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Politics is generally off-topic here other than in a few specific posts that are explicitly allowed because they're so newsworthy, like the death of RBG and the
by snazz 6y ago
Politics is generally off-topic here other than in a few specific posts that are explicitly allowed because they're so newsworthy, like the death of RBG and the media calling the election.
- cryptica 6y agoI think the fact that politics can't be discussed here is itself a form of censorship. Because people are not able to freely exchange ideas about politics, you end up with silos. The main reason why the subject of politics causes flame wars is because people are thinking about it emotionally because they have very little actual information to work with. The less sharing of information there is on the subject, the more divided people are going to be.
- hmry 6y agoThere are valid reasons for limiting which topics people can discuss in a space, in my opinion. If I disallow people from discussing politics on my cooking forum that's not censorship. It's keeping the discussion focused on the actual topic. HN seems to take a middle ground position of allowing politics when they are relevant to the topic, but not otherwise. That is also what I promote on all platforms I moderate.
- astura 6y agoThere's a million places to discuss politics online if you want to.
- chippy 6y agoPolitics can be discussed here. It's that most users don't want to discuss it. They know that most political discussions turn into flame wars and they would rather not have HN be a place of flame.
- bluntfang 6y agoYes, Hacker News is censored by the owner. There is no question about that. If you are anti-censorship, this is not the place for you.
- dang 6y agoIt's not the case that politics can't be discussed here. Many HN stories have political overlap. At the same time, we can't allow all political posts and we have to moderate flamewars, or HN will turn into a political site, which is against its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I've written about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... These explanations have become pretty stable by now, so I think they answer the question pretty completely. Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. If anyone has a better idea about how we should approach this, I'd love to hear it. But please make sure that you've familiarized yourself with the previous explanations first and understand the constraints we're subject to. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why that won't work.