19 ms·

Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016)

318 points by notional 6y ago

dang 6y ago
It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that. It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here: 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... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... 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. These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20politic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... *Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Sorry, even after looking at those links and rereading your edited comment, I'm not sure I follow: How did it make things worse? Was it that "nothing even remotely political" was just way too broad?
  - dang 6y ago
    It turned every thread into a political battle and made every political side 10x madder at us than they already were.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Huh, that's unintuitive; thanks for explaining. Edit: Oh, I wonder if it's a spillover effect; the amount of politics doesn't change, so having those threads on topic avoids spill over into other threads
      - tshaddox 6y ago
        It doesn't seem counterintuitive to me. Of course people on a discussion forum who want to talk about a thing and are suddenly told they cannot talk about that thing are going to be upset.
    - serf 6y ago
      It turned every thread into a political battle and made every political side 10x madder at us than they already were. given that HN isn't an analogue for the world at large, one wonders if this lesson learned on HN translates at all to what may happen elsewhere as a result of the ongoing corporate 'de-platforming' campaigns.
- COGlory 6y ago
  Perhaps the better idea than suppressing politics would be to have a week where technological discussion is encouraged and actively highlighted?
  - dang 6y ago
    Do you know the Monty Python line "God would see through a cheap ploy like that?" People would see through that and rip it to shreds the same way. Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware. Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
    - arduanika 6y ago
      I'm racking my brains and Google and can't seem to pull up which Monty Python sketch or movie that one comes from. Give a hint? Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
      - dang 6y ago
        I'm impressed that you found that, given that my memory of the quote is inaccurate. I prefer my memory (don't we all).
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Wasn't the "cheap ploy" tried long ago with a week of Erlang? It probably didn't work as intended then either, but I'm curious if it's just the scale of HN that has changed, or if it's something else, that makes such an experiment seem even more out of the question now.
- jsm111 6y ago
  "..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error." - John Stuart Mill
  - dang 6y ago
    I don't think that argument applies here because HN is not a general-purpose discussion site. It has a specific mandate which explicitly doesn't cover everything [1], and that's the most important fact about it. Plenty of things are off-topic here, and that's not "robbing the human race" any more than, say, not letting people walk their dogs in the library. To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above. If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - h2odragon 6y ago
      Even with all the rancor around politics right now, I've seen genuine discussion of the pros and cons of free speech and other topics of "classical governance" here. Where people are genially getting their curiosity assisted and enhanced by this group. There's not many places for that. It happens here because of yalls dedicated work and magic touch. I say you're doing the human race a service, and thank you for it.
      - tptacek 6y ago
- tayo42 6y ago
  Have you considered something like the mega threads reddit does on like politics? At least the crazyness is contained in one spot. Like there really didn't need to be all the articles rewording parler, Twitter, Amazon news the last week
  - smolder 6y ago
    I think those megathreads just attract repetitive and incurious debate, things you see play out over and over, especially without specific context to differentiate. The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing. One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
- LukeShu 6y ago
  There's something I've wondered about but I haven't seen addressed in your posts (I may have missed it): It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently? Or is this just selection bias on my part?
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    I have the same feeling; it seems the 2020 election fight was far less intense than the 2016 one - but it might just be me being less on Reddit. One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
    - Fnoord 6y ago
      > it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics. Or another one issue which is deemed of high importance (terrorism, for example).
    - rchaud 6y ago
      My deeply unscientific opinion on the cause of the difference between the 2016 and 2020 election discussions on Reddit: - As you said, concern about Covid diluted the vitriol in a lot of political threads - In 2016, t_d was in ascendancy, and its members would flood other subreddits with their talking points. After that, sub moderators established stronger anti-brigading rules. In 2020, t_d was either banned or made private, I forget which. - A lot of the highly charged flash points of 2016 were no longer that relevant in 2020: Syrian refugees, trans bathrooms, 'identity politics' - 2016 also had 2 polarizing candidates. In 2020 only one was still looked at that way.
  - dang 6y ago
    I'm guessing it's selection bias on your part, but that may be selection bias on my part.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kbar13 6y ago
  it turns out that enforcing "no politics" is often a political stance!
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    More like: anything can be political.
  - millzlane 6y ago
    Only to people that want to complain about their politics. The number of people who want to discuss political science is small.
    - labster 6y ago
      I think you’re getting downvoted because there are plenty of us interested in political science here. Recently I’ve seen discussions of why we need civilian oversight of military, invoking Clausewitz, exploring why large transportation projects cost twice as much in the US as in peer nations, and how local zoning causes our infrastructure problems.
      - millzlane 6y ago
        I think you're right. I didn't mean to downplay the interests of people here wanting to have civil discussions about politics. I've too seen very civilized discussions here involving politics recently. I've also noticed an uptik in political posts. Most of the ones that have 1000+ comments have the most number of downvoted comments I've seen here on HN. Most of those comments don't seem to have a genuine curiosity about political science.
    - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
      I imagine the problem is no one could possibly agree on what politics is so you will have endless bikeshedding over if something classifies as politics. Does a post on climate change count? Does a post on city design and public transport count?
  - 6y ago
- minimaxir 6y ago
  It's worth noting that the original thread was posted Dec 5th 2016; a month after Trump was elected, but before he took office. Politics nowadays is irreversibly different, and an attempt at a detox now would be even worse.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    The lesson I take from it is that you can't shut the barn door while the horses are charging through it. Before or after, you can. In other words, at the height of political emotion the experiment was bound to fail. That's not necessarily the case at any other point in time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kodah 6y ago
  I don't have any ideas to offer but I did want to say thank you. Based on the phrasing I can tell this takes a toll (eg: "this destroys HN and we must ban this account") on both you and HN. This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
  - curioushacking 6y ago
    I whole-heartedly agree. I not sure of another community that has this level of well reasoned discourse anywhere else. Hacker News is a special place.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      It’s true, I also come here for shelter. I know the loud and unruly will be dealt with promptly.
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
