Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it's Political Detox Week on HN.
For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.
Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they're like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don't mix.
Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.
Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.
A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.
Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.
It has to do with us noticing an uptick in two undesirable things: harsh ideological comments, and accounts that use HN primarily for political battle.
You can see one example of how the idea developed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Well, victory gardens were a thing not very long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
This is one of those unintended consequences that gobsmack me any time we try out some new idea here. I'm sure anyone who deals with large internet communities has the same experience. The funny thing is that it's always obvious that it was bound to come up, in retrospect—just never beforehand. It's like the unveiling of the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel: hidden in plain view every time.
I don't know if I can respond in a way that satisfies you, but let me try. First, Clinton and Trump stories are equally penalized on HN. Second, it always seems like HN is biased against whatever views you personally hold, not because it is, but because the community is divided and we're biased to notice the things we dislike, and that offend us, more than the ones that don't. Your use of the word "flagrantly" is an instance of this. Why do the things you listed seem flagrant while others do not? Because they're mirroring your own preferences. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13083111 and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... for more on this if you want.)
I guarantee you that the people who feel oppositely to you about X, Y, Z issues feel like their side is flagrantly the underdog in the same fights. This is one of the dynamics behind why political fights are so toxic to begin with.
> Either way, this is a site full of people skilled at reading between the lines
Read my lines, please! Just don't imagine lines, then imagine subtexts between them, and then read the imaginary subtext. Instead, ask. We're happy to explain what's going on—what's actually, really going on, as best we understand it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb
I guess it is also necessary to turn on showdead in the settings.
This community already has its head in the sand. Political topics are flagged to oblivion, and even those that aren't inevitably inspire so much discussion that the flamewar detector goes off and nukes the thread.
Imagine: in an era where we rail against filter bubbles, a website punishes threads that are too active!
The Devil's Advocate says "Hey now, there's certainly a time and place for political discussion, but HN is a tech forum, not a political forum." Good point, but HN is also a Third Place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), and being a Third Place means promoting Civic Engagement. I agree that HN should strive to stay on topic, but there is plenty of overlap between tech and politics and I think that space deserves to be explored by the community.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108455
(Aside: I believe that this detox experiment is treading on dangerous ground, that it will be a struggle to contain the amount of censorship that will happen as a result of encouraging people to flag each other in this way, and that the effects will linger beyond the 1 week time limit.)
#17 Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for a week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
#23 Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092330
#29 Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065599
#37 Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103611
#49 War Is a Racket by General Smedley D. Butler (1933) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068641
#59 FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074285
Can't help you there. We don't have anything like that degree of finesse in planning.
The way it works is, we do our job and think about it a lot, and don't pay that much attention to other stuff, and when we think something is a good idea and finally get around to it, we do it. About the only thought that went into political timing was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098321.
We work on technologies that impact, in one way or another, other people's life.
As you correctly point out, the discussion of the social impacts of Amazon Go is currently open in another thread and I consider that a must.
Other example of the need of politics in here and in our heads when we design something is the case of Tristan Harris [0], as a former Google employee.
I am not saying I agree with Tristan Harris, or with one side or the other in the Amazon Go thread, but I consider HN as a place where civil political debate needs to take place, because we have a moral duty to have it.
We are, in a way, the 1% of "technologically aware people" (and probably among the world top 10% wealthiest...). We need to discuss these issues and we need to think before we act. I'm not trying to re-enact the 99% battle, but our privileges do come with a price and that price is thinking before we act...
I urge people on Amazon Go team to have that discussion. Do they consider working on that project socially acceptable for them or not, and why?
Do I consider, as a SaaS marketing provider, my job as socially acceptable, and why? That is something I, both as a citizen and a business owner, need to think about and openly discuss with my customers, shareholders and consumers/citizens if need be.
I will probably kick down an open door, but the etymology of politics is politika "affairs of the cities": aren't we all, as technology workers/operators/... all living in these cities?
[0]http://www.realclearlife.com/2016/10/27/former-google-produc...
Quick question for clarification - would http://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-companies-delay-diversity-r... fall into the kind of race and gender issues that you'd block this week?
1) It's an experiment, there should never be any disagreement with an experiment unless the experiment itself can cause harm to someone/something. The results of this experiment should be evaluated closely, and if they make new guidelines for HN I'm fully onboard. But it's an experiment.
