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Is political discourse in HN comment threads ever actually "effective", though? What actually results from having those discussions here that couldn't be accomp

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.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    That's not pointless, those could be really good points! Maybe UBI is something we have to throw out for now, maybe it can be implemented in a way to get around those challenges.
    - hueving 10y ago
      But it's the same points over and over again. Every single time something about minimum wage or job automation shows up someone brings out the UBI horse to beat some more.
      - mattnewton 10y ago
        Those might just be today's lucky 10,000[0] who haven't seen the discussion up to that point, and a small price to pay for being able to discuss it at all. I know I just learned something from this meta discussion, about the argument that the economy can't support UBI based on GDP numbers, and I'm eager to go read more. Most arguments I have seen say it won't work because of moral hazards and I haven't seen an argument that says it flat out can't be done, because there are so many different approaches and different ways it could play out. [0]https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
      - sanderjd 10y ago
        It is possible, if not probable, that each of those times you thought someone was beating the horse some more, at least one other person reading was unaware of and interested in the discussion. It may seem to you like all the stuff discussed here is common knowledge, but most of it really isn't, and this community grows all the time.
      - 10y ago
falcolas 10y ago
If a conversation does nothing more than make someone think about their stance more than they have before, it's been wildly successful. That's all you can ever really achieve with any online discussion about a topic that has no "right" answer.
mcphage 10y ago
> 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? So many of the technologies that we use have political consequences or undertones—the reason that we have these discussions here is that otherwise it's not possible to have a substantial discussion about the technology at all. We'd be reduced to meaningless small talk.
- finid 10y ago
  Meaningless small talk or an endless discussion about the latest and greatest JS framework. It's like watching TV while the house is burning down.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    If you really think it is that bad, then maybe you shouldn't be here, but somewhere relevant to what you feel is important. This is a tech board.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I am very curious: are the impacts of technology and whether-we-should,-not-whether-we-can not appropriate discussions for a "tech board"? Because those are fundamentally political topics.
      - clock_tower 10y ago
        But they're not matters of red-versus-blue United States partisan politics, which is (as far as I can tell) what's being banned here.
        eropple 10y ago
        I dunno. Facebook shapes epistemic closures for its users. The question of whether transgendered folks have the right to exist is one that gets a "no" in some of those groups. I don't think that should be political, I don't think it should be red-versus-blue. But it is. Should that be banned?
ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
Anything tech related on /r/politics gets deleted. So, yes, in this comparison it is more effective.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  roughly half the country for trump. there isn't a single positive thread about him in /r/politics. that isn't by accident.
tripzilch 10y ago
Because they're political comments on tech issues. They have given me new insights on numerous occasions. And I love all counterarguments, especially when they go against beliefs I hold dearly. And it's not just about finding out that I'm completely wrong. Sometimes it's just a new light, and sometimes it's just the reminder that really smart people too believe some things that I didn't think were possible for a "reasonable smart person" to believe (if you don't think you need constant reminding of this, ... well ... haha ;-) )
- statictype 10y ago
  I agree with your sentiments. But this is only for one week right? Let's suck it up and see how it goes? I trust that the admins want the best for the community.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    And I don't envy the admin's job! I know I could just be very sensitive to anything that smells like censorship right now, and that could be coloring my visceral reaction here. Still, I afraid of this becoming a thing. One week is a while and while I don't think the mods would ever dream of intentionally doing this, it could happen during important events. It is really hard for me to imagine what metrics after the fact would justify this. How do you measure the effect of self censorship has on influencing people's beliefs here? I am worried that this will generate some numbers that seem to justify the practice and it becomes a regular practice around politically charged events.
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    > I agree with your sentiments. But this is only for one week right? Let's suck it up and see how it goes? Yes, absolutely! I said this in another comment, I'm curious to see how this experiment goes but I'm also glad it's just for one week :)
p10_user 10y ago
For what it's worth I find discussions centered on the same topic here to be much more civil, informative, and engaging than on most platforms (including /r/politics).
bendmorris 10y ago
To be blunt, /r/politics is full of groupthink and represses alternative opinions. HN is much better in that regard. Also, the fact that everyone here is united by a smaller set of common interests makes the discussion more relevant to me. I enjoy reading political discussions here and often find them though provoking. I don't on Reddit.
Normal_gaussian 10y ago
HN has exposed me to varied and critical political discourse that I would not find elsewhere in my life, and has on the whole been overly positive. Places like /r/politics are often devoid of any real debate or critical argument, and are stressful and tiring to involve oneself in. I do welcome a week without politics on HN, though I would not like to see it permanently in place such an exercise lets us fall back on what makes us happy.
rtpg 10y ago
Did you think talking about SOPA on HN makes sense? Talking about the legality/morality of NSA snooping? What about Uber's woker policies? Facebook censorship/curation? Data privacy? Hiring and firing policies in tech companies? How to manage rogue IoT devices? ICANN domain policy? This is just a sample of topics that feel pretty "Hacker News". They're all political (or at least have strong political angles), and they're all pretty popular topics of conversation here. Now I've felt the moderation here has worked in good faith, and is likely trying to reduce flamewars here. But I'm a bit worried that the things that get marked political will mainly be around discrimination issues. And considering the amount of SV "leadership"(scare quotes but you get the idea) on Hacker News, this is a _very_ effective forum to talk about the difficulties of certain people to get work, get funding. Talking about it here can jumpstart more ways of tackling these issues, and thinking about what the community as a whole wants to do
- belorn 10y ago
  The old rule of not having discussions that reintroduce flame wars which arguments have been stated, restated, and re-restated is a rather useful criteria. Unless grounded and significant structured, discussion about discrimination aren't going to bring any new ways of addressing things. What it commonly do is just expanding the battlefield and pushing people further apart. Even between those that agree on the goal, people can and do still disagree on how to reach it. I have described it in the past as comparing left and right politics, with both side wanting prosperity and liberty. Each side has fundamental different views and values for how that will be accomplished, so the discussion circles around the disagreement rather than the agreements.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    Is it really easier to ban the topic than to ban the flame war? Flame wars are already forbidden.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I think that's a fair question. That said, I think it's important to balance where the effort is expended. Cleaning up flame wars requires work on the part of the moderator at very little cost to those fanning the flames. To perhaps abuse an analogy, when a neighborhood gets well known for arson, people will move away. At some point it may make sense to forbid certain types of structures in the neighborhood to see if it reduces the instances of arson. (okay, that's admittedly pretty tortured :) It's a trade off, and while I'd like the world to be perfect and people talk about everything calmly and with respect, empirically this is very much not the case for certain topics. A limited test (detox week) makes sense to me. And it might not work, which is why it's a test.