  As an Australian, I see most political HN discussion revolving around US interests. For the most part this is to be expected, but in the rare cases that other country's politics enter HN (particularly new laws that affect tech), there seems to be a heavy bias toward comparison to the US's laws, so much so, that I think I understand more of the US laws than I do my own! Again, this is probably to be expected with the big tech companies largely residing in SV... But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community. So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.
  - stevekemp 6y ago
    I've noticed the same thing and also react similarly. It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.) Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
    - grogenaut 6y ago
      Often even to those inside the us the zoning and housing get very SF/cali specific so I hear you
    - bww 6y ago
      Isn’t zoning and housing inherently specific to the location of the housing or whatever is being zoned? It seems natural to discuss it with that frame of reference implied.
      - stevekemp 6y ago
- antonvs 6y ago
  > It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I'm laughing at the naivete of this. Don't quit your day jobs, y'all.
  - dang 6y ago
    It's against the values of this site to laugh at and put down people who know less than you do. Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely. If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
    - antonvs 6y ago
      So you "knew all of that already," but decided "no politics for one week" during one of the most politically charged periods of our time was a good idea? I'm sorry, I don't care enough about your community values not to laugh at that. Besides, this idea of the value of civility in the face of much worse issues is the worst kind of enlightened centrism. You're quite right that "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege," but it's clearly a lesson you haven't learned. > Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely. If you could explain how you reconcile everything you quoted about politics with the ban on politics, I could perhaps help you understand. I can't really grasp what it is you don't understand.
- RobertRoberts 6y ago
  Keep doing this work. We need sound moderation. It's required to have an open forum like this on the internet. HN is literally the only place I will discuss anything online. And it should be recognized that the rules and the general willingingness of the users to follow them combined with the care taking of those rules that make HN work. Keep at it Dang. It's nice to skip politics for a while.
- SftwreEngnr 6y ago
  So dang isn't all-knowing? That's new.
- powersnail 6y ago
  Thank you for the hard work! Reading political discussion alone gives me a heavy heart; I can't imagine moderating it.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  So many stories are political regardless but it really gets worse during election cycles when nearly every story is nothing more than a policy announcement or trial balloon being floated by one candidate or another. Usually its found after a few paragraphs and suddenly candidate X's name appears. What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label. on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
- Sn0wCoder 6y ago
  Thanks for trying. Respect
joshka 6y ago
(Edit): If we had the ability to tag posts, and then ignore categories like politics, this might help. While American politics is generally fascinating (whichever side you happen to end up on), everyone likely already has their own means to get this. Some find it divisive and exhausting.
- krapp 6y ago
  You can already hide stories you don't want to see.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    I think they mean tags come with the content and you can hide whole tags. Hiding individual stories requires you see the story to decide to hide it so you can't really hide ones you don't want to see rather ones you don't want to see again.
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    Only one at a time. HN could use some of the signal/noise tools that newsreaders had, like scorefiles.
- tptacek 6y ago
  It's part of the ethos of the site that it isn't siloed. When Dan says there needs to be room for sites like HN, that's part of what he means: sites where we're all encouraged to read and discuss the same ideas. If what you want is something with tagged posts and categories, you've already got that in Reddit, at a much greater scale than HN, or in lobsters, if you want a smaller scale.
basementcat 6y ago
Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion. Presumably one of the benefits of living in such a regime is the ability to participate in policy formulation through voting, political campaigns and various forms of public service. As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy? Therefore the majority of political discussion would be rigorous, fact based and consider a wide variety of points of view. Analogously it would seem that citizens of dictatorship-based regimes don’t have to worry about these details (hopefully the dictator and their lieutenants have taken care of everything) and can focus on enjoying their lives.
- cvwright 6y ago
  Because it brings out the worst in everyone and makes people mad at each other. Before seeing dang’s post here, I would have thought that removing politics would have helped.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion. It's turning HN into r/politics, I personally don't come on HN for that, there is already many many places online where political discussions happen, like reddit. When I say politics here I'm talking about USA cantered partisan politics. HN is a great place for tech discussion AND it's also an opportunity to talk directly to founders, or important people and technologists in IT, in a better format than Twitter. I'd like for HN to stay in that niche.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    How though? You don't have to click on the discussion? Just ignore it and move on to the next item. I do think it might be a good think to require a [political] tag or something though.
- neogodless 6y ago
  At 41, I'm not sure I'm old enough to comment on "how things were", and I'm not enough a student of history as I should be. But I believe the current trend across the globe is from democracy to autocracy[0], and toxic political polarization[1] is moving opinions so far apart as to effectively eliminate meaningful discussion about compromise or allowing yourself to change your opinion closer to what you believe to be a wholly terrible if not blatantly false perspective. To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation. [0] https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ (specifically https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5-4421-89ae-fb20dcc53dba/democracy_report.pdf https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5... PDF) [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002716218818782 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162188187...
devmunchies 6y ago
I wrote a user script that compares each entry to a blacklist and removes the post from the page. Just by blacklisting the top 15-20 news sites I've been happier.
- lesderid 6y ago
  Would you mind sharing this?
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    https://pastebin.com/Q8EKifEw https://pastebin.com/Q8EKifEw I'm using the Userscripts Extension in Safari for reference. But the code should work in any browser. https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme
    - lesderid 6y ago
      Thanks!
- raunakdag 6y ago
  Do you know of any already-established scripts that do something like this? I was contemplating introducing a block site extension, but I don't know how much self control I'd have to not just remove it when I see a juicy article I just have to read.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    no sorry. but the code I shared is really short and sweet. I don't even see the entries on the homepage on the blacklist so there's no temptation to "just remove it". Try pasting my snippet into your JS console on the homepage to see what i mean (code is short, no HTTP calls) Humans are tormented by choice/options. The hardest time for someone on a diet is when they have the option to choose junk food. My user script removes it from your HN homepage.
stevecalifornia 6y ago
In 2019 my New Years Resolution was to avoid all news and social media. The reason I started the ban was because I found my mind unsettled after reading the news and I had trouble coming back to a tranquil headspace. The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus) I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over. At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this » I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it. You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work. Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    That ties right back into the original comment, though. The quantity of suffering in the world is great, and even those of us with the ability to do something about some small part of it (already a pretty small number) are severely limited in their impact. For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs. For me, the calculus works out like this: 1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial") 2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally) 3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on. The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.
