zlacker

Tribalism is so toxic. I'm all for this. But for flagging purposes what's the boundary between a political/non-political story?

EDIT: @dang in another comment: Let me clarify. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents.

>>pshc+(OP)
It would be great if dang could clarify a bit; for example, what about news about legal developments (that most likely comes with a normative slant, like welcoming or regretting something that courts have done), leaks about government institutions, or opinion pieces about social issues that don't directly associate them with politicians or legislation?

A challenge that's come up around lots of controversies is the way that one side might think something is "political", while another side thinks it's not!

>>pshc+(OP)
> Tribalism is so toxic.

And yet isn't one solution to tribalism a respectful exchange of ideas and dialogue?

Political changes have many direct impacts on this community - net neutrality, education policy related to STEM, funding for organizations/government agencies that have a long history of supporting technology, legislation concerning the development of new technologies (particularly for the medical and energy sectors), employment legislation, patent laws, and many other topics are likely of interest to a large number of HN readers and contributors.

Personally, I don't come to HN looking for political discussion/commentary but I also don't mind seeing it when it's appropriate.

>>knz+d4
Yeah, that's well put... I could go further to propose that the respectful exchange of ideas and dialogue is the antithesis of tribalism--of othering.

I agree with you that politics are deeply intertwined with hacker culture.

But practically speaking, how we get to that respectful ideal? Throttling political stories when things get too heated might help.

>>knz+d4
Have you been witnessing respectful political exchanges on this site? the past 18 months have been pretty awful, in my experience.

>>anonba+e9
Compared to other online communities - absolutely. HN rarely devolves into "Damn [liberals|conservatives]" and people often get called out here for ad hominem attacks. Political articles without any basis in technology and clickbait titles are also usually quickly culled.

>>knz+d4
> And yet isn't one solution to tribalism a respectful exchange of ideas and dialogue?

Yes. And HN may in fact be a good forum for doing so, if we can keep the respectful and dialogue parts.

This may not be the week for it, though. (The last two weeks haven't been so great for civil, thoughtful dialog on anything touching politics, even on HN.) If HN is going to be the place to counter political tribalism via thoughtful cross-tribe communication, it may need this week off in order to be able to get there.

>>knz+d4
They have made so that an article that cultivates discussion is actually penalized, softly silencing any topics worthy of discussion here. Now they outright ban things. Might as well just disable comment functionality if they don't like people opinions and ideas that much.

>>pshc+(OP)
The boundary for flagging is wherever you put it. Just like upvotes or downvotes or commenting.

>>knz+kc
I think the standard for HN political discussions ought to be other HN discussions not political discussions elsewhere on the internet. HN having better political discussions than elsewhere on the internet might even be part of the problem if HN is attracting people whose purpose is political discussions.

>>cLeEOG+Ad
For the most part, the "they" you refer to is the community at large. By far the most flagging and down voting is community members, not the mods. And it's not "silencing topics worthy of discussion", its "avoiding topics that have empirically generated mostly uncivil, non-constructive flamewars". I've made comments expressing this distinction a number of times in response to comments such as yours (silencing/censoring worth discussion; why did this get flagged; this particular political view is always killed), and they've been consistently some of my most-up-voted comments. That indicates to me that this is an idea that has relatively strong support from the community as a whole.

>>pshc+(OP)
> Tribalism is so toxic

What do you think HN will be like when only the privileged ideologies are allowed?

>>brudge+3u
That's a good observation and well put.