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.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  That's not pointless, those could be really good points! Maybe UBI is something we have to throw out for now, maybe it can be implemented in a way to get around those challenges.
  - hueving 10y ago
    But it's the same points over and over again. Every single time something about minimum wage or job automation shows up someone brings out the UBI horse to beat some more.
    - mattnewton 10y ago
      Those might just be today's lucky 10,000[0] who haven't seen the discussion up to that point, and a small price to pay for being able to discuss it at all. I know I just learned something from this meta discussion, about the argument that the economy can't support UBI based on GDP numbers, and I'm eager to go read more. Most arguments I have seen say it won't work because of moral hazards and I haven't seen an argument that says it flat out can't be done, because there are so many different approaches and different ways it could play out. [0]https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
    - sanderjd 10y ago
      It is possible, if not probable, that each of those times you thought someone was beating the horse some more, at least one other person reading was unaware of and interested in the discussion. It may seem to you like all the stuff discussed here is common knowledge, but most of it really isn't, and this community grows all the time.
    - 10y ago

falcolas 10y ago

If a conversation does nothing more than make someone think about their stance more than they have before, it's been wildly successful. That's all you can ever really achieve with any online discussion about a topic that has no "right" answer.

mcphage 10y ago

> 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? So many of the technologies that we use have political consequences or undertones—the reason that we have these discussions here is that otherwise it's not possible to have a substantial discussion about the technology at all. We'd be reduced to meaningless small talk.

finid 10y ago
Meaningless small talk or an endless discussion about the latest and greatest JS framework. It's like watching TV while the house is burning down.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  If you really think it is that bad, then maybe you shouldn't be here, but somewhere relevant to what you feel is important. This is a tech board.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I am very curious: are the impacts of technology and whether-we-should,-not-whether-we-can not appropriate discussions for a "tech board"? Because those are fundamentally political topics.
    - clock_tower 10y ago
      But they're not matters of red-versus-blue United States partisan politics, which is (as far as I can tell) what's being banned here.
      - eropple 10y ago
        I dunno. Facebook shapes epistemic closures for its users. The question of whether transgendered folks have the right to exist is one that gets a "no" in some of those groups. I don't think that should be political, I don't think it should be red-versus-blue. But it is. Should that be banned?

