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I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in pol

I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion. I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. Frankly, it may be impossible to expect objectivity within political discussion because our political feelings are so deeply-held and tied to our individual upbringings, culture, and locale. Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.

mattnewton 10y ago
The rub is, a lot of difficult conversations lead to what are effectively political answers. Take the amazon go which is on the front page right now. We need to be able to have a conversation about job displacing technologies, and hacker news has been a good venue for smart, civilized discussion on the topic. I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but eliminating discussions outright because they might make people feel uncomfortable or might turn uncivil seems like we are missing a really important piece to the news we discuss here. Minority opinions are never going to have "fair treatment" by the majority. I've been down voted several times for my opinions and I'll take it again just to be able to have the discussion here.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  Yeah, it honestly seems like HN should split into two forums effectively. Tech (No politics, etc.) / Not Tech. The trying to force it all into a single view seems to be creating some friction.
  - dang 10y ago
    The distinction isn't tech/notech. That's the most important thing to understand about this whole site! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site.
    - superquest 10y ago
      The very niche "I want to argue politics, but only with other hackers" site!
      - greglindahl 10y ago
        Which only applies to part of HN readers; from reading the comments here, many hackers appear to dislike the political arguments which take places on HN.
    - fweespeech 10y ago
      > I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site. Privacy issues, opinions on hiring practices, etc. are all topics that have heavy polarized sides with little to bridge the divide and would likely benefit from a shift in separating those topics from the solidly tech related ones. Although, to be honest, I'm more concerned with the fact you are oblivious to this than I am about the fact you call change ignorance. I guess it does not really matter, I'll be off HN for a long while.
  - trowawee 10y ago
    Except, as tons of people have already pointed out, there is no way to talk about tech without talking about politics. Is research about how the Google search algorithm or Facebook's news feed shapes users' opinions tech or not-tech? Is a story about Uber researching autonomous cars with the intention of eliminating drivers in its own industry and industries like trucking tech or not-tech?
- chrissnell 10y ago
  Perhaps the upvote/downvote could be removed from political stories and in its place, an "abuse" flag could be substituted?
  - jish 10y ago
    Perhaps upvote/downvote could be replaced with ontopic/offtopic. Or goodpoint/badargument.
    - snerbles 10y ago
      Eventually we'll wind up with Slashdot-style scoring.
    - pera 10y ago
      Or remove comment voting altogether (a voting detox week experiment? :)). I'm a bit skeptic about how much comment voting improves the discussion quality... maybe it's completely useless, or maybe it harms more than it helps. A sort by responses may be enough if you are looking for interesting points.
      - Nickersf 10y ago
        Comment voting is good to filter out spam/off topic and then sadly it can be used to create an echo chamber where dissenting opinions of all sorts gets shut down.
        tropo 10y ago
        Track up and down votes separately. To compute the effective score, square the number of up votes and then subtract the number of down votes.
      - gus_massa 10y ago
        Removing votes will transform this in something like the comment threads of youtube. The vote system is not perfect, but in technical discussions it usually is helpful to make the good comments float to the top.
- BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
  Is political discourse in HN comment threads ever actually "effective", though? What actually results from having those discussions here that couldn't be accomplished just as easily in a forum where it's explicitly on-topic, e.g. /r/politics or similar? It's not as though policymakers or voters are looking to the HN comments section for guidance.
  - chrissnell 10y ago
    Spot on. To quote one of my favorite songwriters, Todd Snider, "I didn't come down here to change anybody's mind about anything. I came down here to ease my own mind about everything."
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    Yes, I generally think that the conversations here stay on the relevant technical topic and treat political explanations as just more evidence into an investigation instead of the end-goal. I don't want a board focused on politics, I certainly don't find this kind of civil discussion in reddit. I also don't think that the hacker spirit responds well to barriers of thought and discussion. It's just an anecdote, but I know my views have been greatly affected in part by hacker news. I was once a staunch libertarian, but reading a lot about universal basic income and other approaches people have offered to income inequality and social issues, while talking about the technology trends first and foremost, have convinced me to broaden my beliefs. There is something about having a stated goal outside of political points scoring that helps everyone see themselves as part of the same team. I've always felt hacker news is largely about understanding things related to technology - trends, weird bugs, how startups work, etc. With that as our main focus we can defer to each other and learn from each other. When the main force is to debate the other side there is no room for concessions or finding common ground. What I want in a community, is for people of all different views and backgrounds to think about a topic with the end goal of solving some problem. Hacker news isn't perfect there but it's close.
    - hueving 10y ago
      The basic income discussions are pretty pointless though. There is just a group of people who think we should have it and another who think it's a pointless thought experiment because it the economy is about an order of magnitude short of the output required for the numbers being proposed.
- padobson 10y ago
  Detox week may be a good time to focus on non-political positions and views to problems like mass-job displacement. Are there solutions to these problems that don't fit neatly into a political ideology? Are there solutions that don't require government policy? If the non-political solution antibody makes itself a permanent resident of the HN community as a result of detox week, I know I'd be pleased.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    There's no non-political solution to a social problem. It's a contradiction in terms. "Non-political" just means "aligned with the political status quo". The idea that major social ills can be solved with no governmental intervention is itself very political.
