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.

To support your point, there's a press release circulating from Google and Facebook right now. They've launched a program to share hashes (fingerprints) through a database identifying offending ("extremist") content so it can be more efficiently removed from the web. Yet, we aren't allowed to comment on this - I just posted it and the story was flagged.

There's a huge difference between saying "No more gratuitous flamebait about the US Election", and "no technical discussion permitted about any topic that could possibly be controversial."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110823

>>reflex+OF
Prediction of any discussion on this topic:

- what's extremist? this is just going to be used to silence my particular views

- this is anti-free speech

- some mention how this is against net neutrality

- some mention of Trump and the cabinet

- some discussion on how Facebook is not taking ownership of the problem

- Facebook echo chambers

- diversity, racism, gender, safe places, identity politics (and likely bathrooms)

- how this is needed to create a safer online community

- something about how this ties in with the views of the MSM (and likely some misrepresentation of polls)

- something about how this wouldn't be an issue if the results of the election would have been otherwise

- something about the difference between the EC and the popular vote

All of these points have been discussed ad nauseum in other threads with no appreciably constructive discussion.

And for the life of me I can't think of any technical discussion that would be made on the topic other than possibly on how calculating all of these hashes/signatures isn't really going to be technically effective to catch everything.

What's useful about that?

mini-project idea: HN discussion generator, maybe markov chain based. Provide a topic, out comes a full-fledged HN-style discussion, complete with vote/flag estimates (not for posting to HN, of course)