zlacker

"..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."

- John Stuart Mill

>>jsm111+(OP)
I don't think that argument applies here because HN is not a general-purpose discussion site. It has a specific mandate which explicitly doesn't cover everything [1], and that's the most important fact about it. Plenty of things are off-topic here, and that's not "robbing the human race" any more than, say, not letting people walk their dogs in the library.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>>dang+o
Even with all the rancor around politics right now, I've seen genuine discussion of the pros and cons of free speech and other topics of "classical governance" here. Where people are genially getting their curiosity assisted and enhanced by this group.

There's not many places for that. It happens here because of yalls dedicated work and magic touch. I say you're doing the human race a service, and thank you for it.

>>jsm111+(OP)
Yes HN is the entire web, all of media and every in person discussion everywhere.

There is absolutely no other way to express your political opinion.

We have to keep shoving politics down HN readers throats for their own good.

>>dkjaud+a3
I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the political threads. I think the reason they often devolve into "discussions" of sub-par quality is that much of politics can't be explained by reason, and so is it with most of our values. We might attempt to do so, and philosophers and logicians have, but in the end that feels hollow. So then we might devolve to social pressure (i.e. resenting those who do not agree with us). When that fails, there are insults and after that violence.

It does not look like there will be any underpinning of all values and morals that a majority of us will accept or understand. So that leaves us the question: how should we disagree? I think the current way is fine, perhaps we could all strive to be less enflamed by views contrary to our own held beliefs, but do not think that the situation couldn't be way, way worse.

>>h2odra+t2
That's gratifying to the people who are curious about that topic, but it has the effect of starving other topics of oxygen. Worse, politics are divisive, and people that might genuinely enjoy spirited debates with each other on less charged topics are instead driven apart.

If you watch the moderation actions on this site, you'll see people corrected every day for using the site solely for nationalist or political or ideological flamewar. I can't think of many times anybody has ever been called out for problematical linguistics flamewar, or for using the site solely to litigate a particular way of writing SQL queries, or for using the site solely to talk about quantum mechanics.

>>dang+o
Someone else can download arc and create political_news.arc or off_Topic.arc I remember playing with news.arc a while back when I wanted to create one for auto news.

>>millzl+Yf
That's a great idea. One of these years we will open-source the up-to-date version of the HN codebase. I wonder how much of the diff would actually be useful to the general community.