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 fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion.

I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. Frankly, it may be impossible to expect objectivity within political discussion because our political feelings are so deeply-held and tied to our individual upbringings, culture, and locale.

Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.

>>chriss+Za
> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site

When people talk about "the average HN reader", or the "prevailing slant", I'm always curious what they mean.

For me, it's always felt more like a back-and-forth struggle between radical liberals and hardline libertarians. That's always been the general nature of pretty much every tech-oriented forum historically (e.g. HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, etc). When Mike Judge was once asked about the core insight behind his "Silicon Valley" TV show, he cited his belief that the tech ethos is a conflict between liberal and libertarian values.

As a pragmatist who just likes to read about tech, I find both sides annoying.

>>SteveP+bn
Still, technologically minded liberals/libertarians, for all their differences, are not the only viewpoints, and even if there's disagreement along that axis it can still lead to a bubble. I doubt you'd see many people on HN advocating for a fundamentally Christian America, for instance.