2) The person who shot the gun did not read HN, I may be wrong but I feel this is a fair assumption. I'm not saying no one here could shoot a gun in public, but they wouldn't come here as anything but a complete troll and shoot a gun based on some crap story like that. If I'm wrong in this then the experiment is terrible and stop it now. But I very much doubt it.
3) The issue is that news in general has degraded. This degradation of journalism has led to many of the issues we experience today. If experimenting on HN can lead to some sort of anecdotal evidence that Politics = bad for communities I'm all for it. I believe part of the issue is pointed to in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 24 Hours news is the issue. 24 Hours politics is the issue. Taking a purge is a great idea.
4) HN should not be where you get your news about politics.
But during WWII in Finland there were definitely gardens built by soldiers. As the Soviet Union defended against Germany and its Finnish front was effectively paused, the Finnish soldiers began to build temporary houses on the front lines. Here's a photo from 1943:
http://www.nautelankoski.net/sota/kuvat/sotakuvat/jatkosotak...
I was going to send this in an email to you ages ago, but this is as good a place as any, I guess.
I'm sure you've seen this account many times, but I intentionally post unpopular opinions here, often to actively game upvotes/downvotes. Sometimes, I post the exact opposite opinion that I hold in meatspace. Occassionally I accidentially stumble on something new (who knew wal-mart was so popular on HN?[0]), and proceed to extend a conversation to see how much karma I will actively lose. I liken it to game testing, where one is encouraged to play incorrectly in order to identify bugs in a program.
I have a pretty good understanding of the political pulse of HN as a result. The HN of 2016 overwhelmingly skews California Liberal, and often includes much of the identity politics. If you even hint at opposing gay rights (which, as an LGBTQ* is obviously not my position), you will be downvote-bombed. In this thread I have been downvoted for making a pro-Eich post. Sometimes, the retaliation for an opinion extends to downvoting my post history.
The system is incredibly easy to game for karma; just post something that largely supports the majority opinion, and contributes just enough that it isn't flagged for not providing anything to the conversation. Keep this up until you have enough karma to downvote, then work on another account. If you're judicious in keeping to the hivemind's platform, you can get a 650 karma account in less than a month (I've done it twice, though I deleted the accounts afterward). in six months, you can downvote a post you don't like to light grey in a matter of seconds.
I'm sure you've made efforts to penalize stories. Largely, you've been really good on that. However, comments are where the hivemind lives, and it can be measured in upvotes and downvotes. If a post isn't incendiary, but ends up with more downvotes than upvotes, it's safe to say this is an account of maybe not the entire site, but at least who is regularly active at the time of posting.
I completely agree with you about the toxicity of political fights, even though I hypocritically partake in them for research. I also agree that everyone believes their side is the underdog. I just don't agree that HN is "equally-biased", and I have the post history to prove it.
(yes, kissing the ass of the mods is part of the game, as it effectively stops the flow of downvotes once you intervene; However, I do mean it when I compliment how you've run the site. You've made HN worth using throughout this Eternal Septembering of redditors)
I wonder why it is called an experiment at all. In the end this just the mods upholding the part of HN guidelines [1] that I like the most:
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Mundane politic topics interfere with HN being the exception place it is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050645 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608356 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6199544
> I was skeptical about the reason dang
As to this, I'm not sure I have the same skepticism you do in this regard. HN has a history of flagging overly political stories, as it can often be hard to keep discussion civil. There seems to be less flagging of these as the election gets close, as it's more relevant to everyone involved, but trying to cut back after the election is past seems appropriate to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site.
As the Amazon Go thread, and this comment from PG demonstrate, the default position - where there is no discussion of race / gender / class / diversity - is for the protections that minority groups enjoy to disappear.
Either because no-one thinks to protect them (as white working classes feel has happened to them) or because SV bigwigs see those protections as an inconvenient fact that should be swept away by technological disruption.
pg: "Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups."
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en
It's a fallacy to think that HN and hackers can somehow obsolve themselves from that responsibility any more than it thinks it can obsolve itself from responsibility toward homeless in SF.
By all means take the decision you feel you need to to maintain your community - but don't under any circumstances pretend it's a politically neutral one because it just cannot be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095475
You'll need 'showdead' set to 'yes' in your profile if you want to see all the comments in it.
