zlacker

>>notion+(OP)
It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.

It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.

These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251

>>dang+c7
Perhaps the better idea than suppressing politics would be to have a week where technological discussion is encouraged and actively highlighted?

>>COGlor+G8
Maybe politics keep popping up because it's a conversation that needs to happen?

Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?

I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.

>>war102+tf
It definitely needs to happen. From my perspective the question is whether it needs to happen here on HN. The answer is yes and no, for the reasons I linked to above.

There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.

In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].

[1] I'm not saying it's very good at this. But it's all relative, and what matters is outrunning the bear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725436.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431