    - weberc2 10y ago
      There seem to be multiple meanings to "political"; one in a broad sense (things pertaining to social governance) and a specific ideological axis along which certain general topics become polarized. The former is fine, the latter is damaging (at least in high concentrations or some such).
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        The appearance of a single overwhelmingly-dominant ideological axis is an artifact certain electoral systems produce in the societies that host them. The fewer axes of variation the electoral system supports, the fewer end up significant in discourse in the society. The "broad" definition is the one in most dictionaries; the narrow one you suggest seems to be the overlap of partisan tribalism with a society with a single overwhelming axis for the reason described above. In any case, simple utterances of tribalism are already clearly off-topic on HN, whether they are centered on political ideology or not, so clearly an experiment of the type here must be targeting something broader (though apparently also narrower than the dictionary definition of poltiics.)
        10y ago
- drvdevd 10y ago
  I agree with you and the first question that came to my mind was: what constitutes political discussion? I believe that, like it or not, the cat is out of the bag and Hacking/technology in general is very much entwined with politics. Thus I'm interested in the "hacker" point of view on these topics...
- Jarwain 10y ago
  I wouldn't think that a conversation about job displacing tech would be against the rules/political. I'd think that it would get political, in the sense that detox week is trying to avoid, if discussion turns to the president-elect or "partisan politics"
heartbreak 10y ago
> I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. I think that being able to discuss political issues such as regulations that impact startups is important, and will certainly resume after the political detox week is over.
canadaduane 10y ago
FWIW, I enjoy well articulated dissenting opinions, as well as experiences brought from sources external to a community's shared experience. It's instructive as well as frequently enlightening. That said, I do also appreciate tribal familiarity and the "relaxed state" that comes from friends who think alike.
serge2k 10y ago
How is this any different than people getting downvoted for questioning the ability of Tesla to execute on an insane timeline or any of the other random things go against the HN hivemind? I'd suggest not caring about downvotes.
timzentu 10y ago
That sounds like a standard <insert derogatory opposing political term here> opinion and it is wrong because you are a <insert mean adverb && previous political term>. Seriously though, political discourse is good, but badgering is poor behavior. Just because someone disagrees, isn't a reason to down vote.
sigmar 10y ago
If your feel your perspective gets marginalized, shouldn't you want to be able to convince others of what you believe to be true? Removing all political conversation will perpetuate the status quo.
- weberc2 10y ago
  This assumes that humans put rational argument above tribalism; social psychology tells us this is not the case ("morality binds and morality blinds"). Excessive political discourse seems more likely to strengthen bonds within political groups relative to the bonds we have with those from rival political groups. Taking time to realize how much we have in common seems prudent.
scj 10y ago
> Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely. Given that cultural and political values and assertions are diverse within relatively small communities, never mind a global audience, I'd suggest this would be very difficult to pull off. For a moment, consider speaking about a topic that was settled decades or centuries ago in your community, but is still a controversial topic elsewhere. What topic are you thinking of? What other communit(y/ies) were you thinking of? What issues and communities do you think other people would offer? I bet there would be a lot of different perspectives on these questions, which is the reason political discussion should be limited.
wheelerwj 10y ago
I am sorry to hear you feel this way. as someone who has independent views, I have no idea what the views of the average HN reader are but I'll try to be more mindful of this in the future.
- chronic92 10y ago
  The overwhelming majority of HN readers are Democrats/liberals/progressives and support Hillary Clinton and/or Bernie Sanders and will attempt to insult and suppress any Republican/conservative/Donald Trump supporter.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    HN has sizable contigents of liberal, left-libertarian, right-libertarian, and conservative posters. And some that don't fit neatly into any of those groups. It absolutely doesn't have an overwhelming majority favoring any one US political party or candidate .
    - davidivadavid 10y ago
      Has there every been any survey about that?
dave_sullivan 10y ago
> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion. Are there any online communities where their political opinions match more with yours? Why don't you hang out there instead? I realize that's reinforcing an echo chamber, but it sounds like you're looking for more of an echo chamber, right? > even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way Maybe an example of a time you made a point in an informed and respectful way only to be downvoted and derided would help clarify? > Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely. I strongly disagree. I don't know what "fair treatment" means, but if enough people on the site feel a topic is worth talking about, we should talk about it. Specific incidences of abuse should be flagged, but again, it's hard for me to say one way or another without examples showing what you mean. As to the overall question of whether politics should be allowed on HN, HN started as "Startup News". It's always been a site about entrepreneurship, mostly in the tech industry. Entrepreurship is intimately linked to politics in obvious and non-obvious ways. Politics has to do with taxes, healthcare, immigration, legality of certain types of research, market size and access, shifting demographic trends, financing sources, and much more. Edit: I removed a final sentence because it's moot and doesn't add to my actual argument.
- dang 10y ago
  > To take this blanket approach of "No talking about politics!" is... For one week. > "Forbidden topics" because some people's feelings are getting hurt? It's about a lot more than that, as I tried to explain in the text above. There are two different kinds of site—intellectually curious and politically combative—and we cannot be both of them.
  - dave_sullivan 10y ago