dkjaudyeqooe 6y ago
Why not ban it forever? Unless it's directly connected to tech it just makes this site more of the same and means one less place to escape toxic politics.
- gu5 6y ago
  HN is a place for "intellectual curiosity", instead of just tech. A lot of it is tech, but not all.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  The whole last 2 weeks was all about tech. Twitter ban, parler shut down, Facebook inciting and radicalizing people. Tech is so immerse in our life and society that I don’t know how you can turn off politics while keeping tech on.
- cgrealy 6y ago
  Because it's frequently connected to technology? It's hard to discuss net neutrality, or content moderation, or even applications of certain technologies (stems cells, for instance) without mentioning politics. And that's not even touching science topics like evolution or climate change.
- dang 6y ago
  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...
jeffbee 6y ago
I really appreciate seeing so many naïve and bad-faith comments archived for all time. Particularly amusing: the guy who wanted to both-sides the discussion by saying that Obama was targeting conservatives for IRS audits, linking to a wikipedia article that now specifically refutes the claim.
- winston_smith 6y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-aggressive-scrutiny-of-conservative-groups https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-... "...the IRS admits it wrongly used "heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays" and demanded unnecessary information as it reviewed applications for tax-exempt status. The order says, "For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology."
sgnelson 6y ago
My question is this: Can you ban discussing politics on a website largely about Technology (and heavy on the Silicon Valley/IT side of things) when one of the largest stories in the world at the moment is the interaction of the internet (read Twitter) and politics (read Trump) and how these things influence one another and lead to real world consequences (read January 6th)? Now, arguably more so than back in 2016, technology is playing an ever larger role in how we interact with one another. I fail to see how not acknowledging and discussing that is going to help anything. In short, good luck sticking your head in the sand. If you ignore it, things won't get better. And you're free to not read any of links or the comments at any time.
- dang 6y ago
  The answer to your question is no, definitely not. But I don't think many people are arguing otherwise?
emilsedgh 6y ago
How about trying to encourage better political discussions rather than banning the whole topic? We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out. At least let's encourage healthy and proper conversations. Maybe even have a specific "political discussion guidelines". The using downvotes to remove noise/unhealthy conversations we can have some proper arguments.
- WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  What is "better", or "healthy" or "proper", and for how long these definition will hold? Because yesterday I could say some words that would be considered improper, unhealthy, and worse today. Tomorrow, will be different words. And, we have not even discussed better, healthy, and proper opinions.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out. For what definition of "we"? As an EU citizen, Corona seems to have calmed politics down quite a bit compared to the trouble that brewed beforehand. I agree that there are issues which need to be talked about, but I do not think that HN is the right place. That being said, as of now I find the political content to be either sparse or relevant enough to not be annoying.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Well, except for in Poland...
- zanmat0 6y ago
  >The using downvotes to remove noise/unhealthy conversations This is a pipe dream.
- kodah 6y ago
  You can have political discussions on HN, you just have to follow the guidelines. All of the bans are just people not following the guidelines. Notice as well they're called guidelines and not "rules". To me, the word choice was intended.
koolba 6y ago
Quoting myself from that thread in 2016[1]: > This sounds like a cop out and I question whether this post would have been made had Trump lost and Clinton won. Per comments from dang it looks like the reason is “it didn’t work”. Still funny how it turned out to be true. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108741
elihu 6y ago
Maybe in 2021, politics can oblige us by having a week go by at some point with nothing of significance happening.
- WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  Like a power outage or some weird clothing malfunction for everyone, but only in State and Federal Capitol!
- ars 6y ago
  From what I've seen of Biden's plans, that's what he's going to do - just calm, very little changes. He isn't going to overturn Trump's things, but also not continue them. (At least the things I checked on - for example he won't keep building the wall, but he's also not going to take it down.) But he'll probably have pressure to actively overturn everything, so who knows.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    https://documentedny.com/2021/01/06/biden-makes-daca-tps-day-1-immigration-priorities/ https://documentedny.com/2021/01/06/biden-makes-daca-tps-day... He's gonna tear down the metaphorical wall right quick.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
Politics has a way of ruining everything.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  What is politics not already a part of? Art is inherently political. Sports certainly are political. Games? Definitely political. News? Writing? Software? Food? Dance? I cannot think of a thing that is free from politics.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    You're using a very broad definition of "politics", which most people aren't familiar with and doesn't strike me as tremendously useful. When people say "politics" in this context, they're generally referring to what we might call "party politics" or "electoral politics", arguments that soandso ought to be elected or suchandsuch group ought to have more power.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      And that's fair, but it's also pretty easy to draw very, very short lines to things like "Who has access to the NFL?" (class politics), "What are players allowed to say?" (first amendment politics), "What was the artist/musician/writer trying to convey? Do you see their political beliefs reflected here?" (E.g. Rand, Orwell, etc.), "Does my workplace allow trans people to use the restrooms of their choosing?", "Who grows this food, and how are they compensated?", "Who makes this garment, and how are they treated?", "Where does my electricity come from and how is it produced?". Etc. We can choose to ignore these questions, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. While they aren't directly answered with "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" or whatever, they pretty quickly have answers that fall into one camp or another.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I guess my analogy would be, I could draw a very short line between all of those topics and burritos - make a slideshow of NFL players with burritos in their mouths, argue about what kinds of fillings Orwell would have put in his burrito, build a little trans pride burrito with a blue corn tortilla. But it'd be both frustrating and bizarre if I insisted on redirecting every conversation to burritos. Burritos are great, sure, but sometimes they're just not what we're talking about! That's about my feelings towards (partisan) politics. I totally understand the impulse towards politics; I have a preferred political camp too, and I think it'd be great if they achieved more power and influence. But I don't think my camp is so important that it ought to go around intruding on every discussion in the world.
arnonejoe 6y ago
How about forever.
hawktheslayer 6y ago
Just realized this was from 4 years ago. But it's an evergreen concept almost even more needed now. I do appreciate even the political perspectives on HN which feel more reasoned to me then elsewhere, but also can apprectiate the one week sabbatical from it here.
fulafel 6y ago
I think it's a bad thing to use "political" in this narrow sense. It cultivates the mindset that politics = party politics at the highest level of government. And then paints it as a bad place. Whereas actually people do political things all the time in their work and personal lives and even most of the decisions made by formal political system are made at the local government level in most western democracies. Redefining a thing narrowly as its uncouth and hard-to-participate subset, and then blasting the thing (using its original wider definition) is a good way to drive people away from participating. Which is what we don't want.
