I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea. Sure, in a week we can get back into the grim reality, the tech-noir crapsack future, but perhaps for one week we can focus on a positive future and its soaring aspirations. Go Dang!
I don't think politics have overtaken the site or even become a significant part of it, so I wonder why politics-averse individuals cant just avoid political threads?
Technology and politics go hand in hand, unless we'd like to head back into the dark ages.
EDIT: I'm not hear to offend or persuade with politics talk. I'm here to provide or obtain new perspectives and understanding. If I want an echo chamber that reinforces my perspectives and beliefs, I can head back to Facebook.
HN is a community for the the intellectually curious, who come here for a wide range of interests (some of which have political aspects, of course--there's no getting away from that). But there's a different kind of users, ideologically committed ones, who use HN primarily for political battle. That's not something that sits well with the purpose of this site, as I tried to explain above.
Those users really want a different kind of site than HN, and need to find another, or maybe start a new one. Plenty of new sites have spawned from HN; that's partly a function of our not trying to be all things. HN has always been in the lucky position of not needing to grow for growth's sake, so we're happy when people who want a different kind of community find it, or create it.
The vision of where we want to be is the central political debate of all time, to which all other political discussions are peripheral appendages. So, no, banning political discussion doesn't let us focus on that, it prohibits even considering it.
It is indeed possible to avoid clicking on a specific kind of topic. From what I understand, the issue here is more that it just isn't a fit for the purpose of this community/website.
This just reads like a cop-out to me, in the same way that large media orgs have been parroting the "it's impossible to be truly unbiased" line as if it were an excuse to throw up their hands and stop trying altogether.
Not that I'm saying you're being disingenuous here, mind, it just reads like defeatism. "All tech is politics so it's pointless to try delineating them". This mentality gets worse and worse as you go down the main thread...
Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking down the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..
Those topics aren't even tangentially political in nature.
(It's interesting how the "this is just for a week" thing hasn't seemed to enter the conversation.)
And these are the articles that matter the least to me. I come here to discuss applied technology, not theory. How can technology improve quality of life? How are we going to deal with automation replacing the need for jobs? How are startups and their culture effecting both their employees and society as a whole (I'm looking at you AirBnB and Uber).
To each their own. I don't believe it's a cop out, but that's my opinion. You can have your threads and I can have mine without any interference. That's my problem. There's no need to censor politics threads if you simply skip them because you have no interest.
EDIT: Which HN is totally within its right to do.
On the other hand, the idea of an interminable ban on political discussion has many obviously salient implications, emotions, and such. A sort of half-baked analogy is that it's like lighting a tiny, contained trashcan fire in the middle of a nuclear reactor--it's not really a big deal but it's easy to see how it could trigger high-magnitude reactions from onlookers.
The thing is that we all have very different visions on the hill of where we want to be, and that friction is what's playing out in these threads.
Because the YC/HN culture is to experiment to inform future direction. "just for a week" probably means "just for a week, so that we can see if it negatively or positively influences the quality of discussion... and, if the effect is positive, we may implement a similar policy for the long term"
Thus, "just for a week" doesn't appear to have much relevance since the experiment is (presumably) part of a longer term plan to curb hostile commentary.
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?
That said, sure, not every thread should re-hash the same conversation, but that's neither exclusive to politics (see the discussions in every thread about JS frameworks) nor is it the problem being called out by the moderator.
Again. Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? What if there are sites that are not Hacker News that are better for that kind of discussion?
As for other sites, no, absolutely not. Politics is unavoidable. You can enforce a silent acceptance of the status quo, but that's in itself a strong political (reactionary) position.
These two views are mutually exclusive. Either technology discussion can be separated from politics discussion (and given the other thread, we have evidence that it can), or it can not.
You're telling me that I can't discuss a topic without touching this other topic, and yet here that is happening right in front of us.
There are times and places to have political discussions - the fact that I do not engage with my mom on political topics over Thanksgiving turkey does not mean I am not interested in politics, it means I am not interested in politics in that particular context.
Mostly because I know that the discussion will end in anger, hurt feelings, and not a single changed mind. It has happened enough on this board that people, myself included, start getting very flag-happy when they get a whiff of partisanship in the air.
I especially do not appreciate the implication that not wanting to have the discussion "here" is a political statement of anything other than wanting to avoid a headache. I must point out that insisting that X be talked about when someone has expressed disinterest in the topic is hard to interpret in any way other than hostile disregard.
That's a creative analogy though.
The long-term plan is to protect the values of this site (intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation), or at least, it's our intention to find such a plan. But there's no longer term plan to ban politics. I understand why people would react with that concern, of course, but it really is just an experiment for a week.
That was definitely not clear to me from the post (although it is reassuring).
I think that's just because people are natural cynics, and as such default to the assumption that a temporary state of emergency will be permanent.
Also, I've gotten in trouble using that word "experiment" before. It turns out to mean weirdly, wildly different things to different people. But I'm attached to it.