6 ms·

Ask HN: Can we get a ruling on political submissions?

16 points by daenz 10y ago

There seem to be two sides to the debate here: 1) I come to HN to read about tech news and things interesting to hackers, not to read divisive political discourse. 2) Current political events absolutely should be on HN because the events concern the tech community and we have a unique position to be able to influence them. Can a moderator make a ruling on what HN's official position is going to be? Over the past few months, I've seen more and more purely political posts rising up to the top spots on the front page. Many times they are flagged off the front page, but the fact that they are rising so quickly implies that many people want them there.

alistproducer2 10y ago
I'm firmly on the "I can get political news elsewhere" side.
- Retra 10y ago
  Where? And where do you get good political discussion?
  - alistproducer2 10y ago
    From my experience, there's almost no such thing as good political discussion via the Internet. I browse headlines from various sources.
- EleventhSun 10y ago
  The discussion is often not as good as here.
greenyoda 10y ago
HN's official position can be found in the HN Guidelines (see link at bottom of page): "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
bsvalley 10y ago
PG - "make something people want". We don't want politics here...
- rimantas 10y ago
  Who are "we"? We, his majesty king?
  - bsvalley 10y ago
    We is the first person, plural personal pronoun (nominative case) in Modern English.
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      You mean "We are the first person, plural personal pronoun ..."
      - bsvalley 10y ago
        nope - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We
        grzm 10y ago
        Who are you including in the "we"?
        bbcbasic 10y ago
        Was a joke
  - xyzzy4 10y ago
    We dropped off the damn money. WE?! I — the royal we, you know, the editorial. - the Big Lebowski
- drallison 10y ago
  You don't want politics on HN; I want (some) politics on HN, but not the redundant drivel that passes for most news. The political posts are often illuminating in their content; they also document the events HN readers feel are important to the tech community.
bbcbasic 10y ago
I vote for a democracy. Let the system of voting and flagging decide.
byoung2 10y ago
From the guidelines [1]: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. The recent news in the US might qualify as "some interesting new phenomenon" in a sense, but there's plenty of places to read about that elsewhere. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
RealGeek 10y ago
If there are any political activities or policies that affect tech community or companies, does that fit in here on HN? Example: Many employees of tech companies are affected by Trump's immigration ban, and tech companies are recalling their employees as a result. Example 2: Protests at Uber's office, and tensions among it's team due to CEO's relationship with Trump.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
flubert 10y ago
There has been a moderator comment on politics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
- waterphone 10y ago
  And three days later it was quietly ended with a comment that noted that it's impossible to separate politics from many the topics we discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
Mz 10y ago
The moderating staff tried a one week ban on politics. It didn't work and didn't last a week in part because it failed so spectacularly. One result: Almost every single submission had people threadshitting with announcements that "This is POLITICAL" as their way to protest the ban on politics. Flag or downvote. Read the things that interest you. Ignore the stuff that doesn't. There is no obligation for you to read anything in particular and I have difficulty believing that anyone can manage to even read everything that hits the front page, plus all comments, etc.
- pen2l 10y ago
  Politics should be allowed in my opinion. The HN crowd has a very interesting take on politics that I cannot get anywhere else. Seriously, the most interesting stuff I read is here, and not anywhere else... it's comments from potatolicious, rayiner, tptacek, yummyfajitas, anigbrowl, etc. HN is still small enough to feel like a group of friends having interesting discussion... of course too much of anything is overbearing, and it's not like politics is all there is... but it should be here. I learn every time I read rayiner's comment or any and all of the contentions that take place between so and so. I don't know any other place where I can find thoughts of such people in such a raw form. I want it to stay this way.
  - Mz 10y ago
    HN is still small enough to feel like a group of friends having interesting discussion You and I experience HN very differently. I'm glad it has been so positive for you. But things generally run smoother when it is recognized that not everyone has those kinds of experiences and the concerns of those experiencing more friction should not be simply ignored. I don't believe politics is likely to go away, but I may start flagging more political discussions myself. I flagged two today. I don't do a lot of flagging. Perhaps that will change. (You can still read them and even participate if they are flagged off the front page, but not flagged to actual death. This would not interfere with your enjoyment of the site.)
  - angersock 10y ago
    It's easy enough to feel like friends having a discussion if you have similarly leftist and statist politics to match some of the folks you mentioned. :) For better or worse, a lot of the other folks and viewpoints here have been quietly squelched, mocked, punished, or outright banned by the moderators for being inconvenient or too abrasive or counter-message. In some cases, it's improved the signal-to-noise ratio, but it certainly hasn't increased diversity of thought. The big problem with letting politics on here is that it tends, especially now with people being suuuuuper lazy about critical thinking, to just end up with folks shouting at each other and downvoting positions they don't agree with. Time was one could dissent in a civil fashion here and receive upvotes for it--that time has long since passed.
tomohawk 10y ago
Politics is one thing, partisanship is another. I'd prefer neither on HN, but most especially the partisan stuff to not be posted. It seems inconsiderate at the very least. There are plenty of other venues for that.