1 I only refer to myself as part of the unwashed masses because: A) I am not actually a programmer B) I am incredibly poor and C) I literally do not bathe frequently due to said extreme poverty as I am homeless. ;-)
2 Evidence of total support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692
I'd like to point out that this site is called "Hacker News", not "Technical and Business News". While there is no single "hacker political stance", there are ethical principles embraced by the community that can be applied usefully to policy questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics
As many have pointed out, it's really the subjective content of this site (here in the comments) that has the most value.
For instance, I just came across this interesting article from The Brookings Institution: "Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs low-output America" [1].
It's a look at how the election broke down by county. Clinton won 472 counties, Trump won 2584. The counties Clinton won produce 64% of the country's GDP, with Trump's counties producing 36%. With the exceptions of the Phoenix, Fort Worth, and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won all the counties that have large economies.
They have a neat visualization of all the counties by size of contribution to GDP and who won them.
The discuss how this big a divide is "unprecedented in the era of modern economic statistics".
The article itself is not taking any political position. It is just providing a way to perhaps get some insight into how the election came out the way it did.
Would this article count as politics and so be subject to this week's ban? Or is it an interesting look at data that happens to be data about a political event?
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another...
The opposite people feel the opposite:
In recent threads, I've made some factual observations, only to have people imagine a slant or motivation, then argue with that commenter of their imagination. I think HN is succumbing to the "Arguments as Soliders" antipattern:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108944
So, that immediately prompted follow-up comments about rivalries between northern and southern Californians over water use (edit: including whether the choice of this metric is southern-Californian political propaganda!), about whether Californians can manage to reduce the amount of water that we need, about whether the west has too much human settlement, etc. While those may not align very well with political ideologies that have been the most controversial here, they could be seen as political questions (and they could potentially lead to flamewarring over different aspects of environmentalism).
How does this kind of topic fit in with this plan, dang?
Find just about any article on the hacker mindset and politics, aside from the desire for freedom, won't be anywhere near the top of the list. Nothing about Republicans, Democrats, race, etc.
Some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28subculture%29 http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://suntzu23.blogspot.com/2006/11/five-principles-of-hack... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.html
The article was not "how to argue with people you disagree with" but how to connect with an audience who does not believe in a scientific consensus due to misinformation. In fact the point of the article had nothing to do with arguing (or political parties), but rather empathetically connecting with an opposing viewpoint.
This is exactly what I meant from my parent comment. Because a topic has been hijacked by political parties we can't bring it up? Climate change = science topic. It is a well documented phenomenon that 97% of the world's climate scientists agree on [1].
Being on either side of the political spectrum is irrelevant here, as at its core this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with science.
We're happy to clarify (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614) but it's impossible to draw a precise line. Moderation is about a few core principles and a lot of case-by-case judgment calls, and it's inherently unsatisfying.
Whatever rules we have, though, we apply them less rather than more in cases where YC itself or a YC startup is at issue. That's one of the rules :)
I'm reminded of Ted Nelson's notion that politics, loosely defined, is "clash and reconciliation of agendas" and, "If software is successful, it steers the path that many users take, and selects among many possibilities to further the creator's agenda...Suppressing the other possibilities may also be part of the agenda."
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/video/the-politics-of-internet-soft...
In any case, I get & appreciate the practical goal here and what you're looking to accomplish. I know I specifically need a Trump-related detox, in general (although not because of anything I've seen on HN).
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/20/donal...
> Donald J. Trump, who earlier in the week said he was open to requiring Muslims in the United States to register in a database, said on Thursday night that he “would certainly implement that — absolutely.” Mr. Trump was asked about the issue by an NBC News reporter and pressed on whether all Muslims in the country would be forced to register. “They have to be,” he said. “They have to be.’’ ... Asked later, as he signed autographs, how such a database would be different from Jews having to register in Nazi Germany, Mr. Trump repeatedly said, “You tell me,” until he stopped responding to the question.
I know I just learned something from this meta discussion, about the argument that the economy can't support UBI based on GDP numbers, and I'm eager to go read more. Most arguments I have seen say it won't work because of moral hazards and I haven't seen an argument that says it flat out can't be done, because there are so many different approaches and different ways it could play out.
Agreed. I've been thinking about how communities can handle this problem for awhile. A solution to it would be revolutionary, in a very good way for the entire Internet, and what better place to experiment with and develop a solution than HN. Here's my over-ambitious shot at a solution, based only on experience in online communities:
------------------------
I propose that we have different rules, much higher standards for commenting, for hot button issues. When these situations come up, our moderators could post something like,
** Hot button rules apply **
----
1) Be precise: Who? Did? What?