grzaks 6y ago
Everything is politics
guerrilla 6y ago
Why is this coming up? Is it due to the five or so posts a day regarding the recent censorship? It's been pretty repetitive but I think it's definitely relevant to pretty much everyone here. While maybe it hasn't been the absolute highest quality debate, I don't think it's been at all nasty. I've found it quite interesting and I'm still thinking about it.
Seb-C 6y ago
Seeing so much political topics, and especially bad news most of the time makes us feeling bad and pessimistic about many things that are objectively not so important. A big part of the people working for influencial companies (GAFAM) are most certainly members of this community. So this made me wonder: would it be possible that we have a collective responsibility or influence over those companies through those people? Would making the debates and trends here more interesting, sane and positive have a positive influence on those? Edit: I just noticed that it was from 2016
rosmax_1337 6y ago
One of the main problems with banning political subjects on the site is that it favors the mainstream political ideas and disfavors the alternative political ideas. This makes it essentially a political move on HN mods side, ie. not neutral at all, even though it "bans everything equally". Mainstream political ideas disseminate through all other sorts of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or even cable news. Whilst alternative ideas do not. (Arguably not even on Reddit anymore) Whilst you can certainly make the argument that what we post here doesn't matter because there isn't a million users on Facebook that it might reach, I think reaching the correct people, even if only less than a hundred, is worthwhile and arguably more impactful. Now, with the way the world is moving forward right now, with Twitter and Parler, it turns out that allowing political subjects to be debated isn't exactly a neutral stance either. That it is essentially a stance that is "for" the alternatives, at least according to some powerful people in control. Which puts the HN mods team in a damned if you do damned if you don't kind of seat. I think in a more healthy world a site like this could and should stay on topic, avoiding political subjects outside the occasional coding-language or distro flamewars. ;) But since the world is arguably terminally ill right now, HN should continue on it's current trajectory and "keep siding with the alternative political ideas", and allowing politics to be discussed. I don't want to come off as accusing them of actually siding with any side however, I'm just stating that in the current climate, they come off that way whether they like it or not. In my personal opinion, a forum that allows moderated political debate is truly neutral, period. But my personal opinion doesn't set the tone for the political climate just yet.
- dang 6y ago
  No one has banned political subjects on HN. There was a brief experiment to see what the site would be like without them—it was scheduled to last a week, instead it lasted 2 days, and we've never dreamt of trying anything like it since.
  - rosmax_1337 6y ago
    Right, I was speculating about what it would be like and my thoughts on that, IF it were so. But perhaps it came off as me commenting "a change on HN". I'm glad to hear you've never dreamt of trying anything like it since. :)
gadders 6y ago
It's quite funny how badly some of those comments on the previous post have aged: "We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry." Lol, no.
mybrid 6y ago
Well met. Just curious if one has approached this site from a usability perspective? For example, one formality in usability studies is that of personnas. The name "Hacker"suggests a preconcieved personna? Who is this hacker? My usability and marketing spidey senses tell me hacker embodies on one hand a elite group of programmers and on the other hand a lawless band of brigands? Have you ever conducted studies on how just the name Hacker alone gates this community? Who shies away from this place and who doesn't? I highly recommend courses by NNG for usability. The word hacker certainly has stigmas associated with it. The last study I read from NNG concluded that while many gains have been made in usabilty in the last decade, their findings were that IA, information architecture, lags significantly. IA is about word choices. If I saw an application menu with the word Hacker as a selection I would definitely flag that for review? Also I enjoy the site and Happy New Year!
mybrid 6y ago
I have another question, is profit a motive for HN? It does not appear to be. Before HN there was slashdot.org, whicj is still around. Slashdot lost the thread I think because of revenue concerns and change of ownership. If this place is truly 100% a finacial loss then it does seem to validate yet again that news for profit is a bad idea because the news is soon compromised in the name of more viewership to drive ad revenue. If Reddit went 100% loss then I'm sure better moderation decisions would be available to them, likewise for Twitter and Facebook.
- fsflover 6y ago
  > is profit a motive for HN? Sort of. AFAIK HN get money from this https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and this https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/.
- dang 6y ago
  I've answered this a few times - if you're interested, take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
supportlocal4h 6y ago
I have heard people shouted down with "No politics!" for mentioning a vaccine. FOSS is politics. DNS is politics. Stray dogs is politics. The weather is politics. Banning political discussion is politics. Any disagreement or difference of opinion is politics. Politics is inescapable.
- midasz 6y ago
  There's usually just something missing from sentence e.g. "No politics (that I don't agree with)!" or "That's censorship (when they do it to people I agree with)!"
andrew-dc 6y ago
I have been somewhat successful generally avoiding news. This has a benefit of taming a lot of the political backwash that everyone ends up gargling. And as many have mentioned - this doesn't equate to not caring, or being ignorant. Instead, I try trading the quick hit junk food, for material of better lasting value such as research articles, old books, historic writings, etc. (Don't get me wrong, I'm no stoic or saint. It's still easy to get dragged into some current affair. But I always feel stressed, and discouraged which encourages me to keep trying to avoid... ;) The funny thing I have found is that there truly is 'nothing new under the Sun.' For instance, read through some of Frédéric Bastiat's stuff from the 1850s: http://bastiat.org/ http://bastiat.org/ It could have been written this year. Another goal of mine has been, if I get tangled in some current affair, to try and dig into what first principals are being addressed (or ignored) and reflect on my core beliefs in that area (rather than arguing the more surface issue that is being currently discussed). It's certain I don't have very much correct. And lastly, and most obvious: avoid Teh socialz except where they build up value. Like, I might engage other illustrators through instagram - where we encourage each other, but completely avoid the fomenting and political bickering etc.
fareesh 6y ago
I would be curious to see a recent political poll of HN users
bmcn2020 6y ago
For some people, politics isn't a choice, a luxury, an option to discuss or not, just because of the breadth and width of what politics means. T Even then, there'd probably be a better time for a politics detox week than the current week, since it will be so impossibly difficult to not discuss the goings on. I mean, these are historic times (in the US, with international repercussions).
davesque 6y ago
I wanted to emphasize to people that there's a date attached to this post. I don't think they're currently considering having a political detox week. It seems there are a lot of comments that assume they are.
RobLach 6y ago
Detaching yourself from politics is in itself a luxurious political statement.
- dang 6y ago
  The idea was to try it for a week, not forever.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
That seems like not a great mood when the nation (USA) is apparently under attack by domestic terrorists. I can understand if people are just being overly political, but it's hard to be political when a sizeable faction of the country evidently thinks it's time for the US experiment to get cancelled.
- dang 6y ago
  The OP was an experiment from 4 years ago. We haven't done anything like that since, nor will we. Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me. In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.