Mz 10y ago
You could try to bring that time back though. (I blogged about how and submitted it today.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
grzm 10y ago
You participate on lobste.rs as well, correct? How do you find discussions there in comparison?
- angersock 10y ago
  I (and others) have made it an explicit goal to try and maintain civility and to focus on things that are immediately useful to tech practitioners. It's amazing the amount of shit that gets cut out when you don't normalize the mindless upvoting of news, marketing, and politics. The closest we've come in recent memory was a long grumping in a subthread about ESR in a submission involving Rust vs. Go. The basic problem is just that there are a lot of people who want to inject politics into everything--and that's fine, and frankly even correct--but they don't realize that by doing so they destroy the safe space for civil technical discussion, of which there are few these days. Some of the things that keep the discussions civil (in my estimation): 1. Public moderation logs, none of the secret cabal stuff that goes on here. Thus, users never have a clear ground to say "help help I'm being repressed!". Towards that end, at least one user banned multiple times here has been a reasonably civil member of our community--though we do try to keep him from getting to longwinded about certain topics. 2. People have multiple reasons to select why they're flagging something, and downvoting something just because you disagree with it is actively discouraged. Allowing people to get used to knee-jerk downvotes has made HN nastier, and it's something you can't really walk back. 3. We have a clear tag system for organizing submissions, and a general policy of pointing out things that don't fit (and adding tags for new things). In this way, we get to ignore the brunt of articles--news, marketing spam, other bollocks--that would have to show up and be flagged away manually by the userbase. In effect, it seems people submit things with a little more care and submit things that are actually in the wheelhouse of the community. 4. People are not afraid to point out when community norms are being broken, and are not afraid to use the mechanisms in place (meta threads, tag discussion threads, PMing) to fix those norms when they aren't working correctly. 5. Invites are handled through the existing userbase, and we are all aware that we are somewhat responsible for who we bring in. In some small way, everybody feels directly responsible for the community and how it evolves--and they often put some minimum effort into vetting the people instead of just opening the floodgates to normies and marketers (for lack of a friendlier term). ~ I guess the other thing that helps is that, in general, we've had open discussion about the role of politics in the site, and the general population seems to recognize that, while some discussion is to be encouraged (and cultivated in places like our `culture` tags), we don't want to just start indiscriminately hosting submissions and their resulting arguments. Some, like me, would prefer that those submissions never appear. Others would be happy to submit politics all the time. The community though, in agggregate, is empowered enough and--for now--wise enough to strike a balance between those two extremes. It's a good place, and I hope we don't fuck it up too soon.
  - Mz 10y ago
    and it's something you can't really walk back. It is not something easily or readily walked back. Nothing takes the past away like the future. If HN wants to walk it back, it can be done.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Agreed (and hoped for).
  - grzm 10y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Points 2 and 3 are of particular interest to me. Are there references available to non-members to learn more about how these work?