Who should be a proper noun; only individuals (and in some cases, specific organizations like 'Acmesoft') actually have thoughts, motives, and perform actions; groups do none of those things - we are not hive minds. This eliminates lazily broad statements with huge implications that provoke anger and fear, stereotype large groups, and don't make us any better informed. 'Tennesseans hate Kentuckyians' doesn't inform anyone - there is nothing all Tennesseans agree on, and nobody can possibly read all their minds, and we know nothing more after reading it than we did before - but '60% of Tennesseans who responded to this survey say they have stopped visiting Kentucky' is fine.
Did: HN readers mostly grasp empirical science and should be able to understand: Only actions are observable, not other people's thoughts and feelings - though you can observe what they say about their thoughts.
What, used precisely, eliminates sloppy characterizations. 'Tennessee Governor Jane Jones despises Kentucky BBQ.' No, what actually happened? 'Tennessee Governor Jane Jones said, "I despise seeing Kentucky BBQ taking jobs from hardworking Tennessee chefs."'
Finally, Be precise also means: No hyperbole.
----
2) Context is required: Where and when
Where and when are essential context. Think of your high school writing guidelines: Who, what, where, when, etc. 'Tennessee Governor Jane Jones said, "I despise seeing Kentucky BBQ taking jobs from hardworking Tennessee chefs."': It is essential to know when she said that (1985? 2010? Before the Kentucky-Tennessee trade war began or after?) and where (On a campaign stop in a TN BBQ restaurant? The title of a book? A tweet? A warm-up joke for a speech?); otherwise, we have no idea what really happened.
----
3) Back it up:
The burden of proof is much higher, and on the commenter: Respected scholarly research (not someone's self-published book) or highly respected news media, and not in a column or editorial. Wikipedia's Reliable Source rules may help here, but with higher standards for sources (and also actually applied here; Wikipedia articles often ignore the standards).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
----
4) Be 100% respectful, as if talking to someone important to you whom you respect. No exceptions; no grey areas; stay well away from this line.
----
5) The only idea we don't tolerate is intolerance itself. See Karl Popper's Paradox of Intolerance if you want to go deeper on this. Or a simpler way to approach it: Tolerance is a social contract - you tolerate me and I'll tolerate you.
----
6) These rules apply to anyone you quote, also. You can't say 'Kentuckians suck', and you can't quote someone else saying it (except to talk about the quoted person's habit of broad stereotypes).
----
Comments violating these guidelines are immediately, mercilessly killed dead. Busy moderators may not have time to explain why, but in most cases you can find the reason(s) here pretty easily. Feel free to rewrite according to the guidelines and try again.
------------------------
By now you may be thinking: 'With those standards, I won't have much to say on inflammatory topic X!' or 'Those will be much shorter threads!' or 'I'd really need some good information and think it through in order to comment!' Good; you understand. Imagine if we restricted those discussions to only valuable, informative content. The contents of the threads could actually advance our knowledge about inflammatory, often very important, issues. It's almost hard conceive of. We could actually, in the heat of an issue, advance rational public discussion - a goal that has seemed so intractable that it's almost forgotten; it seems almost fanciful. The perfect challenge.
It also eliminates the prominent problem of people making endless wild allegations for others to refute (see rule #3 - they must back up what they post). So instead of endlessly repeating the same low-value information back and forth, we'd actually gain real knowledge from each other. And if some threads are very short, then what have we lost? A bunch of low-value comments from uniformed commenters? Ideological rants? Things we've heard a thousand times before? It even will save some disk space and bandwidth, and reduce page load times.
Finally, if it works - which not at all a sure thing and will require fine-tuning at the very least - the concept could be used by other online communities. What we develop here - not software, but guidelines for community interaction - it could change the world, in a way that it badly needs and longs for.
Sister site to HN the way it looks.
Speech is a form of power. Decisions about which speech is allowed affect the distributions of power and it's easy to see how the decision to ban politics is itself political.
In this sense it's not possible to ban politics from HN, only to change the distribution of politics.
We should examine the ways that a ban like this might change the distributions of politics and power among the HN community. I suspect we'd find it reduces the power among marginalized communities. Even if you're not from one of those communities you can really benefit by reading their writings. In that case to cut off those voices is a shame. It's a loss.
Who's deciding what counts as political and not? Moderators. We should examine that. "Banning politics" essentially becomes "Moderators politics."
