zlacker

>>dang+(OP)
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).

The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.

>>tarikj+34
I find it disturbing too. Right now one of the top stories on HN is about Amazon Go and the top comment is about whether the destruction of jobs it could cause is socially acceptable.

I don't know whether that is politics or not but I can't imagine discussing Amazon Go as a technology without having that discussion. In fact when you look at HN very little is about particular technologies. Most of our discussion is around the implications.

>>golemo+0a
I can't agree enough. I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but preemptively censoring things that might turn into uncivilized discussions seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater - we need to be able to talk about difficult things.