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago

Anything tech related on /r/politics gets deleted. So, yes, in this comparison it is more effective.

beachstartup 10y ago
roughly half the country for trump. there isn't a single positive thread about him in /r/politics. that isn't by accident.

tripzilch 10y ago

Because they're political comments on tech issues. They have given me new insights on numerous occasions. And I love all counterarguments, especially when they go against beliefs I hold dearly. And it's not just about finding out that I'm completely wrong. Sometimes it's just a new light, and sometimes it's just the reminder that really smart people too believe some things that I didn't think were possible for a "reasonable smart person" to believe (if you don't think you need constant reminding of this, ... well ... haha ;-) )

statictype 10y ago
I agree with your sentiments. But this is only for one week right? Let's suck it up and see how it goes? I trust that the admins want the best for the community.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  And I don't envy the admin's job! I know I could just be very sensitive to anything that smells like censorship right now, and that could be coloring my visceral reaction here. Still, I afraid of this becoming a thing. One week is a while and while I don't think the mods would ever dream of intentionally doing this, it could happen during important events. It is really hard for me to imagine what metrics after the fact would justify this. How do you measure the effect of self censorship has on influencing people's beliefs here? I am worried that this will generate some numbers that seem to justify the practice and it becomes a regular practice around politically charged events.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  > I agree with your sentiments. But this is only for one week right? Let's suck it up and see how it goes? Yes, absolutely! I said this in another comment, I'm curious to see how this experiment goes but I'm also glad it's just for one week :)

p10_user 10y ago

For what it's worth I find discussions centered on the same topic here to be much more civil, informative, and engaging than on most platforms (including /r/politics).

bendmorris 10y ago

To be blunt, /r/politics is full of groupthink and represses alternative opinions. HN is much better in that regard. Also, the fact that everyone here is united by a smaller set of common interests makes the discussion more relevant to me. I enjoy reading political discussions here and often find them though provoking. I don't on Reddit.

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

HN has exposed me to varied and critical political discourse that I would not find elsewhere in my life, and has on the whole been overly positive. Places like /r/politics are often devoid of any real debate or critical argument, and are stressful and tiring to involve oneself in. I do welcome a week without politics on HN, though I would not like to see it permanently in place such an exercise lets us fall back on what makes us happy.

rtpg 10y ago

Did you think talking about SOPA on HN makes sense? Talking about the legality/morality of NSA snooping? What about Uber's woker policies? Facebook censorship/curation? Data privacy? Hiring and firing policies in tech companies? How to manage rogue IoT devices? ICANN domain policy? This is just a sample of topics that feel pretty "Hacker News". They're all political (or at least have strong political angles), and they're all pretty popular topics of conversation here. Now I've felt the moderation here has worked in good faith, and is likely trying to reduce flamewars here. But I'm a bit worried that the things that get marked political will mainly be around discrimination issues. And considering the amount of SV "leadership"(scare quotes but you get the idea) on Hacker News, this is a _very_ effective forum to talk about the difficulties of certain people to get work, get funding. Talking about it here can jumpstart more ways of tackling these issues, and thinking about what the community as a whole wants to do

belorn 10y ago
The old rule of not having discussions that reintroduce flame wars which arguments have been stated, restated, and re-restated is a rather useful criteria. Unless grounded and significant structured, discussion about discrimination aren't going to bring any new ways of addressing things. What it commonly do is just expanding the battlefield and pushing people further apart. Even between those that agree on the goal, people can and do still disagree on how to reach it. I have described it in the past as comparing left and right politics, with both side wanting prosperity and liberty. Each side has fundamental different views and values for how that will be accomplished, so the discussion circles around the disagreement rather than the agreements.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  Is it really easier to ban the topic than to ban the flame war? Flame wars are already forbidden.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I think that's a fair question. That said, I think it's important to balance where the effort is expended. Cleaning up flame wars requires work on the part of the moderator at very little cost to those fanning the flames. To perhaps abuse an analogy, when a neighborhood gets well known for arson, people will move away. At some point it may make sense to forbid certain types of structures in the neighborhood to see if it reduces the instances of arson. (okay, that's admittedly pretty tortured :) It's a trade off, and while I'd like the world to be perfect and people talk about everything calmly and with respect, empirically this is very much not the case for certain topics. A limited test (detox week) makes sense to me. And it might not work, which is why it's a test.