I respectfully disagree.
Yesterday someone motivated by the "Pizzagate" story, spread and enabled by the social media systems we designed, fired multiple shots from a semi-automatic weapon into a crowded restaurant near my home.
My partner and I passed the crime scene shortly thereafter on our way back to our apartment.
The new National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, endorsed the totally false rumors that led to this shooting. He will soon be empowered by the full force of the nation's intelligence agencies.
I want you to very carefully consider the implications of what he could do with access to that power, and the potential result of blocking discussion of such issues, particularly at this moment in time.
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.
The systems on which that person read the false information that drove them to shoot the gun were built by people who read HN. That may sound like a lot of levels of indirection, but to ignore politics for a week seems like a symptom of pretending that we are not a part of the problem.
I think the technology running the web needs to be thought of as a part of the fourth estate. We are not separate from the media which we have restructured.
HN might not should be or should strive to be the place where you get your news about politics - but it has certainly educated me about political positions and history in the past.
1. Any views expressed here or elsewhere on HN are purely my own and not representative of the United States government or any other entity.
2. This is not about one individual act of violence. It is symptomatic of a culture created by the types of technology we discuss and implement. I happen to know many people within various spheres that do read HN, and are influenced by it.
3. This comment was flagged, which seems contrary to the purpose of inviting a public discussion, particularly on the thread regarding the appropriateness of such discussions on this site.
If we can't even express dissent that we can't express dissent, that is a problem.
It is also an experiment. I'd like to emphasize that. It is an experiment. It is OK to not get politics on HN for a week. It will not be the cause of a global meltdown in society.
I'm also pretty confident that if some ground breaking news broke about Donald Trump wanting to launch a nuclear weapon that dang would allow that, but the current noise that is happening can be removed for a week is a good experiment.
If you want to discuss whether this experiment is a good idea for HN, that's fine, but you need to do it without fighting a specific political fight at the same time. "The new National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, endorsed the totally false rumors that led to this shooting" is the very thing we're asking you not to post this week.
3) 24 hour news may be an issue of degradation but fake news perpetuated within giant tech companies is also an issue. You cannot talk about fake news without going into the politics of it.
2. The person who shot the gun was informed by Reddit, a company that had it's genesis here. The Y Combinator is a function that makes other functions.
The Internet is not like a blank canvas. The decisions we make about a platform, about news optimization, and about community structure affect our public discourse. If Twitter had set it's character limit at 280 characters, that would have had a profound effect on the marketplace of ideas in the public sphere.
3. The issue is that the particular forms of communication which enabled these thought-bubbles to exist were created by a handful of decisions by software developers.
4. HN is where I get my news about technology. Technology is a crucial area of political discussion, and right now the very basic freedoms of the internet are under direct threat from political forces.
Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?
It is an experiment. That's a good thing. Let's talk about solving Fake News in a week. If they try to ban politics on HN in a week I'll get up in arms with you.
3) perpetuated by the users of software distributed by giant tech companies
To finish up: It is an experiment.
These issues can't be discussed in a vacuum. This is the person who is openly promoting a Muslim registry, and intends to use the technology we have built to do it. There is no ground to be apolitical in that context, particularly when you have just seen first hand evidence of the violence it portends.
I submit that, if people were firing assault rifles into pizza places in your neighborhood because of "politics," you might feel differently.
The controls on the usage of national security programs, as we know, are today largely governed by the discretion of the people in charge, much like your discretion governs comments here.
It's fine if you don't consider that acceptable discourse anymore. It's your sandbox. But if that's the case, I'm taking taking my toys and going home. I know what censorship looks like when I see it.
Worst of all dang, I though I could trust you guys to be better than this...
Even setting aside how this effectively encourages the status quo: you are functionally telling women and minorities not to relate their own experiences for fear of being branded as "political" and getting flagged for it. That's bad. That's real bad. When somebody like 'tptacek says he's on-board with this because he thinks that 97.99% of politics on HN are alt-right trolling...maybe there's a problem here that isn't "politics".
I generally regard the proprietorship here with good faith even when I disagree 'cause you have always been fair and straight with concerns I've thrown your way, but this is an unmistakably dark message you're sending to your community--a message that works very much to the favor of the white supremacists who are actively pissing in your pool around here.
2) The person was informed by the hive mind of a subreddit that reddit allows. I mean look at what happened when the Steve went and edited user data on Reddit. We talk about not wanting censorship, but then we blame technologies that don't sensor for having toxic communities. How do you find out if the community or the individual is to blame? Would you perform an Experiment?
3) Software has perpetuated the thought bubble issue, this is one thing I can think of being introduced to society purely by software so I agree on this point.
4) Which is why I think after the experiment we should go back to politics on HN.
> Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?
I get my political news from other sources, I'd suggest anyone reading this does too.
But...
The media and technology revolution that we are both living through and shaping with the technologies that we deploy should be something that we actively discuss and wrestle with. I've recently been reading more history of the impact of the printing press (scientific revolution, monarchy => democracy, reformation, and a lot of war).
"This is not a new issue and it is not something that the people who read this site are responsible for."
I could not disagree more strongly. The web is quite new, and we don't understand its impact on society. Certainly the people on this site are not entirely responsible for it, but I think that we should feel some responsibility for it. I certainly do.
I am afraid that potential benefits of this policy are easier to measure (I.e. less flame wars) and the bad parts are not (less deep and critical discussion), we will lead to the conclusion that it is better to keep such a policy in place without a good sense of what we are losing in the process.