zlacker

>>dang+(OP)
Tribalism is so toxic. I'm all for this. But for flagging purposes what's the boundary between a political/non-political story?

EDIT: @dang in another comment: Let me clarify. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents.

>>pshc+k2
> Tribalism is so toxic.

And yet isn't one solution to tribalism a respectful exchange of ideas and dialogue?

Political changes have many direct impacts on this community - net neutrality, education policy related to STEM, funding for organizations/government agencies that have a long history of supporting technology, legislation concerning the development of new technologies (particularly for the medical and energy sectors), employment legislation, patent laws, and many other topics are likely of interest to a large number of HN readers and contributors.

Personally, I don't come to HN looking for political discussion/commentary but I also don't mind seeing it when it's appropriate.

>>knz+x6
They have made so that an article that cultivates discussion is actually penalized, softly silencing any topics worthy of discussion here. Now they outright ban things. Might as well just disable comment functionality if they don't like people opinions and ideas that much.

>>cLeEOG+Uf
For the most part, the "they" you refer to is the community at large. By far the most flagging and down voting is community members, not the mods. And it's not "silencing topics worthy of discussion", its "avoiding topics that have empirically generated mostly uncivil, non-constructive flamewars". I've made comments expressing this distinction a number of times in response to comments such as yours (silencing/censoring worth discussion; why did this get flagged; this particular political view is always killed), and they've been consistently some of my most-up-voted comments. That indicates to me that this is an idea that has relatively strong support from the community as a whole.