318 points by notional 6y ago

dang 6y ago

It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that. It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here: 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... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... 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. These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20politic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... *Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Sorry, even after looking at those links and rereading your edited comment, I'm not sure I follow: How did it make things worse? Was it that "nothing even remotely political" was just way too broad?
- dang 6y ago
  It turned every thread into a political battle and made every political side 10x madder at us than they already were.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Huh, that's unintuitive; thanks for explaining. Edit: Oh, I wonder if it's a spillover effect; the amount of politics doesn't change, so having those threads on topic avoids spill over into other threads
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      It doesn't seem counterintuitive to me. Of course people on a discussion forum who want to talk about a thing and are suddenly told they cannot talk about that thing are going to be upset.
  - serf 6y ago
    It turned every thread into a political battle and made every political side 10x madder at us than they already were. given that HN isn't an analogue for the world at large, one wonders if this lesson learned on HN translates at all to what may happen elsewhere as a result of the ongoing corporate 'de-platforming' campaigns.
COGlory 6y ago
Perhaps the better idea than suppressing politics would be to have a week where technological discussion is encouraged and actively highlighted?
- dang 6y ago
  Do you know the Monty Python line "God would see through a cheap ploy like that?" People would see through that and rip it to shreds the same way. Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware. Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
  - arduanika 6y ago
    I'm racking my brains and Google and can't seem to pull up which Monty Python sketch or movie that one comes from. Give a hint? Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
    - dang 6y ago
      I'm impressed that you found that, given that my memory of the quote is inaccurate. I prefer my memory (don't we all).
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Wasn't the "cheap ploy" tried long ago with a week of Erlang? It probably didn't work as intended then either, but I'm curious if it's just the scale of HN that has changed, or if it's something else, that makes such an experiment seem even more out of the question now.
jsm111 6y ago
"..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error." - John Stuart Mill
- dang 6y ago
  I don't think that argument applies here because HN is not a general-purpose discussion site. It has a specific mandate which explicitly doesn't cover everything [1], and that's the most important fact about it. Plenty of things are off-topic here, and that's not "robbing the human race" any more than, say, not letting people walk their dogs in the library. To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above. If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - h2odragon 6y ago
    Even with all the rancor around politics right now, I've seen genuine discussion of the pros and cons of free speech and other topics of "classical governance" here. Where people are genially getting their curiosity assisted and enhanced by this group. There's not many places for that. It happens here because of yalls dedicated work and magic touch. I say you're doing the human race a service, and thank you for it.
    - tptacek 6y ago
tayo42 6y ago
Have you considered something like the mega threads reddit does on like politics? At least the crazyness is contained in one spot. Like there really didn't need to be all the articles rewording parler, Twitter, Amazon news the last week
- smolder 6y ago
  I think those megathreads just attract repetitive and incurious debate, things you see play out over and over, especially without specific context to differentiate. The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing. One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
LukeShu 6y ago
There's something I've wondered about but I haven't seen addressed in your posts (I may have missed it): It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently? Or is this just selection bias on my part?
- Sebb767 6y ago
  I have the same feeling; it seems the 2020 election fight was far less intense than the 2016 one - but it might just be me being less on Reddit. One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    > it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics. Or another one issue which is deemed of high importance (terrorism, for example).
  - rchaud 6y ago
    My deeply unscientific opinion on the cause of the difference between the 2016 and 2020 election discussions on Reddit: - As you said, concern about Covid diluted the vitriol in a lot of political threads - In 2016, t_d was in ascendancy, and its members would flood other subreddits with their talking points. After that, sub moderators established stronger anti-brigading rules. In 2020, t_d was either banned or made private, I forget which. - A lot of the highly charged flash points of 2016 were no longer that relevant in 2020: Syrian refugees, trans bathrooms, 'identity politics' - 2016 also had 2 polarizing candidates. In 2020 only one was still looked at that way.
- dang 6y ago
  I'm guessing it's selection bias on your part, but that may be selection bias on my part.
deleted 6y ago
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kbar13 6y ago
it turns out that enforcing "no politics" is often a political stance!
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  More like: anything can be political.
- millzlane 6y ago
  Only to people that want to complain about their politics. The number of people who want to discuss political science is small.
  - labster 6y ago
    I think you’re getting downvoted because there are plenty of us interested in political science here. Recently I’ve seen discussions of why we need civilian oversight of military, invoking Clausewitz, exploring why large transportation projects cost twice as much in the US as in peer nations, and how local zoning causes our infrastructure problems.
    - millzlane 6y ago
      I think you're right. I didn't mean to downplay the interests of people here wanting to have civil discussions about politics. I've too seen very civilized discussions here involving politics recently. I've also noticed an uptik in political posts. Most of the ones that have 1000+ comments have the most number of downvoted comments I've seen here on HN. Most of those comments don't seem to have a genuine curiosity about political science.
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    I imagine the problem is no one could possibly agree on what politics is so you will have endless bikeshedding over if something classifies as politics. Does a post on climate change count? Does a post on city design and public transport count?
- 6y ago
minimaxir 6y ago
It's worth noting that the original thread was posted Dec 5th 2016; a month after Trump was elected, but before he took office. Politics nowadays is irreversibly different, and an attempt at a detox now would be even worse.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  The lesson I take from it is that you can't shut the barn door while the horses are charging through it. Before or after, you can. In other words, at the height of political emotion the experiment was bound to fail. That's not necessarily the case at any other point in time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kodah 6y ago
I don't have any ideas to offer but I did want to say thank you. Based on the phrasing I can tell this takes a toll (eg: "this destroys HN and we must ban this account") on both you and HN. This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
- curioushacking 6y ago
  I whole-heartedly agree. I not sure of another community that has this level of well reasoned discourse anywhere else. Hacker News is a special place.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    It’s true, I also come here for shelter. I know the loud and unruly will be dealt with promptly.
cmroanirgo 6y ago
As an Australian, I see most political HN discussion revolving around US interests. For the most part this is to be expected, but in the rare cases that other country's politics enter HN (particularly new laws that affect tech), there seems to be a heavy bias toward comparison to the US's laws, so much so, that I think I understand more of the US laws than I do my own! Again, this is probably to be expected with the big tech companies largely residing in SV... But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community. So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I've noticed the same thing and also react similarly. It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.) Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
  - grogenaut 6y ago
    Often even to those inside the us the zoning and housing get very SF/cali specific so I hear you
  - bww 6y ago
    Isn’t zoning and housing inherently specific to the location of the housing or whatever is being zoned? It seems natural to discuss it with that frame of reference implied.
    - stevekemp 6y ago
antonvs 6y ago
> It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I'm laughing at the naivete of this. Don't quit your day jobs, y'all.
- dang 6y ago
  It's against the values of this site to laugh at and put down people who know less than you do. Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely. If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    So you "knew all of that already," but decided "no politics for one week" during one of the most politically charged periods of our time was a good idea? I'm sorry, I don't care enough about your community values not to laugh at that. Besides, this idea of the value of civility in the face of much worse issues is the worst kind of enlightened centrism. You're quite right that "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege," but it's clearly a lesson you haven't learned. > Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely. If you could explain how you reconcile everything you quoted about politics with the ban on politics, I could perhaps help you understand. I can't really grasp what it is you don't understand.
RobertRoberts 6y ago
Keep doing this work. We need sound moderation. It's required to have an open forum like this on the internet. HN is literally the only place I will discuss anything online. And it should be recognized that the rules and the general willingingness of the users to follow them combined with the care taking of those rules that make HN work. Keep at it Dang. It's nice to skip politics for a while.
SftwreEngnr 6y ago
So dang isn't all-knowing? That's new.
powersnail 6y ago
Thank you for the hard work! Reading political discussion alone gives me a heavy heart; I can't imagine moderating it.
Shivetya 6y ago
So many stories are political regardless but it really gets worse during election cycles when nearly every story is nothing more than a policy announcement or trial balloon being floated by one candidate or another. Usually its found after a few paragraphs and suddenly candidate X's name appears. What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label. on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
Sn0wCoder 6y ago
Thanks for trying. Respect

