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 this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.

I wonder why it is called an experiment at all. In the end this just the mods upholding the part of HN guidelines [1] that I like the most:

    If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The problem with having stories and comments about mundane politics is also that they bury the technically interesting comments and they make stories on the the front page go away quicker. There are plenty of other sites where one can discuss about politics. Only on HN can one discuss, for example, with Animats (John Nagle) about the shortcomings and the history of the Nagle's algorithm [2,3] or getting lessons of public speaking from patio11 [4].

Mundane politic topics interfere with HN being the exception place it is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050645 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544