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Yeah, i'll serve as a counter-example if you'd like. I've been on the site for a long time, and there are things i love about HN, and many many things that i s

Yeah, i'll serve as a counter-example if you'd like. I've been on the site for a long time, and there are things i love about HN, and many many things that i strongly dislike. Blind-spots for politics (either with a capital P or lowercase p) is at the top of the list of things i think are fatally flawed with this community. Especially since this community started as both software AND entrepreneurship, i find it unreasonable and untenable to claim that politics are dissociable from the topics discussed on this site (it is, at the very least, undeniably capitalist). If you are building organizations, you cannot be agnostic about politics. Your organization will have politics, and you as a leader must define what values your organization has and how they are to be implemented. [for brevity, i will skip over the discussion of the value of diversity in organizations here] And at this point if you think that i'm shifting or moving the goalposts away from software, i'm happy to bring it back. Especially in a space where you care about your users, and their user experience, you must meet them in their contexts and consider their needs. Those are also not devoid of politics, and there are even business decisions on which user bases to serve and why, many of which should not be devoid of policy and politics. For example: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers... Lastly, perhaps we'll retreat to "well threads about explicitly political topics devolve into shit shows", and i'd even probably agree with you, but the question is... so what? Just agreeing not to discuss these topics, some of which directly pertain to the development and productization of software just means that the mistakes that software orgs make won't be called out in HN. No one will learn from them here, and that seems like a big problem, especially for a community which folks come to in order to learn how to build software and organizations. Agreeing not to discuss politics is not a solution to the problem being described. I'm not entirely clear what the correct solution is, but this is definitely not it.

tptacek 10y ago
I don't think the idea was to permanently not discuss politics. I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be. Further: I don't believe that technology is dissociable from politics either. But I don't have to believe that to think that the political discussions we have on HN are unhealthy and unproductive. 'ubernostrum took issue with my comparison of technology and woodworking, because, I suppose, woodworkers aren't upending the housing market and converting tens of thousands of W2 employees into 1099s. That's fair. But none of us think that means that r/golang or r/haskell should host discussions about Facebook's fakenews problem --- so it's clearly not the case that talking about technology obligates us to host all possible political discussions. Ultimately my problem with politics on HN is that the discussions are vapid. The best recent example was the Google research project on quantifying and manipulating bias built into machine learning algorithms, which immediately attracted a flock of trolls hijacking the thread with claims that the mere concept of bias was "PC". I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN.
- dang 10y ago
  I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be. Correct, and with no intention of banning all politics outside of that short artificial period. I wish I'd read this a few days ago, because it's a great way of putting it. > I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN. We'll find other ways to get there.

tptacek 10y ago

I don't think the idea was to permanently not discuss politics. I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be. Further: I don't believe that technology is dissociable from politics either. But I don't have to believe that to think that the political discussions we have on HN are unhealthy and unproductive. 'ubernostrum took issue with my comparison of technology and woodworking, because, I suppose, woodworkers aren't upending the housing market and converting tens of thousands of W2 employees into 1099s. That's fair. But none of us think that means that r/golang or r/haskell should host discussions about Facebook's fakenews problem --- so it's clearly not the case that talking about technology obligates us to host all possible political discussions. Ultimately my problem with politics on HN is that the discussions are vapid. The best recent example was the Google research project on quantifying and manipulating bias built into machine learning algorithms, which immediately attracted a flock of trolls hijacking the thread with claims that the mere concept of bias was "PC". I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN.

dang 10y ago
I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be. Correct, and with no intention of banning all politics outside of that short artificial period. I wish I'd read this a few days ago, because it's a great way of putting it. > I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN. We'll find other ways to get there.