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
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.
To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above.
If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work.
To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation.
[0] https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ (specifically https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5... PDF)
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162188187...
> This sounds like a cop out and I question whether this post would have been made had Trump lost and Clinton won.
Per comments from dang it looks like the reason is “it didn’t work”. Still funny how it turned out to be true.
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
He's gonna tear down the metaphorical wall right quick.
The goal of staying politically informed is not so that you will necessarily take direct action. It is so that you will be able to take direct action if it becomes necessary for you to do so.
As many others have pointed out in the thread, it is quite selfish for you to do what you did. Millions of folks do not have the food security, income security, or essential freedoms and rights which are secured to you. However, selfishness is not inherently bad. What is bad is the myopia and the willingness to be ignorant which comes with it.
At the end of "Game of Thrones", nothing of interest happened. We all just turned off the TV and went on with life. However, politics is not just on TV. Your username suggests that you live somewhere in California; I live in Portland. Not all of us have your luxury.
If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.
In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].
[1] I'm not saying it's very good at this. But it's all relative, and what matters is outrunning the bear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725436.
What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.
There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].
It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm using the Userscripts Extension in Safari for reference. But the code should work in any browser. https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme
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.
That's not accurate. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to everybody. The only prerequisite is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Intellectual curiosity exists everywhere, HN's userbase is 50% outside the US, and at least 90% outside of Silicon Valley. That's important for people to understand.
Meanwhile, I've tried to see if this bit of info can be added to the HN repo maintained by Max Wolf.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-i...
There are a few other places you can do this, like the slate star codex culture war comment spinoffs: r/theMotte and https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php
Due to rightwingers often feeling unwelcome elsewhere a lot go to those places, meaning both communities think they need more leftists to balance things out.
In another comment, you said that HN isn't siloed[1]. I think otherwise, there's definitely a certain vibe of groupthink going on, which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day, but mostly has strong common undercurrents of what are acceptable lines of thoughts and what are not in the greater HN community. And then within a given timezone, there are thought-cliques that share common counter-positions.
I would say, HN is siloed, it just has a few silos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%9...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Juice_Media#Honest_Governm...
> But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
Many of us certainly can, however, America is often whalloped over the head for not being like other countries. In some threads this is made out peacefully, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766884
In others, America is widdled down to very reductionist arguments that Americans already debate endlessly. Things like, "This is a very uniquely American point of view" as if to eschew our problems like they don't still deserve debate because we should be just like everyone else. An example is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486350 Of course, this can be pretty frustrating because America isn't all the same, though I know it can be easy to perceive it that way. States in America are more like countries in the EU with respect to their homogeneity, or lack thereof. In some ways we have some overtones that are the same, but we're all different. As dang pointed out, HN represents a lot of people from outside Silicon Valley too.
You seem to allude to this here:
> Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
and I agree. Maybe this is people learning they actually are part of a more global community and how to respect one another while also fostering thoughtful, curious debate. I can tell you that I often wake up in the morning to read my threads from the night prior because I want to know what the global community, outside of America, has had to say. As I'm doing right now in fact. That's to say, hearing your voice matters at least to me.
I'll try to pay attention to what gets downvoted, and if that's happening you'll get my upvote.
Sort of. AFAIK HN get money from this https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs and this https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/.
Allow me to introduce a few samples who disagree with your nuanced analysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol...
The funny thing I have found is that there truly is 'nothing new under the Sun.' For instance, read through some of Frédéric Bastiat's stuff from the 1850s: http://bastiat.org/
It could have been written this year.
Another goal of mine has been, if I get tangled in some current affair, to try and dig into what first principals are being addressed (or ignored) and reflect on my core beliefs in that area (rather than arguing the more surface issue that is being currently discussed). It's certain I don't have very much correct.
And lastly, and most obvious: avoid Teh socialz except where they build up value. Like, I might engage other illustrators through instagram - where we encourage each other, but completely avoid the fomenting and political bickering etc.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
You wouldn't have noticed McCormack in charge but for him opening his mouth and spouting some retarded crap (about COVID19) and some very poorly thought out and articulated comments on BLM vs the Capital insurrection. The only person I think mostly has the right of it as far as comparing the two and the police responses was Sam Harris from his last podcast.
Also, please stop using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which politics they're battling for), because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. I had to go quite a way back in your comment history to get to a place where you weren't doing that. Fortunately I eventually found it so I'm not going to ban you right now, but can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit?
Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me.
In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.