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[return to "Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016)"]
1. dang+c7[view] [source] 2021-01-15 01:14:35
>>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

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2. cmroan+So[view] [source] 2021-01-15 03:40:47
>>dang+c7
As an Australian, I see most political HN discussion revolving around US interests. For the most part this is to be expected, but in the rare cases that other country's politics enter HN (particularly new laws that affect tech), there seems to be a heavy bias toward comparison to the US's laws, so much so, that I think I understand more of the US laws than I do my own! Again, this is probably to be expected with the big tech companies largely residing in SV...

But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community.

So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.

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3. dang+kA[view] [source] 2021-01-15 05:45:12
>>cmroan+So
I point this out a lot [1]. The problem is the statelessness of the internet [2]. No matter how often you repeat something, the population that receives the message has measure zero.

There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].

It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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4. AYBABT+b21[view] [source] 2021-01-15 10:30:00
>>dang+kA
Something I've noticed while traveling and staying abroad for long period: the content on HN tends to have a slightly different vibe depending on which continent/timezone group is awake and reading the news at a given time, especially on slow-news days.

In another comment, you said that HN isn't siloed[1]. I think otherwise, there's definitely a certain vibe of groupthink going on, which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day, but mostly has strong common undercurrents of what are acceptable lines of thoughts and what are not in the greater HN community. And then within a given timezone, there are thought-cliques that share common counter-positions.

I would say, HN is siloed, it just has a few silos.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25190216

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5. pietro+tk1[view] [source] 2021-01-15 12:47:24
>>AYBABT+b21
> which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day

This seems to be true. I noticed on my comments I get pretty consistent waves of upvotes or downvotes depending on the time of the day. My comments are usually pretty politicized and polarizing, so my guess must be that the US wave likes my content less and the European wave likes it more.

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