to see it go longer term. I'm guilty of engaging in political discussions on HN but I try to moderate my words, but I know there are many who don't moderate their words in part or at all and especially because of how polarized politics seems at the moment (in the US at least) it's maybe a smarter decision to not allow people the opportunity to not moderate their words.
jitix 10y ago
Damn right! Its about time someone took a stance.. HN is slowly becoming reddit.
Brakenshire 10y ago
> 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. From a British perspective, I find most of the political discussion on HN to be useful, although perhaps I just instinctively avoid some topics. There are a lot of global issues which are being discussed, whether that's climate change, transport, tech and data regulation, job automation, money in politics, licensing and intellectual property, electronic surveillance, global trade, etc. These are all issues which are relevant to the technology community, as big social issues which are targets for innovation, as moral issues which we have to grapple with, or as concrete barriers which directly impinge on us. I'd say having a space for the technology community to discuss these things is a source of a fair amount of the value of this discussion board. Having said that, political discussion does have to be subsidiary to technology discussion. Once political discussion gets over a certain level, you're just appealing to a general audience and the forum loses its distinctiveness. So I sympathize with the moderators. You always have to draw a line in the sand, unfortunately attempting a total ban is going to be just as subjective as what goes on at the moment, which is moderators removing or flagging thread-by-thread (presumably to avoid general topics dominating, or to kill off those particular comment threads which have become toxic). I suggest they just keep on muddling through, and we just acknowledge the process is necessary but messy, and cut them some slack.
morgante 10y ago
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. ---------- 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
- ekiru 10y ago
  > 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 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.
yosefk 10y ago
As someone tempted to comment on politics, I'd love for the detox to continue indefinitely, with an instant lifetime ban for the first offence. 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.)
- lmm 10y ago
  HN has no ban on porn that I'm aware of; erotica has been upvoted and no doubt will be again.
  - dang 10y ago
    HN is for what's intellectually interesting—not the other kinds of interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - lmm 10y ago
      I see no contradiction between being pornographic and being intellectually interesting.
      - dang 10y ago
Shivetya 10y ago
If it is not blatantly political the number of stealth articles people submit can be daunting to filter through. I have more than once found myself reading through an article only to get halfway when the shoe falls. Worse, the super majority are all tilted one way. This is what sank /. in the eyes of many when they let their slant wreck the intelligent discussion of any story.
agumonkey 10y ago
I don't know if it's good or bad, I don't like to ignore politics, even politics related to hacks/techs, but it could be cool to separate and direct these discussions toward dedicated platforms and focus on original technological ideas here.
hash-set 10y ago
The problem is, you come off as sniffy and elitist when you say that "political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion." It's just the coward's way out. And we all know why this is happening--because some people are too thin-skinned to accept the fact that not only did their cherished (but utterly ethically compromised) candidate lose, but their whole way of thinking is also in question. The whole thing that backed up the Clintons was a pile lies, just like Socialism is a PILE OF LIES. Furthermore, it hurt me that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others added to that pile of lies in order to push for a political candidate. The left reason and everything the tech community used to stand for in the dust.
ProxCoques 10y ago
What, really, is wrong with noise as long as there is signal? The only people who care about flaming are the flamed. They should be able to take a good argument, and besides the flamers get modded down. Slashdot is a great example that HN would well to emulate in my opinion. It is in no way an echo chamber.

ythn 10y ago

Thank you. I have a million places I can go for political discussion. Why does HN have to be one of them?

daptaq 10y ago
One could argue, that when you live in a democracy, politics are a necessary duty for every citizen. For a democracy to flourish, no place, no topic, no time should be unfit for discussion, because if you forbid politics, you just manifest the status quo, which doesn't have to be a-political!
- olalonde 10y ago
  > For a democracy to flourish, no place should be unfit for discussion This is obviously false. For example, plenty of democracies have flourished despite having libraries where silence is golden. > One could argue, that when you live in a democracy, politics are a necessary duty for every citizen. HN is international and if I recall correctly, more than half of users are not from the USA. Some users don't live in a democracy and some don't believe in it.
  - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
    Libraries and librarians tend to be opposed to censorship of what they may contain. > Some users don't live in a democracy and some don't believe in it. I look forward to arguing with monarchists about their views at some point in the future, then.
  - daptaq 10y ago
    >For example, plenty of democracies have flourished despite having libraries where silence is golden. There is a difference between "not allowed to speak" and "not allowed to speak about politics". You can't speak under water, but a pond isn't the proof that democracy can't exist.