    > For one week. Then I hope it's just for a week. I know HN weights certain topics down already. I think there's a good argument for some of that, but I don't see an argument for more of it. > There are two different kinds of site—intellectually curious and politically combative—and we literally cannot be both of them. FWIW, as a user, I have not noticed an uptick in politically combative discussion on HN, although I have noticed the uptick in political posts. If your target demographic is basically founders/hackers/entrepreneurs/whatever, having a place to find relatively sane discussions about politics is a good thing. HN is pretty much that, I can't think of a place that's better. I do think having lots of strong opinions in one place is a good thing and helps those opinions evolve towards something better. Echo chambers result in the information equivalent of inbreeding. But that's my point, I very much don't want HN to become an echo chamber by, for example, banning political posts for more than 1 week (which is a weird experiment, but fine).
CN7R 10y ago
I thought there were rules established: upvote if a post is thought provoking and or informative; downvote if it's factually incorrect or doesn't contribute to the conversation. The forums on the internet should not be solely to affirm your opinions, but also to challenge them and allow growth as an individual. The problem isn't with politics -- it's with the people misusing the voting system.
- weberc2 10y ago
  > downvote if it's factually incorrect I would be surprised if this had much of an impact. I've encountered a lot of people even on HN who truly seem to believe their ideology is somehow 'fact'. Those who are sufficiently self-aware in this regard are probably not abusing the downvote button to begin with.
- kps 10y ago
  The actual rule emerges from the code: upvote a post you want people to read, downvote a post you want made difficult to read.
StevePerkins 10y ago
> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site When people talk about "the average HN reader", or the "prevailing slant", I'm always curious what they mean. For me, it's always felt more like a back-and-forth struggle between radical liberals and hardline libertarians. That's always been the general nature of pretty much every tech-oriented forum historically (e.g. HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, etc). When Mike Judge was once asked about the core insight behind his "Silicon Valley" TV show, he cited his belief that the tech ethos is a conflict between liberal and libertarian values. As a pragmatist who just likes to read about tech, I find both sides annoying.
- bbctol 10y ago
  Still, technologically minded liberals/libertarians, for all their differences, are not the only viewpoints, and even if there's disagreement along that axis it can still lead to a bubble. I doubt you'd see many people on HN advocating for a fundamentally Christian America, for instance.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    Yes, liberal-libertarian is only one axis and this axis is different to the Democrat-Republican one. Both liberals and libertarians are socially liberal, as you imply.
- Yen 10y ago
  I'm also curious as to what the mean (or median) HN political viewpoint would be, and which is the majority/minority viewpoint. Personally, I tend towards liberal politics. I interperent this statement as "Liberal politics dominates HN, and conservative politics is a minority that gets downvoted" Even assuming that's accurate, I tend to find more conservative viewpoints on this forum, compared to other forums I browse, and I find those conservative viewpoints better argued, and more likely to affect my view.
ritchiea 10y ago
Hacker News is an unfair place for people to speak up about about the lack of racial and gender diversity in tech. I have been downvoted for comments where I felt like I was making uncontroversial critiques of the status quo. I have seen HN users say that black neighborhoods need more policing than other neighborhoods. It's not an easy place to be non-white or non-male. I believe banning politics is a bad idea even for a week.
- ianstallings 10y ago
  How is that unfair? It's actually quite fair. We all have opinions and we can upvote, downvote, and comment equally.
  - ritchiea 10y ago
    The parent to my comment complains about HN being unfair to his political viewpoint and has a history of posting somewhat sympathetically about Trump. He seemed to assume that sympathizing with Trump or conservatives is the only way one could disagree with mainstream HN political views. "Unfair" is his term, I was making a point.
    - digler999 10y ago
      Saying "you were downvoted" doesn't mean all of HN is unfair. I've been here a couple years and overall the topic of inclusion and diversity is handled very well. I dont mean "well" in that every progressive claim is unilaterally accepted, either. I mean that we take the subject seriously and most of us are champions of diversity and inclusion.
      - adrienne 10y ago
        This may be the most laughably wrong statement I've seen in this entire thread, and that's saying something.
- reflexive 10y ago
  uncontroversial critiques of the status quo Hmm... Let me try to understand your reasoning. If everyone agreed with your critique of the "status quo", why would it be the status quo to begin with?
pfooti 10y ago
I think that it's important to support minority opinions, sure. Civil discourse needs to be civil. That said, not wanting to talk about politics is a political act. It's basically saying, "let's let the status quo keep going for now", because most things involve politics on some level. Can we get away from namecalling and toxic behavior? Sure. But having a politics free space isn't the way to do that.
reflexive 10y ago
I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. I'd like to point out that this site is called "Hacker News", not "Technical and Business News". While there is no single "hacker political stance", there are ethical principles embraced by the community that can be applied usefully to policy questions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics As many have pointed out, it's really the subjective content of this site (here in the comments) that has the most value.
stcredzero 10y ago
I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion. In recent threads, I've made some factual observations, only to have people imagine a slant or motivation, then argue with that commenter of their imagination. I think HN is succumbing to the "Arguments as Soliders" antipattern: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers
tripzilch 10y ago