joshka 6y ago

(Edit): If we had the ability to tag posts, and then ignore categories like politics, this might help. While American politics is generally fascinating (whichever side you happen to end up on), everyone likely already has their own means to get this. Some find it divisive and exhausting.

krapp 6y ago
You can already hide stories you don't want to see.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  I think they mean tags come with the content and you can hide whole tags. Hiding individual stories requires you see the story to decide to hide it so you can't really hide ones you don't want to see rather ones you don't want to see again.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  Only one at a time. HN could use some of the signal/noise tools that newsreaders had, like scorefiles.
tptacek 6y ago
It's part of the ethos of the site that it isn't siloed. When Dan says there needs to be room for sites like HN, that's part of what he means: sites where we're all encouraged to read and discuss the same ideas. If what you want is something with tagged posts and categories, you've already got that in Reddit, at a much greater scale than HN, or in lobsters, if you want a smaller scale.

basementcat 6y ago

Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion. Presumably one of the benefits of living in such a regime is the ability to participate in policy formulation through voting, political campaigns and various forms of public service. As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy? Therefore the majority of political discussion would be rigorous, fact based and consider a wide variety of points of view. Analogously it would seem that citizens of dictatorship-based regimes don’t have to worry about these details (hopefully the dictator and their lieutenants have taken care of everything) and can focus on enjoying their lives.

cvwright 6y ago
Because it brings out the worst in everyone and makes people mad at each other. Before seeing dang’s post here, I would have thought that removing politics would have helped.
throw_m239339 6y ago
> Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion. It's turning HN into r/politics, I personally don't come on HN for that, there is already many many places online where political discussions happen, like reddit. When I say politics here I'm talking about USA cantered partisan politics. HN is a great place for tech discussion AND it's also an opportunity to talk directly to founders, or important people and technologists in IT, in a better format than Twitter. I'd like for HN to stay in that niche.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  How though? You don't have to click on the discussion? Just ignore it and move on to the next item. I do think it might be a good think to require a [political] tag or something though.
neogodless 6y ago
At 41, I'm not sure I'm old enough to comment on "how things were", and I'm not enough a student of history as I should be. But I believe the current trend across the globe is from democracy to autocracy[0], and toxic political polarization[1] is moving opinions so far apart as to effectively eliminate meaningful discussion about compromise or allowing yourself to change your opinion closer to what you believe to be a wholly terrible if not blatantly false perspective. To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation. [0] https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ (specifically https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5-4421-89ae-fb20dcc53dba/democracy_report.pdf https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5... PDF) [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002716218818782 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162188187...

devmunchies 6y ago

I wrote a user script that compares each entry to a blacklist and removes the post from the page. Just by blacklisting the top 15-20 news sites I've been happier.

lesderid 6y ago
Would you mind sharing this?
- devmunchies 6y ago
  https://pastebin.com/Q8EKifEw https://pastebin.com/Q8EKifEw I'm using the Userscripts Extension in Safari for reference. But the code should work in any browser. https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme
  - lesderid 6y ago
    Thanks!
raunakdag 6y ago
Do you know of any already-established scripts that do something like this? I was contemplating introducing a block site extension, but I don't know how much self control I'd have to not just remove it when I see a juicy article I just have to read.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  no sorry. but the code I shared is really short and sweet. I don't even see the entries on the homepage on the blacklist so there's no temptation to "just remove it". Try pasting my snippet into your JS console on the homepage to see what i mean (code is short, no HTTP calls) Humans are tormented by choice/options. The hardest time for someone on a diet is when they have the option to choose junk food. My user script removes it from your HN homepage.

stevecalifornia 6y ago

In 2019 my New Years Resolution was to avoid all news and social media. The reason I started the ban was because I found my mind unsettled after reading the news and I had trouble coming back to a tranquil headspace. The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus) I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over. At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.

jeromegv 6y ago
It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this » I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it. You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work. Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  That ties right back into the original comment, though. The quantity of suffering in the world is great, and even those of us with the ability to do something about some small part of it (already a pretty small number) are severely limited in their impact. For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs. For me, the calculus works out like this: 1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial") 2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally) 3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on. The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.

dkjaudyeqooe 6y ago

Why not ban it forever? Unless it's directly connected to tech it just makes this site more of the same and means one less place to escape toxic politics.

gu5 6y ago
HN is a place for "intellectual curiosity", instead of just tech. A lot of it is tech, but not all.
jeromegv 6y ago
The whole last 2 weeks was all about tech. Twitter ban, parler shut down, Facebook inciting and radicalizing people. Tech is so immerse in our life and society that I don’t know how you can turn off politics while keeping tech on.
cgrealy 6y ago
Because it's frequently connected to technology? It's hard to discuss net neutrality, or content moderation, or even applications of certain technologies (stems cells, for instance) without mentioning politics. And that's not even touching science topics like evolution or climate change.
dang 6y ago
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...

