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Flag submissions you consider inappropriate for HN. If you recall Political Detox Week, it was very chaotic and noisy. It's very difficult to find widespread ag
by grzm 10y ago
Flag submissions you consider inappropriate for HN. If you recall Political Detox Week, it was very chaotic and noisy. It's very difficult to find widespread agreement as to what's politics and what's not, and what's an exception because it's really really important.
'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. I'll dig around for them and update this comment with links to them in a bit to provide more context.
Edit: Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433
There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480
On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.
- jbyers 10y agoI agree, and this has been my practice: flag what doesn't pass my internal bar and see if the algorithm / moderators / community agree. For all this community has generated inspired commentary on the technology world, I maintain that we don't have the framework to manage net-positive political debate. My point is we should choose to address that deficiency or choose to avoid political debate. We'll see where flagging and voting take us - maybe it's enough. So far I would summarize the karmic reaction to my first comment as: "meh."