reflexive 10y ago

Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. In fact, what is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion is: emotionally charged, poorly-considered, and dishonest discussion. The topic doesn't matter: health fads, operating systems, or taxes. I agree, many people have terrible style in their approach to political discussion - but see also, e.g. Hobbes and Rousseau for more thoughtful representatives.

qntty 10y ago
Yeah if this were true then most modern governments are doomed because they depend on intelligent political discussions happening.
cloverich 10y ago
> The topic doesn't matter Technically true. But practically speaking, I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others. If that's true, then this moderation should boost the general quality of HN comments and topics, which is why most of us come here in the first place. As a comparison, I was initially annoyed that simple jokes / witty remarks that were void of other content were down voted on HN. But long-term I compare it to reddit and agree with the method: I can still go to reddit if I want wit (I often do). I (ideally) come here for high quality technical content.
- reflexive 10y ago
  I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others. This may be partly because so many thoughtless people feel qualified to enter a political discussion (e.g., about basic income, or immigration), whereas they couldn't even pretend to understand real-time operating systems or functional programming enough to have an opinion. Part of the beauty of HN is getting opinions about things that matter in the real world, from people who really think about things.
  - JonnieCache 10y ago

droopybuns 10y ago

/agree One benefit of this community is that technical discussion is exclusive. Not everyone is ready to understand why a relational database might be better than a key value store. This hopefully results in discussion that is based on experience earned expertise. Politics has virtually no barrier to entry. Consequently, the comment quality declines.

andrewtbham 10y ago

I am so glad about this. The unwashed masses are ruining this site with political drivel.

Mz 10y ago
Some of us unwashed masses [1] loathe political drivel and totally support [2] this move. 1 I only refer to myself as part of the unwashed masses because: A) I am not actually a programmer B) I am incredibly poor and C) I literally do not bathe frequently due to said extreme poverty as I am homeless. ;-) 2 Evidence of total support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692
- pauloday 10y ago
  You seem exactly like the type of person that should be here, don't worry :) I don't know what they meant by "unwashed masses", but it kind of seems like there have been a lot of new posters coming here to talk about politics and nothing else. Honestly I think this site started getting mentioned a lot more on Reddit (especially the technology sub), and more people from there started posting here because they felt it was a more civilized place to discuss politics. That's true, but it's also specifically not a politics focused forum (unlike /r/technology) and I think that's messing some people up.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

scotch_drinker 10y ago

I really wish this top level comment could get some traction. People seem to think that because something is important to them, it should be important to the community but that's not how communities work. I for one feel that no amount of discussion of politics on HN is going to meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive to people who have already made up their minds. What I love about HN is that it's mostly rational. People aren't being rational right now in the political world and while I could see an argument being made for enforcing rationality through strong moderation here, I also think an experiment like this provides value. It would be interesting to know how they will judge the results of this experiment when it concludes.

gkafkg8y8 10y ago
> It would be interesting to know how they will judge the results of this experiment when it concludes. Personally, I don't plan to discuss politics any more or less than when this topic was posted, so I guess I'm not part of the experiment.
humanrebar 10y ago
> I for one feel that no amount of discussion of politics on HN is going to meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive to people who have already made up their minds. I feel like healthy political discussion would be a meaningful change. If thoughtful people all abstain from the topic, it will surely get worse. The immediate goal isn't to "win" arguments. It's not to be confused about why someone would disagree. Or even agree! Maybe they do but there's no place to say that.
Bud 10y ago
Removing one of the most intelligent and rational communities from the political debate (albeit temporarily, although I fear that a permanent ban might be considered) will only make the overall political debate even less rational, in addition to taking away a space where technologists can discuss these matters. I respectfully disagree that discussion of politics on HN cannot "meaningfully change or move forward the debate and is unlikely to be instructive". Indeed, I have witnessed proof that this is not so. I have seen numerous occurrences in comment threads where there has been spirited factual debate which ended up informing both sides. I have seen minds changed. I have experienced my own mind being changed. I don't deny, of course, that there has been some...less useful discussion, as well. But I feel that overall, it has been positive.