As someone whose views don't align with a good chunk of HN readers (or don't align, period), I've grown to love reading about differing ideas through the eyes of others computing/tech enthusiasts. There's common ground to start from and most importantly, even if it turns out to be a viewpoint that deeply goes against my values I can still respect this fellow human because of their tech expertise. I have to admit, it really irked me at first when I came here. How can all these people that like the same things as me, have ideas that are so ... "wrong?!" (just kidding, honest :) ) But then I learned to listen and realize that these opinions will be here whether I engage them or not. Of course, I see subthreads that aren't very "objective in the way I want them to be". But I don't share your experience with downvotes. I try to refrain from trying to convince the person I'm directly replying to if their view is directly opposed to mine, that never works any way. I just state my own personal position and how it reflects. Sure I get the occasional downvote but that's almost always when I've let myself be confrontational about it. Also, there's a big difference between providing a link to some facts that a person might not know, and a very opinionated link (that may also have facts and numbers) that is arguing your point. So yeah, while I support the experiment (it'll be interesting to see), I really hope they don't extend this to forever, but just occasionally after particularly turbulent US elections. Finally: > fair treatment to minority opinions Come on what does that even mean? I don't know what your opinions are. You don't know what mine are (you can read my comment history but good luck). I have no idea what "fair treatment to minority opinions" should even mean. My opinions are minority opinions too (I'll change them if you don't believe me), but I know this; People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  > Come on what does that even mean? > People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio. Downvoted comments are subject to being greyed out here, which is a stigma. Yes, it happens. The downvote in a political story has such a different meaning than downvotes in other stories. I feel like people use them as an agree/disagree vote in political threads, whereas they serve as an informed/uninformed vote normally.
7952 10y ago
A trouble I have with HN is the casual assumption that a subject actually has an objective truth that can be debated. Often we just don't agree on the basics of what is actually important in a philosophical sense. So every fact is just a proxy for a particular world view. It is better to question the underlying assumptions than the facts themselves. We don't need to do this with technology or buisness because we already share the same sort of world view. You see this kind of problem on debates about climate change. Once people learn about environment and ecology they tend to assume that humans have an unavoidable impact on the planet. Climate change "deniers" simply have a different intuition. All the science in the world is not going to change that. Which is why it is political, and not objective. Really the entire point of politics is to debate things that lack definitive truth. Of course that is probably true of anything that is discussed on a forum to a lesser or greater extent. Otherwise the answer would already be on Wikipedia.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  I also often see this when someone argues that a certain action by a company isn't ethical--which has no objective truth, but that makes the debate only more fruitful, IMO--and someone else then replies that this company has every (legal) right to act this way, which has more of an objective truth by most standards, but isn't very interesting at all if you don't live in the same jurisdiction, nor has it much relevance to whether the action was "right" (in the ethical sense) or not. But then, I guess, that person has every right to conflate moral and legal rights ... so sue me? :)
  - 7952 10y ago
    Yes, I have lost count of the rants against "natural products". People develop these buying habits in response to an inabilty to hold complete information about a product. So you have to have shortcuts based on your world view. For every organic lover there is someone slurping Soylant.
Forlien 10y ago
You make some interesting points about non-objective discussions on HN. I think your reasoning could justify banning other topics too, so I'm wondering how you would decide that discussions aren't objective enough. For example, you could use your justification for banning any discussion about HN's rules since that would also be subjective and have minority viewpoints unfairly downvoted. People are often passionate about any rules changes as we can see by the upvotes on this submission. Do you think discussion about this rules change should be banned too?
rplnt 10y ago
I like the idea, but I don't see the rule to stand if something of importance happens this week.
denzil_correa 10y ago
Personally, I think that is quite a self-centered view. You don't want political discussions because you are in the minority? That's quite a myopic perspective to take.
irascible 10y ago
So are you proposing that HN become a sort of "safe space" for your political opinions?
erikbye 10y ago
> I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do... Sure, why not. They are useless. But, those "discussions" on Apple, Linux, Microsoft, FOSS and FSF, Vim, Emacs, IDEs, JS frameworks, programming languages, etc--they are so objective and fruitful... Truth is, between the overton window and the commonly accepted fictions of the world there is only subjectivity, if you think you can be objective about anything you are delusional. And for someone who are not a believer in the common myths and accepted fallacies of this world--this is so much easier to fathom. If your opinion is outside of the norm matrix you'll be downvoted, tough shit. Fair? Are your feelings hurt? This is not directed at you personally: if downvotes bother you, then don't partake in online discussions.
smaddox 10y ago
That's probably the biggest disadvantage of the simple upvote/downvote moderation system. This is one area where I miss Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderatiom system (though I don't miss the continually degrading quality of the discussions). It's a bit like the distinction between true democracy and a democratic republic. True democracy is mob rule. Democratic republics are slightly better at maintaining some sanity and objectivity.
trav4225 10y ago
I completely sympathize. The hate is real -- I myself often have to take a personal "detox break" from HN simply in order to feel human again. It would be nice to be able to consider HN a welcoming, warm community but, on the other hand, I don't want it to be a fake sense of community -- I'm glad when people vilify me for my beliefs so that I can mark and avoid those people.
clackanon 10y ago
I feel your pain, brother.
taytus 10y ago
>I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion This is insane. Why are people worried about internet points. I'm guessing you are an adult right? and you don't want to express your points of views because someone might click the little arrow? Why? Please, honestly, explain this to me.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  I could care less about the "internet points". Look at my karma--I don't need them. My objection is to the greying-out/hiding of comments that are voted down. This is how a majority can effectively silence a minority viewpoint here on HN. It's easy to say "get a thicker skin" when it's not you that's being squelched.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- webmaven 10y ago
  Here are a few reasons someone might care: 1. Internet Points are a social signal. 2. Some HN features are restricted to users that have more than a certain number of Internet Points. 3. If you are expressing yourself in a comment with the aim of communicating, having the comment downvoted enough to grey it out (making it harder to read) will frustrate you.
inimino 10y ago
Rational, polite, constructive, civil, objective discourse is possible on any topic. It just gets a lot harder.

