2 ms·
I don't want to start a meta flamewar, but I don't think HN has ever officially banned political discussion tout court. There's always been a fair amount of it
by foldr 6y ago
I don't want to start a meta flamewar, but I don't think HN has ever officially banned political discussion tout court. There's always been a fair amount of it on the site for the past decade, as far as I remember.
- arethuza 6y agoThe guidelines says the following are off-topic: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." So I'd say HN explicitly allows some political content as long as it is "interesting". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- foldr 6y agoYes indeed. That's the policy on stories, though. I think the policy on political discussion in comments (which often occurs in threads for "non-political" stories) has always been fairly unrestrictive.
- pjc50 6y agoThere was a period a few years ago where a total ban was attempted, then rolled back after a couple of weeks - users protested by flagging everything and writing a comment saying how X was in fact political.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThere was a political detox week for years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 It ended early: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133823 Numerous references: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20experiment%20politics&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...