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 agree 100%. Banning politics for any period of time just because it's not palatable to some does not mean that the world of politics has no value to hackers and entrepreneurs. Politics is a big part of the world and the real world matters. I've said it before and I say it again. Insulated geeks tend to created chat app # 1000 with little to no real world advantages over chat app #999. Putting our heads underground just because we don't like the real world does not help anyone. An example is the appointment of Myron Ebell to head the EPA. Purely political news but climate change is an important part of HN users. The advantage of having politics as part of the HN community is that we have a special view of how technology works and having a better view of the real world gives us a chance to better apply what we know.

In my opinion, the fix is to mark then as political and give the user the choice to bypass them. Either as a prefix such as in "Tell HN" or to flag it as such via a clickable option. Putting a defacto policy against political news is a bad idea.