mattnewton 10y ago

The rub is, a lot of difficult conversations lead to what are effectively political answers. Take the amazon go which is on the front page right now. We need to be able to have a conversation about job displacing technologies, and hacker news has been a good venue for smart, civilized discussion on the topic. I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but eliminating discussions outright because they might make people feel uncomfortable or might turn uncivil seems like we are missing a really important piece to the news we discuss here. Minority opinions are never going to have "fair treatment" by the majority. I've been down voted several times for my opinions and I'll take it again just to be able to have the discussion here.

fweespeech 10y ago
Yeah, it honestly seems like HN should split into two forums effectively. Tech (No politics, etc.) / Not Tech. The trying to force it all into a single view seems to be creating some friction.
- dang 10y ago
  The distinction isn't tech/notech. That's the most important thing to understand about this whole site! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site.
  - superquest 10y ago
    The very niche "I want to argue politics, but only with other hackers" site!
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      Which only applies to part of HN readers; from reading the comments here, many hackers appear to dislike the political arguments which take places on HN.
  - fweespeech 10y ago
    > I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site. Privacy issues, opinions on hiring practices, etc. are all topics that have heavy polarized sides with little to bridge the divide and would likely benefit from a shift in separating those topics from the solidly tech related ones. Although, to be honest, I'm more concerned with the fact you are oblivious to this than I am about the fact you call change ignorance. I guess it does not really matter, I'll be off HN for a long while.
- trowawee 10y ago
  Except, as tons of people have already pointed out, there is no way to talk about tech without talking about politics. Is research about how the Google search algorithm or Facebook's news feed shapes users' opinions tech or not-tech? Is a story about Uber researching autonomous cars with the intention of eliminating drivers in its own industry and industries like trucking tech or not-tech?
chrissnell 10y ago
Perhaps the upvote/downvote could be removed from political stories and in its place, an "abuse" flag could be substituted?
- jish 10y ago
  Perhaps upvote/downvote could be replaced with ontopic/offtopic. Or goodpoint/badargument.
  - snerbles 10y ago
    Eventually we'll wind up with Slashdot-style scoring.
  - pera 10y ago
    Or remove comment voting altogether (a voting detox week experiment? :)). I'm a bit skeptic about how much comment voting improves the discussion quality... maybe it's completely useless, or maybe it harms more than it helps. A sort by responses may be enough if you are looking for interesting points.
    - Nickersf 10y ago
      Comment voting is good to filter out spam/off topic and then sadly it can be used to create an echo chamber where dissenting opinions of all sorts gets shut down.
      - tropo 10y ago
        Track up and down votes separately. To compute the effective score, square the number of up votes and then subtract the number of down votes.
    - gus_massa 10y ago
      Removing votes will transform this in something like the comment threads of youtube. The vote system is not perfect, but in technical discussions it usually is helpful to make the good comments float to the top.
BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
Is political discourse in HN comment threads ever actually "effective", though? What actually results from having those discussions here that couldn't be accomplished just as easily in a forum where it's explicitly on-topic, e.g. /r/politics or similar? It's not as though policymakers or voters are looking to the HN comments section for guidance.
- chrissnell 10y ago
  Spot on. To quote one of my favorite songwriters, Todd Snider, "I didn't come down here to change anybody's mind about anything. I came down here to ease my own mind about everything."
- mattnewton 10y ago
  Yes, I generally think that the conversations here stay on the relevant technical topic and treat political explanations as just more evidence into an investigation instead of the end-goal. I don't want a board focused on politics, I certainly don't find this kind of civil discussion in reddit. I also don't think that the hacker spirit responds well to barriers of thought and discussion. It's just an anecdote, but I know my views have been greatly affected in part by hacker news. I was once a staunch libertarian, but reading a lot about universal basic income and other approaches people have offered to income inequality and social issues, while talking about the technology trends first and foremost, have convinced me to broaden my beliefs. There is something about having a stated goal outside of political points scoring that helps everyone see themselves as part of the same team. I've always felt hacker news is largely about understanding things related to technology - trends, weird bugs, how startups work, etc. With that as our main focus we can defer to each other and learn from each other. When the main force is to debate the other side there is no room for concessions or finding common ground. What I want in a community, is for people of all different views and backgrounds to think about a topic with the end goal of solving some problem. Hacker news isn't perfect there but it's close.
  - hueving 10y ago
    The basic income discussions are pretty pointless though. There is just a group of people who think we should have it and another who think it's a pointless thought experiment because it the economy is about an order of magnitude short of the output required for the numbers being proposed.
padobson 10y ago
Detox week may be a good time to focus on non-political positions and views to problems like mass-job displacement. Are there solutions to these problems that don't fit neatly into a political ideology? Are there solutions that don't require government policy? If the non-political solution antibody makes itself a permanent resident of the HN community as a result of detox week, I know I'd be pleased.
- icebraining 10y ago
  There's no non-political solution to a social problem. It's a contradiction in terms. "Non-political" just means "aligned with the political status quo". The idea that major social ills can be solved with no governmental intervention is itself very political.
  - weberc2 10y ago
    There seem to be multiple meanings to "political"; one in a broad sense (things pertaining to social governance) and a specific ideological axis along which certain general topics become polarized. The former is fine, the latter is damaging (at least in high concentrations or some such).
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      The appearance of a single overwhelmingly-dominant ideological axis is an artifact certain electoral systems produce in the societies that host them. The fewer axes of variation the electoral system supports, the fewer end up significant in discourse in the society. The "broad" definition is the one in most dictionaries; the narrow one you suggest seems to be the overlap of partisan tribalism with a society with a single overwhelming axis for the reason described above. In any case, simple utterances of tribalism are already clearly off-topic on HN, whether they are centered on political ideology or not, so clearly an experiment of the type here must be targeting something broader (though apparently also narrower than the dictionary definition of poltiics.)
      - 10y ago
drvdevd 10y ago
I agree with you and the first question that came to my mind was: what constitutes political discussion? I believe that, like it or not, the cat is out of the bag and Hacking/technology in general is very much entwined with politics. Thus I'm interested in the "hacker" point of view on these topics...
Jarwain 10y ago
I wouldn't think that a conversation about job displacing tech would be against the rules/political. I'd think that it would get political, in the sense that detox week is trying to avoid, if discussion turns to the president-elect or "partisan politics"

