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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

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?
  - gbog 10y ago
    I think for HN becoming less political do not mean avoiding topics with a social impact, it means avoiding the display of personal political preferences in discussions. For example "why did Trump win" is a political topic that can be discussed on HN the HN way: share confirmed figures and stats, links to informed opinions, bundle these together to form an explanation and test its predictiveness on other similar cases. All of that can happen without anyone ever stating their own personal (dis)taste for Trump. (Edited for typos)
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"

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?
- gbog 10y ago
  I think for HN becoming less political do not mean avoiding topics with a social impact, it means avoiding the display of personal political preferences in discussions. For example "why did Trump win" is a political topic that can be discussed on HN the HN way: share confirmed figures and stats, links to informed opinions, bundle these together to form an explanation and test its predictiveness on other similar cases. All of that can happen without anyone ever stating their own personal (dis)taste for Trump. (Edited for typos)

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"