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Thing is, he's been entirely right about all but maybe one of the stories he's left a comment on? These stories are political. The whole problem is that these t

Thing is, he's been entirely right about all but maybe one of the stories he's left a comment on? These stories are political. The whole problem is that these things are political and HN doesn't see that.

dang 10y ago
I haven't looked at all those stories but I don't doubt you're right about most of them and definitely do see it. FWIW, for years I was the loudest advocate on HN for keeping some politics on-topic despite the site guidelines declaring most off-topic, and regularly made many of the same arguments people have been making over the last few days. I'd be making them right now myself if I weren't a moderator. It's indeed the case that politics is inseparable from many clearly on-topic-here things and that it's impossible to define "politics" in a way that would justify banning it outright. I told pg that very thing when he was training me to do moderation here, and he agreed. Questions around this have come up so often, though, that proposing one experimental week off from politics, just to see what we could learn, seemed worth trying. And we've already learned quite a few things, one of which is just how inseparable the political dimensions of these stories really are.
- adrienne 10y ago
  Also, given how many political stories aren't getting flagged and are getting a lot of discussion, how oblivious a lot of people here seem to be to the political dimensions of their work and hobbies?
  - dang 10y ago
    I think that's a fair point, but there's inevitably a ton of randomness in how large groups react, and also inevitably differences in how people see individual cases. So that probably would be true no matter what. It's mostly a moot point, though, because for most users there's bound to be at least one story that is (a) clearly on-topic and (b) clearly not apolitical.
    - adrienne 10y ago
      Except i don't think it is a moot point, because my thesis is that the HN community perceives certain things as "political" and other things as "not political" and that it creates a bias. Obviously individual users are going to have different opinions in some cases; HN isn't a hive-mind. But that doesn't mean one can't predict trends in what's going to be flagged as "politics" and what isn't, regardless of the actual political content.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I don't have to be oblivious to the intersection between my work and politics to believe that HN is a poor venue for politics. Politics is inseparable from technology in a very similar sense as it's inseparable from woodworking, but we don't imagine a woodworking forum would have a hard time enforcing a ban on purely political posts that were crowding out hand-cut dovetail tutorials. This dichotomy that keeps being presented on HN --- that one either supports politics on HN or is oblivious to politics --- is obviously false, and a little offensive. People who feel a proprietary ownership over political awareness are often missing something. I don't know what your politics are, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they're comparable to my own. Respectfully, I'm going to keep playing this card until my deck runs dry of them, which could be awhile: I think there's might not be anybody else on the site who has put more effort into political persuasion about racial and gender equity than I have (not because I'm a great person, but because I'm a quintessential message board nerd that happens to have strongly held beliefs about structural injustice in our field). I've learned a couple of things in that work: * It takes way more effort to compose a careful, persuasive comment about political issues on HN than it does to compose a shrill, superficial, partisan appeal to one issue's pole or the other. The bad comments have a structural advantage. * Political threads on HN are invariably nastier than technical threads, in part because they attract a lower grade of commenter that thrives on accumulating karma from shrill partisan appeals. * The rest of the tech community does not appreciate thoughtful political commentary on HN, and in fact has created an ongoing schtick whose premise is that HN should be written off --- politically engaged tech people are less likely to have an active HN account than a Wicker Park hipster is to own a TV. * Despite the almost total lack of support I feel from the rest of the tech community (or at least that portion of the community that shares our beliefs about structural injustice) --- really, the almost total lack of awareness of HN they have, apart from the circulation of egregiously awful comments in the few moments they exist here before people like me flag them off the site --- these people all have curiously strong opinions about how the site should be moderated. * The net result of all these bullets is that political threads on HN are a shitshow --- they're almost guaranteed to be a shitshow, because all these people who feel so strongly that repressing politics on HN represents further repression of the underrepresented are unwilling to put the effort in to doing the required amount of writing to ensure that political threads are productive, rather than just an awful joke to share with each other on Twitter. It's all a little galling.

dang 10y ago

I haven't looked at all those stories but I don't doubt you're right about most of them and definitely do see it. FWIW, for years I was the loudest advocate on HN for keeping some politics on-topic despite the site guidelines declaring most off-topic, and regularly made many of the same arguments people have been making over the last few days. I'd be making them right now myself if I weren't a moderator. It's indeed the case that politics is inseparable from many clearly on-topic-here things and that it's impossible to define "politics" in a way that would justify banning it outright. I told pg that very thing when he was training me to do moderation here, and he agreed. Questions around this have come up so often, though, that proposing one experimental week off from politics, just to see what we could learn, seemed worth trying. And we've already learned quite a few things, one of which is just how inseparable the political dimensions of these stories really are.

adrienne 10y ago
Also, given how many political stories aren't getting flagged and are getting a lot of discussion, how oblivious a lot of people here seem to be to the political dimensions of their work and hobbies?
- dang 10y ago
  I think that's a fair point, but there's inevitably a ton of randomness in how large groups react, and also inevitably differences in how people see individual cases. So that probably would be true no matter what. It's mostly a moot point, though, because for most users there's bound to be at least one story that is (a) clearly on-topic and (b) clearly not apolitical.
  - adrienne 10y ago
    Except i don't think it is a moot point, because my thesis is that the HN community perceives certain things as "political" and other things as "not political" and that it creates a bias. Obviously individual users are going to have different opinions in some cases; HN isn't a hive-mind. But that doesn't mean one can't predict trends in what's going to be flagged as "politics" and what isn't, regardless of the actual political content.
- tptacek 10y ago
  I don't have to be oblivious to the intersection between my work and politics to believe that HN is a poor venue for politics. Politics is inseparable from technology in a very similar sense as it's inseparable from woodworking, but we don't imagine a woodworking forum would have a hard time enforcing a ban on purely political posts that were crowding out hand-cut dovetail tutorials. This dichotomy that keeps being presented on HN --- that one either supports politics on HN or is oblivious to politics --- is obviously false, and a little offensive. People who feel a proprietary ownership over political awareness are often missing something. I don't know what your politics are, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they're comparable to my own. Respectfully, I'm going to keep playing this card until my deck runs dry of them, which could be awhile: I think there's might not be anybody else on the site who has put more effort into political persuasion about racial and gender equity than I have (not because I'm a great person, but because I'm a quintessential message board nerd that happens to have strongly held beliefs about structural injustice in our field). I've learned a couple of things in that work: * It takes way more effort to compose a careful, persuasive comment about political issues on HN than it does to compose a shrill, superficial, partisan appeal to one issue's pole or the other. The bad comments have a structural advantage. * Political threads on HN are invariably nastier than technical threads, in part because they attract a lower grade of commenter that thrives on accumulating karma from shrill partisan appeals. * The rest of the tech community does not appreciate thoughtful political commentary on HN, and in fact has created an ongoing schtick whose premise is that HN should be written off --- politically engaged tech people are less likely to have an active HN account than a Wicker Park hipster is to own a TV. * Despite the almost total lack of support I feel from the rest of the tech community (or at least that portion of the community that shares our beliefs about structural injustice) --- really, the almost total lack of awareness of HN they have, apart from the circulation of egregiously awful comments in the few moments they exist here before people like me flag them off the site --- these people all have curiously strong opinions about how the site should be moderated. * The net result of all these bullets is that political threads on HN are a shitshow --- they're almost guaranteed to be a shitshow, because all these people who feel so strongly that repressing politics on HN represents further repression of the underrepresented are unwilling to put the effort in to doing the required amount of writing to ensure that political threads are productive, rather than just an awful joke to share with each other on Twitter. It's all a little galling.