heartbreak 10y ago

> I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. I think that being able to discuss political issues such as regulations that impact startups is important, and will certainly resume after the political detox week is over.

canadaduane 10y ago

FWIW, I enjoy well articulated dissenting opinions, as well as experiences brought from sources external to a community's shared experience. It's instructive as well as frequently enlightening. That said, I do also appreciate tribal familiarity and the "relaxed state" that comes from friends who think alike.

serge2k 10y ago

How is this any different than people getting downvoted for questioning the ability of Tesla to execute on an insane timeline or any of the other random things go against the HN hivemind? I'd suggest not caring about downvotes.

timzentu 10y ago

That sounds like a standard <insert derogatory opposing political term here> opinion and it is wrong because you are a <insert mean adverb && previous political term>. Seriously though, political discourse is good, but badgering is poor behavior. Just because someone disagrees, isn't a reason to down vote.

sigmar 10y ago

If your feel your perspective gets marginalized, shouldn't you want to be able to convince others of what you believe to be true? Removing all political conversation will perpetuate the status quo.

weberc2 10y ago
This assumes that humans put rational argument above tribalism; social psychology tells us this is not the case ("morality binds and morality blinds"). Excessive political discourse seems more likely to strengthen bonds within political groups relative to the bonds we have with those from rival political groups. Taking time to realize how much we have in common seems prudent.

scj 10y ago

> Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely. Given that cultural and political values and assertions are diverse within relatively small communities, never mind a global audience, I'd suggest this would be very difficult to pull off. For a moment, consider speaking about a topic that was settled decades or centuries ago in your community, but is still a controversial topic elsewhere. What topic are you thinking of? What other communit(y/ies) were you thinking of? What issues and communities do you think other people would offer? I bet there would be a lot of different perspectives on these questions, which is the reason political discussion should be limited.

wheelerwj 10y ago

I am sorry to hear you feel this way. as someone who has independent views, I have no idea what the views of the average HN reader are but I'll try to be more mindful of this in the future.

chronic92 10y ago
The overwhelming majority of HN readers are Democrats/liberals/progressives and support Hillary Clinton and/or Bernie Sanders and will attempt to insult and suppress any Republican/conservative/Donald Trump supporter.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  HN has sizable contigents of liberal, left-libertarian, right-libertarian, and conservative posters. And some that don't fit neatly into any of those groups. It absolutely doesn't have an overwhelming majority favoring any one US political party or candidate .
  - davidivadavid 10y ago
    Has there every been any survey about that?

dave_sullivan 10y ago

> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion. Are there any online communities where their political opinions match more with yours? Why don't you hang out there instead? I realize that's reinforcing an echo chamber, but it sounds like you're looking for more of an echo chamber, right? > even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way Maybe an example of a time you made a point in an informed and respectful way only to be downvoted and derided would help clarify? > Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely. I strongly disagree. I don't know what "fair treatment" means, but if enough people on the site feel a topic is worth talking about, we should talk about it. Specific incidences of abuse should be flagged, but again, it's hard for me to say one way or another without examples showing what you mean. As to the overall question of whether politics should be allowed on HN, HN started as "Startup News". It's always been a site about entrepreneurship, mostly in the tech industry. Entrepreurship is intimately linked to politics in obvious and non-obvious ways. Politics has to do with taxes, healthcare, immigration, legality of certain types of research, market size and access, shifting demographic trends, financing sources, and much more. Edit: I removed a final sentence because it's moot and doesn't add to my actual argument.

dang 10y ago
> To take this blanket approach of "No talking about politics!" is... For one week. > "Forbidden topics" because some people's feelings are getting hurt? It's about a lot more than that, as I tried to explain in the text above. There are two different kinds of site—intellectually curious and politically combative—and we cannot be both of them.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  > For one week. Then I hope it's just for a week. I know HN weights certain topics down already. I think there's a good argument for some of that, but I don't see an argument for more of it. > There are two different kinds of site—intellectually curious and politically combative—and we literally cannot be both of them. FWIW, as a user, I have not noticed an uptick in politically combative discussion on HN, although I have noticed the uptick in political posts. If your target demographic is basically founders/hackers/entrepreneurs/whatever, having a place to find relatively sane discussions about politics is a good thing. HN is pretty much that, I can't think of a place that's better. I do think having lots of strong opinions in one place is a good thing and helps those opinions evolve towards something better. Echo chambers result in the information equivalent of inbreeding. But that's my point, I very much don't want HN to become an echo chamber by, for example, banning political posts for more than 1 week (which is a weird experiment, but fine).

