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
Do you know the Monty Python line "God would see through a cheap ploy like that?" People would see through that and rip it to shreds the same way.

Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.

Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

>>dang+V8
Wasn't the "cheap ploy" tried long ago with a week of Erlang? It probably didn't work as intended then either, but I'm curious if it's just the scale of HN that has changed, or if it's something else, that makes such an experiment seem even more out of the question now.

>>nitrog+dz
It worked better than intended! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512280.

I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.

>>dang+DC
For those who are also curious¹, and the excellent linked topic².

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512291