jeffbee 6y ago

I really appreciate seeing so many naïve and bad-faith comments archived for all time. Particularly amusing: the guy who wanted to both-sides the discussion by saying that Obama was targeting conservatives for IRS audits, linking to a wikipedia article that now specifically refutes the claim.

winston_smith 6y ago
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-aggressive-scrutiny-of-conservative-groups https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-... "...the IRS admits it wrongly used "heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays" and demanded unnecessary information as it reviewed applications for tax-exempt status. The order says, "For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology."

sgnelson 6y ago

My question is this: Can you ban discussing politics on a website largely about Technology (and heavy on the Silicon Valley/IT side of things) when one of the largest stories in the world at the moment is the interaction of the internet (read Twitter) and politics (read Trump) and how these things influence one another and lead to real world consequences (read January 6th)? Now, arguably more so than back in 2016, technology is playing an ever larger role in how we interact with one another. I fail to see how not acknowledging and discussing that is going to help anything. In short, good luck sticking your head in the sand. If you ignore it, things won't get better. And you're free to not read any of links or the comments at any time.

dang 6y ago
The answer to your question is no, definitely not. But I don't think many people are arguing otherwise?

emilsedgh 6y ago

How about trying to encourage better political discussions rather than banning the whole topic? We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out. At least let's encourage healthy and proper conversations. Maybe even have a specific "political discussion guidelines". The using downvotes to remove noise/unhealthy conversations we can have some proper arguments.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago
What is "better", or "healthy" or "proper", and for how long these definition will hold? Because yesterday I could say some words that would be considered improper, unhealthy, and worse today. Tomorrow, will be different words. And, we have not even discussed better, healthy, and proper opinions.
Sebb767 6y ago
> We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out. For what definition of "we"? As an EU citizen, Corona seems to have calmed politics down quite a bit compared to the trouble that brewed beforehand. I agree that there are issues which need to be talked about, but I do not think that HN is the right place. That being said, as of now I find the political content to be either sparse or relevant enough to not be annoying.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Well, except for in Poland...
zanmat0 6y ago
>The using downvotes to remove noise/unhealthy conversations This is a pipe dream.
kodah 6y ago
You can have political discussions on HN, you just have to follow the guidelines. All of the bans are just people not following the guidelines. Notice as well they're called guidelines and not "rules". To me, the word choice was intended.

koolba 6y ago

Quoting myself from that thread in 2016[1]: > This sounds like a cop out and I question whether this post would have been made had Trump lost and Clinton won. Per comments from dang it looks like the reason is “it didn’t work”. Still funny how it turned out to be true. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108741

elihu 6y ago

Maybe in 2021, politics can oblige us by having a week go by at some point with nothing of significance happening.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago
Like a power outage or some weird clothing malfunction for everyone, but only in State and Federal Capitol!
ars 6y ago
From what I've seen of Biden's plans, that's what he's going to do - just calm, very little changes. He isn't going to overturn Trump's things, but also not continue them. (At least the things I checked on - for example he won't keep building the wall, but he's also not going to take it down.) But he'll probably have pressure to actively overturn everything, so who knows.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  https://documentedny.com/2021/01/06/biden-makes-daca-tps-day-1-immigration-priorities/ https://documentedny.com/2021/01/06/biden-makes-daca-tps-day... He's gonna tear down the metaphorical wall right quick.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

Politics has a way of ruining everything.

Pfhreak 6y ago
What is politics not already a part of? Art is inherently political. Sports certainly are political. Games? Definitely political. News? Writing? Software? Food? Dance? I cannot think of a thing that is free from politics.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  You're using a very broad definition of "politics", which most people aren't familiar with and doesn't strike me as tremendously useful. When people say "politics" in this context, they're generally referring to what we might call "party politics" or "electoral politics", arguments that soandso ought to be elected or suchandsuch group ought to have more power.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    And that's fair, but it's also pretty easy to draw very, very short lines to things like "Who has access to the NFL?" (class politics), "What are players allowed to say?" (first amendment politics), "What was the artist/musician/writer trying to convey? Do you see their political beliefs reflected here?" (E.g. Rand, Orwell, etc.), "Does my workplace allow trans people to use the restrooms of their choosing?", "Who grows this food, and how are they compensated?", "Who makes this garment, and how are they treated?", "Where does my electricity come from and how is it produced?". Etc. We can choose to ignore these questions, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. While they aren't directly answered with "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" or whatever, they pretty quickly have answers that fall into one camp or another.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I guess my analogy would be, I could draw a very short line between all of those topics and burritos - make a slideshow of NFL players with burritos in their mouths, argue about what kinds of fillings Orwell would have put in his burrito, build a little trans pride burrito with a blue corn tortilla. But it'd be both frustrating and bizarre if I insisted on redirecting every conversation to burritos. Burritos are great, sure, but sometimes they're just not what we're talking about! That's about my feelings towards (partisan) politics. I totally understand the impulse towards politics; I have a preferred political camp too, and I think it'd be great if they achieved more power and influence. But I don't think my camp is so important that it ought to go around intruding on every discussion in the world.

arnonejoe 6y ago

How about forever.

hawktheslayer 6y ago

Just realized this was from 4 years ago. But it's an evergreen concept almost even more needed now. I do appreciate even the political perspectives on HN which feel more reasoned to me then elsewhere, but also can apprectiate the one week sabbatical from it here.

fulafel 6y ago

I think it's a bad thing to use "political" in this narrow sense. It cultivates the mindset that politics = party politics at the highest level of government. And then paints it as a bad place. Whereas actually people do political things all the time in their work and personal lives and even most of the decisions made by formal political system are made at the local government level in most western democracies. Redefining a thing narrowly as its uncouth and hard-to-participate subset, and then blasting the thing (using its original wider definition) is a good way to drive people away from participating. Which is what we don't want.

grzaks 6y ago

Everything is politics

guerrilla 6y ago

Why is this coming up? Is it due to the five or so posts a day regarding the recent censorship? It's been pretty repetitive but I think it's definitely relevant to pretty much everyone here. While maybe it hasn't been the absolute highest quality debate, I don't think it's been at all nasty. I've found it quite interesting and I'm still thinking about it.