CN7R 10y ago

I thought there were rules established: upvote if a post is thought provoking and or informative; downvote if it's factually incorrect or doesn't contribute to the conversation. The forums on the internet should not be solely to affirm your opinions, but also to challenge them and allow growth as an individual. The problem isn't with politics -- it's with the people misusing the voting system.

weberc2 10y ago
> downvote if it's factually incorrect I would be surprised if this had much of an impact. I've encountered a lot of people even on HN who truly seem to believe their ideology is somehow 'fact'. Those who are sufficiently self-aware in this regard are probably not abusing the downvote button to begin with.
kps 10y ago
The actual rule emerges from the code: upvote a post you want people to read, downvote a post you want made difficult to read.

StevePerkins 10y ago

> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site When people talk about "the average HN reader", or the "prevailing slant", I'm always curious what they mean. For me, it's always felt more like a back-and-forth struggle between radical liberals and hardline libertarians. That's always been the general nature of pretty much every tech-oriented forum historically (e.g. HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, etc). When Mike Judge was once asked about the core insight behind his "Silicon Valley" TV show, he cited his belief that the tech ethos is a conflict between liberal and libertarian values. As a pragmatist who just likes to read about tech, I find both sides annoying.

bbctol 10y ago
Still, technologically minded liberals/libertarians, for all their differences, are not the only viewpoints, and even if there's disagreement along that axis it can still lead to a bubble. I doubt you'd see many people on HN advocating for a fundamentally Christian America, for instance.
- tormeh 10y ago
  Yes, liberal-libertarian is only one axis and this axis is different to the Democrat-Republican one. Both liberals and libertarians are socially liberal, as you imply.
Yen 10y ago
I'm also curious as to what the mean (or median) HN political viewpoint would be, and which is the majority/minority viewpoint. Personally, I tend towards liberal politics. I interperent this statement as "Liberal politics dominates HN, and conservative politics is a minority that gets downvoted" Even assuming that's accurate, I tend to find more conservative viewpoints on this forum, compared to other forums I browse, and I find those conservative viewpoints better argued, and more likely to affect my view.

ritchiea 10y ago

Hacker News is an unfair place for people to speak up about about the lack of racial and gender diversity in tech. I have been downvoted for comments where I felt like I was making uncontroversial critiques of the status quo. I have seen HN users say that black neighborhoods need more policing than other neighborhoods. It's not an easy place to be non-white or non-male. I believe banning politics is a bad idea even for a week.

ianstallings 10y ago
How is that unfair? It's actually quite fair. We all have opinions and we can upvote, downvote, and comment equally.
- ritchiea 10y ago
  The parent to my comment complains about HN being unfair to his political viewpoint and has a history of posting somewhat sympathetically about Trump. He seemed to assume that sympathizing with Trump or conservatives is the only way one could disagree with mainstream HN political views. "Unfair" is his term, I was making a point.
  - digler999 10y ago
    Saying "you were downvoted" doesn't mean all of HN is unfair. I've been here a couple years and overall the topic of inclusion and diversity is handled very well. I dont mean "well" in that every progressive claim is unilaterally accepted, either. I mean that we take the subject seriously and most of us are champions of diversity and inclusion.
    - adrienne 10y ago
      This may be the most laughably wrong statement I've seen in this entire thread, and that's saying something.
reflexive 10y ago
uncontroversial critiques of the status quo Hmm... Let me try to understand your reasoning. If everyone agreed with your critique of the "status quo", why would it be the status quo to begin with?

pfooti 10y ago

I think that it's important to support minority opinions, sure. Civil discourse needs to be civil. That said, not wanting to talk about politics is a political act. It's basically saying, "let's let the status quo keep going for now", because most things involve politics on some level. Can we get away from namecalling and toxic behavior? Sure. But having a politics free space isn't the way to do that.

reflexive 10y ago

I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. I'd like to point out that this site is called "Hacker News", not "Technical and Business News". While there is no single "hacker political stance", there are ethical principles embraced by the community that can be applied usefully to policy questions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics As many have pointed out, it's really the subjective content of this site (here in the comments) that has the most value.

stcredzero 10y ago

I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion. In recent threads, I've made some factual observations, only to have people imagine a slant or motivation, then argue with that commenter of their imagination. I think HN is succumbing to the "Arguments as Soliders" antipattern: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Arguments_as_soldiers

tripzilch 10y ago

As someone whose views don't align with a good chunk of HN readers (or don't align, period), I've grown to love reading about differing ideas through the eyes of others computing/tech enthusiasts. There's common ground to start from and most importantly, even if it turns out to be a viewpoint that deeply goes against my values I can still respect this fellow human because of their tech expertise. I have to admit, it really irked me at first when I came here. How can all these people that like the same things as me, have ideas that are so ... "wrong?!" (just kidding, honest :) ) But then I learned to listen and realize that these opinions will be here whether I engage them or not. Of course, I see subthreads that aren't very "objective in the way I want them to be". But I don't share your experience with downvotes. I try to refrain from trying to convince the person I'm directly replying to if their view is directly opposed to mine, that never works any way. I just state my own personal position and how it reflects. Sure I get the occasional downvote but that's almost always when I've let myself be confrontational about it. Also, there's a big difference between providing a link to some facts that a person might not know, and a very opinionated link (that may also have facts and numbers) that is arguing your point. So yeah, while I support the experiment (it'll be interesting to see), I really hope they don't extend this to forever, but just occasionally after particularly turbulent US elections. Finally: > fair treatment to minority opinions Come on what does that even mean? I don't know what your opinions are. You don't know what mine are (you can read my comment history but good luck). I have no idea what "fair treatment to minority opinions" should even mean. My opinions are minority opinions too (I'll change them if you don't believe me), but I know this; People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio.