Nope. I actually am at the receiving end. 2 of my cousins are married to illegal aliens (both Mexican women) and 1 couple has a child born here (so citizen).
Still I had a moment of clarity when I realized that
1) Trump was indeed Democratically elected, and 2) I don't gain anything by fretting over and stressing over after reading 1 bad news after another about his policies, because I really can't do anything as a single person (unless, of course, I make 1 issue my life long pursuit, then it's different).
I've chosen to focus on my Circle of Control and reduce or altogether eliminate my Circle of Concern
Related Reading: Circle of Control vs Circle of Concern: => http://www.jdroth.com/images/circle-concern-control.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
I'm not aware of any other recent significant bans, so I don't know what user samstave means by ``They were like "Oh! BAM" A ban on /r/this and that.''
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13095475
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886
What actually constructive on balance came out of these discussions? How can we improve the signal-to-noise ratio/reduce the tribal displays? This is a topic I'm genuinely interested in, so your take on it given your experience here on HN is of particular interest to me. I think it's not putting words in dang's mouth to say reducing the tribal displays (as opposed to stifle intellectual curiosity) is exactly what detox week is attempting to accomplish.
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."
Everyone wanting to continue these conversations, please join us there.
https://medium.com/projectinclude/peter-thiel-yc-and-hard-de...
> But Thiel’s actions are in direct conflict with our values at Project Include. Because of his continued connection to YC, we are compelled to break off our relationship with YC. =Ellen Pao
Short answer: Because oftentimes a thread about a technology is about its concrete operational characteristics and applications, not it's social effects.
When you start dragging those into the topic, there's shockingly little depth to probe. AI will automate people out of jobs eventually - okay, and? You've moved the thread off topic. I came to read about how OpenAI works, not what the left, right, center, and upside-down think about the larger concept of AI, rather than the specific implementation called out in the thread title.
Here's the thread I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103742
A cursory reading suggests that somehow, that particular rabbit hole was avoided by everyone there. This kind of goes into what dang was saying, broaching the topic you just did in that thread would have just been unwelcome noise.
Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? Is that really an interesting discussion to have in every thread?
If that cup of coffee is from a civet[1], for example, then it does behoove you to consider the social ramifications of your actions.
And that sandwich, depending on who you are, what you look like, and where you are, could be considered extremely political.[2]
[1] http://world.time.com/2013/10/02/the-worlds-most-expensive-c...
[2] http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/6-legacy/freedom...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/librarians-act-now-pro...
Is this political?
"Fashion is mistaken for good design;
moral fashion is mistaken for good."
"Moral fashions more often seem to be
created deliberately. When there's
something we can't say, it's often
because some group doesn't want us to."
[0] "What you can't Say" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Edit: Looks like the two of us have discussed this before :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12974834
And both times I've appreciated the civil discussion. Thanks for that!
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/785769454516916228?lang=en
And we, in turn, were criticized for daring to express our thoughts that, if Trump were elected, YC would play the typical role of the moneyed, comfortable, and powerful, and not use any of its significant power to work towards a better end.
Anyways, cool to put a moratorium on political discussion < 15 days before the electors vote and 45 days before Inauguration. I feel relieved, and not proven right at all.
In the longer run, I think it is good to have some politics on the site. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum and has a huge amount of intersection with politics. In the past, it has been possible to have rational and nuanced conversations about political issues on HN.
In the recent election cycle, that's been destroyed. It seems to have emboldened people to derail threads with political mud-slinging and the crazies have come out of the woodwork.
To put it simply, I never thought HN would be the place where I was first told to leave the country or get killed. The fact that it was (and not Reddit) honestly depresses me, and I hope that a detox period will force the worst politics out of the forum.
----------
That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.
If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
I definitely understand electoral politics fatigue. We're all having that. But 'dang explicitly said the intended scope of the ban/"detox" is wider than that, over in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614
"The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet."
So apparently literally anything about race, gender, or class (which are really important issues both in terms of the tech industry and in terms of who technology is for) are considered off-limits for the week. (And at least one relevant story - about big tech companies releasing diversity reports - has already been killed under the policy.) That is one reason I am taking this as such a clear signal of the values of the mods, rather than simply a reaction to election stuff. I could be wrong, of course, but i wanted to try to let you see what i - and many others, i think? - are seeing that concerns us.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13111026
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn...