fusiongyro 10y ago

Not only do I completely agree, this used to be the policy here, long long ago. Around the time that Aaron Swartz was gaining influence and the Snowden leak happened, it suddenly became a political free-for-all around here and a lot of highly political people showed up and started commenting. I don't agree that everything is political, unlike most of the protesters above. We have sister sites like lobste.rs that have even less politics than we do and seem to have some useful dialog. I have always missed the less political atmosphere we used to have and am really glad to see this "cleanse." I hope it helps reinstate some of our culture, even if it is temporary.

dang 10y ago
No, that's a misunderstanding. The policy hadn't changed, circumstances did. We had to learn from that, and we're still learning.
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  I appreciate that. Thanks!

grandalf 10y ago

> Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. Not terribly different from discussions of MongoDB, is it?

yladiz 10y ago

Your point about regional politics is a really good argument for keeping political discussions out of Hacker News, for the most part. While (I'd guess) the majority of HN users are from the states, there's probably a healthy minority that are not and political discussions, which are almost always US-centric, generally do become noise and have low relevance to them. Even to myself as an American I already see too much political discussion on other sites like Reddit and Facebook that a place that is proactive in disallowing the discussions is a breath of fresh air (or bits, I guess). I understand it's a little contentious to remove an entire topic of discussion, but I also welcome this and if the experiment goes well I would like to see it go longer term. I'm guilty of engaging in political discussions on HN but I try to moderate my words, but I know there are many who don't moderate their words in part or at all and especially because of how polarized politics seems at the moment (in the US at least) it's maybe a smarter decision to not allow people the opportunity to not moderate their words.

jitix 10y ago

Damn right! Its about time someone took a stance.. HN is slowly becoming reddit.

Brakenshire 10y ago

> 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. From a British perspective, I find most of the political discussion on HN to be useful, although perhaps I just instinctively avoid some topics. There are a lot of global issues which are being discussed, whether that's climate change, transport, tech and data regulation, job automation, money in politics, licensing and intellectual property, electronic surveillance, global trade, etc. These are all issues which are relevant to the technology community, as big social issues which are targets for innovation, as moral issues which we have to grapple with, or as concrete barriers which directly impinge on us. I'd say having a space for the technology community to discuss these things is a source of a fair amount of the value of this discussion board. Having said that, political discussion does have to be subsidiary to technology discussion. Once political discussion gets over a certain level, you're just appealing to a general audience and the forum loses its distinctiveness. So I sympathize with the moderators. You always have to draw a line in the sand, unfortunately attempting a total ban is going to be just as subjective as what goes on at the moment, which is moderators removing or flagging thread-by-thread (presumably to avoid general topics dominating, or to kill off those particular comment threads which have become toxic). I suggest they just keep on muddling through, and we just acknowledge the process is necessary but messy, and cut them some slack.

morgante 10y ago

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. ---------- 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816

ekiru 10y ago
> 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 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.

yosefk 10y ago

As someone tempted to comment on politics, I'd love for the detox to continue indefinitely, with an instant lifetime ban for the first offence. 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.)

lmm 10y ago
HN has no ban on porn that I'm aware of; erotica has been upvoted and no doubt will be again.
- dang 10y ago
  HN is for what's intellectually interesting—not the other kinds of interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - lmm 10y ago
    I see no contradiction between being pornographic and being intellectually interesting.
    - dang 10y ago

Shivetya 10y ago

If it is not blatantly political the number of stealth articles people submit can be daunting to filter through. I have more than once found myself reading through an article only to get halfway when the shoe falls. Worse, the super majority are all tilted one way. This is what sank /. in the eyes of many when they let their slant wreck the intelligent discussion of any story.

agumonkey 10y ago

I don't know if it's good or bad, I don't like to ignore politics, even politics related to hacks/techs, but it could be cool to separate and direct these discussions toward dedicated platforms and focus on original technological ideas here.

hash-set 10y ago

The problem is, you come off as sniffy and elitist when you say that "political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion." It's just the coward's way out. And we all know why this is happening--because some people are too thin-skinned to accept the fact that not only did their cherished (but utterly ethically compromised) candidate lose, but their whole way of thinking is also in question. The whole thing that backed up the Clintons was a pile lies, just like Socialism is a PILE OF LIES. Furthermore, it hurt me that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others added to that pile of lies in order to push for a political candidate. The left reason and everything the tech community used to stand for in the dust.

ProxCoques 10y ago

What, really, is wrong with noise as long as there is signal? The only people who care about flaming are the flamed. They should be able to take a good argument, and besides the flamers get modded down. Slashdot is a great example that HN would well to emulate in my opinion. It is in no way an echo chamber.