Seb-C 6y ago

Seeing so much political topics, and especially bad news most of the time makes us feeling bad and pessimistic about many things that are objectively not so important. A big part of the people working for influencial companies (GAFAM) are most certainly members of this community. So this made me wonder: would it be possible that we have a collective responsibility or influence over those companies through those people? Would making the debates and trends here more interesting, sane and positive have a positive influence on those? Edit: I just noticed that it was from 2016

rosmax_1337 6y ago

One of the main problems with banning political subjects on the site is that it favors the mainstream political ideas and disfavors the alternative political ideas. This makes it essentially a political move on HN mods side, ie. not neutral at all, even though it "bans everything equally". Mainstream political ideas disseminate through all other sorts of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or even cable news. Whilst alternative ideas do not. (Arguably not even on Reddit anymore) Whilst you can certainly make the argument that what we post here doesn't matter because there isn't a million users on Facebook that it might reach, I think reaching the correct people, even if only less than a hundred, is worthwhile and arguably more impactful. Now, with the way the world is moving forward right now, with Twitter and Parler, it turns out that allowing political subjects to be debated isn't exactly a neutral stance either. That it is essentially a stance that is "for" the alternatives, at least according to some powerful people in control. Which puts the HN mods team in a damned if you do damned if you don't kind of seat. I think in a more healthy world a site like this could and should stay on topic, avoiding political subjects outside the occasional coding-language or distro flamewars. ;) But since the world is arguably terminally ill right now, HN should continue on it's current trajectory and "keep siding with the alternative political ideas", and allowing politics to be discussed. I don't want to come off as accusing them of actually siding with any side however, I'm just stating that in the current climate, they come off that way whether they like it or not. In my personal opinion, a forum that allows moderated political debate is truly neutral, period. But my personal opinion doesn't set the tone for the political climate just yet.

dang 6y ago
No one has banned political subjects on HN. There was a brief experiment to see what the site would be like without them—it was scheduled to last a week, instead it lasted 2 days, and we've never dreamt of trying anything like it since.
- rosmax_1337 6y ago
  Right, I was speculating about what it would be like and my thoughts on that, IF it were so. But perhaps it came off as me commenting "a change on HN". I'm glad to hear you've never dreamt of trying anything like it since. :)

gadders 6y ago

It's quite funny how badly some of those comments on the previous post have aged: "We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry." Lol, no.

mybrid 6y ago

Well met. Just curious if one has approached this site from a usability perspective? For example, one formality in usability studies is that of personnas. The name "Hacker"suggests a preconcieved personna? Who is this hacker? My usability and marketing spidey senses tell me hacker embodies on one hand a elite group of programmers and on the other hand a lawless band of brigands? Have you ever conducted studies on how just the name Hacker alone gates this community? Who shies away from this place and who doesn't? I highly recommend courses by NNG for usability. The word hacker certainly has stigmas associated with it. The last study I read from NNG concluded that while many gains have been made in usabilty in the last decade, their findings were that IA, information architecture, lags significantly. IA is about word choices. If I saw an application menu with the word Hacker as a selection I would definitely flag that for review? Also I enjoy the site and Happy New Year!

mybrid 6y ago

I have another question, is profit a motive for HN? It does not appear to be. Before HN there was slashdot.org, whicj is still around. Slashdot lost the thread I think because of revenue concerns and change of ownership. If this place is truly 100% a finacial loss then it does seem to validate yet again that news for profit is a bad idea because the news is soon compromised in the name of more viewership to drive ad revenue. If Reddit went 100% loss then I'm sure better moderation decisions would be available to them, likewise for Twitter and Facebook.

fsflover 6y ago
> is profit a motive for HN? Sort of. AFAIK HN get money from this https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and this https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/.
dang 6y ago
I've answered this a few times - if you're interested, take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.

supportlocal4h 6y ago

I have heard people shouted down with "No politics!" for mentioning a vaccine. FOSS is politics. DNS is politics. Stray dogs is politics. The weather is politics. Banning political discussion is politics. Any disagreement or difference of opinion is politics. Politics is inescapable.

midasz 6y ago
There's usually just something missing from sentence e.g. "No politics (that I don't agree with)!" or "That's censorship (when they do it to people I agree with)!"

andrew-dc 6y ago

I have been somewhat successful generally avoiding news. This has a benefit of taming a lot of the political backwash that everyone ends up gargling. And as many have mentioned - this doesn't equate to not caring, or being ignorant. Instead, I try trading the quick hit junk food, for material of better lasting value such as research articles, old books, historic writings, etc. (Don't get me wrong, I'm no stoic or saint. It's still easy to get dragged into some current affair. But I always feel stressed, and discouraged which encourages me to keep trying to avoid... ;) The funny thing I have found is that there truly is 'nothing new under the Sun.' For instance, read through some of Frédéric Bastiat's stuff from the 1850s: http://bastiat.org/ http://bastiat.org/ It could have been written this year. Another goal of mine has been, if I get tangled in some current affair, to try and dig into what first principals are being addressed (or ignored) and reflect on my core beliefs in that area (rather than arguing the more surface issue that is being currently discussed). It's certain I don't have very much correct. And lastly, and most obvious: avoid Teh socialz except where they build up value. Like, I might engage other illustrators through instagram - where we encourage each other, but completely avoid the fomenting and political bickering etc.

fareesh 6y ago

I would be curious to see a recent political poll of HN users

bmcn2020 6y ago

For some people, politics isn't a choice, a luxury, an option to discuss or not, just because of the breadth and width of what politics means. T Even then, there'd probably be a better time for a politics detox week than the current week, since it will be so impossibly difficult to not discuss the goings on. I mean, these are historic times (in the US, with international repercussions).

davesque 6y ago

I wanted to emphasize to people that there's a date attached to this post. I don't think they're currently considering having a political detox week. It seems there are a lot of comments that assume they are.

RobLach 6y ago

Detaching yourself from politics is in itself a luxurious political statement.

dang 6y ago
The idea was to try it for a week, not forever.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

That seems like not a great mood when the nation (USA) is apparently under attack by domestic terrorists. I can understand if people are just being overly political, but it's hard to be political when a sizeable faction of the country evidently thinks it's time for the US experiment to get cancelled.

dang 6y ago
The OP was an experiment from 4 years ago. We haven't done anything like that since, nor will we. Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me. In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.