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-the-alt-right-is
Don't know about you, but I always trust content from Teen Vogue...
I have no idea why you feel so much more comfortable at this place than MeFi - MeFi isn't good, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least when people get banned for horrific misogyny or anti-Semitism people don't come along later and say "but they had great technical contributions!"
And as many others have said, this is a horrible idea. ESPECIALLY for a site oriented toward start-ups (or, at least, people who like to talk about start-ups). Guess who is going to be signing off on the regulations that determine what is and isn't allowed? Guess who is going to determine where research money goes and what gets subsidies or tax breaks?
Oh yeah, that thing which you don't want anyone to discuss.
A few years old and more geared toward HPC and scientific computing, but Michio Kaku gave a great talk at SC about how politics and lobbying are very important and are actually vital and that if technology wants to advance it needs to not plug its ears and hide but actually be involved and fight for our interests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_MbkVozydE
Rather than sit around, gazing at our navels, and talking about how amazingly smart and above it all we all are maybe, just maybe, people should actually consider "disrupting" the world into an "agile" state that can actually result in a government and laws that aren't a hindrance. And you sure as sugar don't get that by talking about how nobody else knows how to communicate with anyone because they aren't "hackers".
But hey, gotta make sure you don't alienate anyone who might be a good business partner.
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Maybe, just maybe, enforce rules about not making emotional and unfounded posts. Because that is largely independent of politics and is the kind of thing that makes it hard to take this place seriously as a "meeting of the minds" and mostly causes it to feel like "A marginally less meme filled reddit".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614
We can clarify, though. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet.
This is true, but I suspect the biggest reason is that politics is more prone to Crony Beliefs ( http://www.meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/ ) than almost any other field of discussion.
Couldn't you also enable an enhanced slow mode on threads that seem political in nature? Maybe something like the "hate tax" system proposed here[1].
I feel as though political topics tend to generate a knee-jerk response in people, especially when they are in an...shall we say, altered state of mind. The more controversial a topic is, the slower the pace of discussion should be IMHO. Exponentially so.
There is a setting in your options called "showdead". Is that on or off for you? If it's set to off HN will hide some comments that have been killed by userflags. Thus, you may well have not seen the worst examples.
But this week someone (with more than 10k karma and an account that's over 3000 days old) called for Jews to relocate:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
> But, yes, to the extent the inchoate Alt Right has a position on it, one of them is that Jews are to be "excluded if not eliminated from society", as in all societies that are not Israel. You've got your own homeland now, which we of the Alt West fully support, relocate yourself there. Specifically "diversity + proximity = war", and we want to avoid "war" such as it is or will be.
There's a severe danger that you would lose. For a commentary on emotionally charged and intellectually devoid arguments about a technical subject, I give you http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488235).
But that's not the whole of it, by a long chalk. There have been "the OS Wars", "the editor wars", "the archiver wars", and others. One particularly extreme example that I personally encountered was a group of people in comp.os.os2.advocacy . They did all of the petty and stupid Usenet tricks such as rudely and impatiently splitting paragraphs and sentences to reply to all of the individual words. Much of the level of "argument" was the sort of thing that I'd expect from six-year-olds in a playground: parroting, insults, and general childishness.
I didn't read the newsgroup for the better part of a decade. When I went back to look at it I was astounded to see that the group was still at it, in (as far as I could tell) the same threads with exactly the same content-free taunting and rubbish.
Going back to that newsgroup again today, and picking stuff at random, here's an example of this sort of discourse. From 2011!
* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.os2.advocacy...
Here's a comparison thread randomly selected from the 1990s.
* https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.os2.advocacy...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/...
"No, he would not rule out a database on all Muslims. But for now, he wants a database for refugees."
And most importantly - it wasn't him that brought up the idea, he was asked this "John F. Kennedy is not a homosexual"-style. The fact that he failed to clarify either way was then reported in ambiguous snippets giving the impression that he had brought this up.
Even an insinuation that someone has a connection with an undesirable group apparently makes it legitimate to repeatedly ask them about it. I think such a low-bar to interrogation is not enough; sometime even being repeatedly asked something can give the impression that it might be true (or more likely), "big lie"-style.
For anyone else, the original article discussing the graphic: is here [0].
NYTimes didn't provide those, right?
"While many headlines came out after this exchange saying Trump would "absolutely" require Muslims to register in a database, it’s not entirely clear that’s what he said."
