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Comment by KineticLensman | Hacker News Reader

> I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.

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!

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> 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.

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.

Not all of us view political topics as nausea inducing.

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?

It's in HN's DNA to have a single community. The path you're talking about leads to subreddits, which would make for a siloed kind of site, i.e. one that is broken into silos rather than being in the same world. This is an important point, because it touches on the what-HN-is-and-isn't thing.

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.

Can you carve out an exception for economic / startup relevant legislation please? As a UK based startup, I would really value HN support navigating Brexit and VATMOSS changes.

If one comes up this week, sure. Otherwise I doubt you need to worry.

(It's interesting how the "this is just for a week" thing hasn't seemed to enter the conversation.)

Of course, News doesn't stop rolling in, and people love their hacker news :) I know I'm personally guilty of being really sensitive and reactive to anything that looks like censorship right now.

I think one of the reasons the time limit hasn't come up much in discussion is that it's hard to envision the data/information/knowledge that we might have in a week that we don't have today. I don't mean to imply one way or the other whether this experiment will have meaningful results, just that it's hard for me to picture myself, in a week, reviewing the situation and saying "wow, now I know X, Y, Z." I mean I'm not sure what those X, Y, and Z might be.

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.

I see what you mean, but we've already learned a lot just today.

That's a creative analogy though.

> It's interesting how the "this is just for a week" thing hasn't seemed to enter the conversation.

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.

You've explained that very well.

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.

> there's no longer term plan to ban politics

That was definitely not clear to me from the post (although it is reassuring).

I did mean my original post to be a bit more reassuring about that than it came out as. But maybe that was for the best, because the reaction it provoked has been instructive.

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.

(It's interesting how the "this is just for a week" thing hasn't seemed to enter the conversation.)

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.

> so I wonder why politics-averse individuals cant just avoid political threads

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.

At least allow us to opt out of the artificial safe space.

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.

Technology and politics go hand in hand

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.

> Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking dowen the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..

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.

OpenAI is one of the tools that might be used to replace whole swaths of people from their jobs. How can it not be political?

>How can it not be political?

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?

One can refuse to approach the inherent political nature of the topic, but not deny it exists, which was what I was responding to.

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.

If they go "hand in hand", they are inextricable in all ways that matter. Yet somehow, here is a very healthy discussion thread where it isn't brought up, at all, ever. That tells me that they are not as inextricable as people seem to think.

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?

Sorry, I edit my post, so the answer to the relitigation problem is above :)

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.

And yet the other thread somehow managed to discuss the technical nature of OpenAI without touching any of this other stuff, absent any enforcement (the political cooling-off period was started after that thread was submitted), or obvious attempts to not touch it.

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.

No, I'm saying that lack of discussion is a political position, and a community-wide ban, or even refusal to discuss it is yet another - in particular, one that silences everyone who is not okay with the social impact of the topic.

What if I am not interested, at a meta level, in discussion on the social impact of the topic? (Note: Please appreciate the distinction between topic X in general, and discussion of topic X on board Y)

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.

It's the Internet. Opting out is the easiest thing in the world to do by going to a different web site.

Then just say "we're censoring these posts because reasons kthxbye".

EDIT: Which HN is totally within its right to do.

I'm just not understanding your complaint, then. Dang gave the reasons why they're doing this at the top of the post.

> 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

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.

This is some incredibly naive thinking. To build a 'positive future' you need to focus on the problems its facing - otherwise what are you building?

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