chrissnell 10y ago
> Come on what does that even mean? > People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio. Downvoted comments are subject to being greyed out here, which is a stigma. Yes, it happens. The downvote in a political story has such a different meaning than downvotes in other stories. I feel like people use them as an agree/disagree vote in political threads, whereas they serve as an informed/uninformed vote normally.

7952 10y ago

A trouble I have with HN is the casual assumption that a subject actually has an objective truth that can be debated. Often we just don't agree on the basics of what is actually important in a philosophical sense. So every fact is just a proxy for a particular world view. It is better to question the underlying assumptions than the facts themselves. We don't need to do this with technology or buisness because we already share the same sort of world view. You see this kind of problem on debates about climate change. Once people learn about environment and ecology they tend to assume that humans have an unavoidable impact on the planet. Climate change "deniers" simply have a different intuition. All the science in the world is not going to change that. Which is why it is political, and not objective. Really the entire point of politics is to debate things that lack definitive truth. Of course that is probably true of anything that is discussed on a forum to a lesser or greater extent. Otherwise the answer would already be on Wikipedia.

tripzilch 10y ago
I also often see this when someone argues that a certain action by a company isn't ethical--which has no objective truth, but that makes the debate only more fruitful, IMO--and someone else then replies that this company has every (legal) right to act this way, which has more of an objective truth by most standards, but isn't very interesting at all if you don't live in the same jurisdiction, nor has it much relevance to whether the action was "right" (in the ethical sense) or not. But then, I guess, that person has every right to conflate moral and legal rights ... so sue me? :)
- 7952 10y ago
  Yes, I have lost count of the rants against "natural products". People develop these buying habits in response to an inabilty to hold complete information about a product. So you have to have shortcuts based on your world view. For every organic lover there is someone slurping Soylant.

Forlien 10y ago

You make some interesting points about non-objective discussions on HN. I think your reasoning could justify banning other topics too, so I'm wondering how you would decide that discussions aren't objective enough. For example, you could use your justification for banning any discussion about HN's rules since that would also be subjective and have minority viewpoints unfairly downvoted. People are often passionate about any rules changes as we can see by the upvotes on this submission. Do you think discussion about this rules change should be banned too?

rplnt 10y ago

I like the idea, but I don't see the rule to stand if something of importance happens this week.

denzil_correa 10y ago

Personally, I think that is quite a self-centered view. You don't want political discussions because you are in the minority? That's quite a myopic perspective to take.

irascible 10y ago

So are you proposing that HN become a sort of "safe space" for your political opinions?

erikbye 10y ago

> I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do... Sure, why not. They are useless. But, those "discussions" on Apple, Linux, Microsoft, FOSS and FSF, Vim, Emacs, IDEs, JS frameworks, programming languages, etc--they are so objective and fruitful... Truth is, between the overton window and the commonly accepted fictions of the world there is only subjectivity, if you think you can be objective about anything you are delusional. And for someone who are not a believer in the common myths and accepted fallacies of this world--this is so much easier to fathom. If your opinion is outside of the norm matrix you'll be downvoted, tough shit. Fair? Are your feelings hurt? This is not directed at you personally: if downvotes bother you, then don't partake in online discussions.

smaddox 10y ago

That's probably the biggest disadvantage of the simple upvote/downvote moderation system. This is one area where I miss Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderatiom system (though I don't miss the continually degrading quality of the discussions). It's a bit like the distinction between true democracy and a democratic republic. True democracy is mob rule. Democratic republics are slightly better at maintaining some sanity and objectivity.

trav4225 10y ago

I completely sympathize. The hate is real -- I myself often have to take a personal "detox break" from HN simply in order to feel human again. It would be nice to be able to consider HN a welcoming, warm community but, on the other hand, I don't want it to be a fake sense of community -- I'm glad when people vilify me for my beliefs so that I can mark and avoid those people.

clackanon 10y ago

I feel your pain, brother.

taytus 10y ago

>I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion This is insane. Why are people worried about internet points. I'm guessing you are an adult right? and you don't want to express your points of views because someone might click the little arrow? Why? Please, honestly, explain this to me.

chrissnell 10y ago
I could care less about the "internet points". Look at my karma--I don't need them. My objection is to the greying-out/hiding of comments that are voted down. This is how a majority can effectively silence a minority viewpoint here on HN. It's easy to say "get a thicker skin" when it's not you that's being squelched.
deleted 10y ago
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webmaven 10y ago
Here are a few reasons someone might care: 1. Internet Points are a social signal. 2. Some HN features are restricted to users that have more than a certain number of Internet Points. 3. If you are expressing yourself in a comment with the aim of communicating, having the comment downvoted enough to grey it out (making it harder to read) will frustrate you.

inimino 10y ago

Rational, polite, constructive, civil, objective discourse is possible on any topic. It just gets a lot harder.