"Through the end of the conversation, it’s possible Trump thought the exchange was about illegal immigration."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/...
Tell me what you think of Trumps reply wrt that last "Nazi Germany" question from NBC?
I think you're right that both of those are problems, but they're not the only problem. Incivility is also a problem in political discussions here lately. Another problem lately is that discussions to which a political discussion is only tangentially relevant get derailed by political discussions that exhibit these problems.
> If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
I disagree with this for two reasons. Firstly, if people could civilly propose the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews, then that wouldn't show that people proposing either that or innocuous things incivilly is not a problem (only that incivility is not the only problem). But here specifically, I don't think that commenter spoke civilly, any more than "No offense, but <some insulting or offensive thing>" is polite (indeed, less so, as the commenter made even less pretense). The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.
Consider how that would sound to someone who's "karma-poor," i.e. anyone new to HN.
> But I don't agree that you should feel anything based on downvotes....never, ever let a little number next to your name control your life. Don't let it become who you are.
Yes, Eleanor Roosevelt was right, of course. However, the fact remains that people are people, and people are social animals, and, despite being virtual, these are social interactions with real consequences.
One of the problems with downvotes is that they have no cost for the voter, but they inflict a social penalty upon the receiver. Their being anonymous-yet-public is part of that problem.
Imagine being in an office environment that had a corkboard on the wall divided into columns, one for each employee. Anyone can anonymously post a card, and anyone can read posted cards. Downvotes are the equivalent of someone posting a card saying, "You're wrong and stupid and you should feel bad for saying that thing you said earlier today at lunch." The person making the accusation incurs no social cost, expends no social capital, but the person about whom the comment is made suffers a social penalty, an anonymous-yet-public shaming, without even an opportunity to defend himself or face his accuser.
Would anyone deny that such an environment would have extremely negative consequences for social interactions in the group? Imagine walking up to the board and seeing a number of cards equivalent to over half the group in your column, all of them shaming you for something that happened earlier. Who in the group hates you now? When you interact with someone, and they seem nice, are they putting on an act? Are they talking about you behind your back? Are they one of the ones who posted those cards?
Yet here on HN, people think this kind of interaction is acceptable, even good. It makes no sense.
Another serious problem with downvoting (or, at least, the way downvoting is implemented here) is that it discourages discussion. Every time someone takes the time to write a thoughtful comment, and it gets downvoted into invisibility, that person is discouraged from doing so in the future, because it would effectively be a waste of his time. Why should he bother, when it only takes a few people to click a button and make his words vanish. And in this way, the whole community is worse off.
For example, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13118453 I made a relevant comment with a good point supported by a clear example. Then someone responds with a bunch of strawmen that have no relevance to what I said and my comment starts getting downvotes. His comment wasn't even relevant, which is exactly the kind of comment that should be downvoted--but does his get downvoted? No, of course not--he gets approbation, and I get shamed. A few more downvotes and my comment won't even be seen by anyone who might have something interesting to say about it, which disenfranchises me of the opportunity to have a discussion at all.
I wanted to have an interesting discussion on the topic, but a handful of people have the power to deny me that opportunity, while remaining anonymous and refusing to even engage in the discussion themselves. It's just plain cowardly. So why should I bother? It's a waste of my time. HN becomes a read-only medium to me. But of course, to them, that's a good thing, because I'm an outsider, and they don't want to hear from me.
> I want you to know that you're welcome on HN.
That's nice of you to say, but it's not the case according to the people who downvoted him, because such downvoting is directly discouraging further such participation, i.e. saying, "Don't do that again," which is exactly not welcoming.
(Unsurprisingly, Arkady is my favorite character.)
Rapoport's Rules:
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
- You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
- You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
[0]: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
Ok. When did he say he would build a list of Muslims from Facebook? What is that based on?
Obama actually did target conservatives with the IRS[1] and nobody on here wasting time speculating what he might or might not do even though he clearly does things that weren't in his campaign speeches and lied about other things ("you can keep your plan"[2]).
My point is that suddenly a ton of young liberal people that lived most of their adult life with Democrat in the white house have someone they didn't vote for in office and they don't have the maturity to deal with it. It's constant over-the-top messaging about the end of the country and when Republicans did the same thing during Obama's presidency ("death panels", "secret muslim", etc), they were laughed out of the room as they should have been. It's embarrassing coming from the side that touted things like "facts tend to be liberal".