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Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

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

This community already has its head in the sand. Political topics are flagged to oblivion, and even those that aren't inevitably inspire so much discussion that the flamewar detector goes off and nukes the thread.

Imagine: in an era where we rail against filter bubbles, a website punishes threads that are too active!

The Devil's Advocate says "Hey now, there's certainly a time and place for political discussion, but HN is a tech forum, not a political forum." Good point, but HN is also a Third Place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), and being a Third Place means promoting Civic Engagement. I agree that HN should strive to stay on topic, but there is plenty of overlap between tech and politics and I think that space deserves to be explored by the community.

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I already get TONS of political crap thrown at me on facebook and reddit, why would I want my last bastion of pure, unadulterated technology news also tainted by the very thing I'm trying to avoid? I want to come here to discuss code and technology, not to argue about Trump or Clinton.

I think this is where good judgement comes into play. If there's an argument about Trump or Clinton, clearly it's off topic. If there's an argument about how a technology will be impacted by some element of the current political landscape, that seems reasonable.

Others have stated this elsewhere in the thread, but it's often impossible to avoid politics altogether. I'm completely with you about posts that are purely political in nature.

I guess I just interpreted "politics" to mean left vs. right bickering, not the nuanced ethics of self-driving cars or whatever. The left vs. right never-ending debates are what I want to avoid.

If an article clearly has a pro-left/right spin, I don't want to read it.

This leaves you in a place where it's very easy to fall prey to a really crafty spin and turn that into the norm against which you compare everything else. And suddenly you're seeing things that, hey, that's not spin. And bit by bit, you drift one way or another.

The world is political and everybody's trying to sell you something. You can't opt out of it. Sorry.

So, where would a story about the code in voting machines sit? Anathema?

I agree that HN does not need walls of bickering partisan flames, but outlawing discussions of politics and ethics is not the way to go in my mind.

I don't see any reason a story about voting machines couldn't be strictly technical. What politics would you even want to discuss?

That entirely depends on the requirement priority for the user experience being based on agnostic fact, not opinion.

But as we know, some parties prefer more stringer voter identification at the expense of supression, and vice versa.

You can have a discussion about how to implement voter ID without deciding whether it's a good idea overall, or whether it violates the VRA.

In fact, most voting machines don't check ID at all; they leave that to the humans. (If they did check ID, the machines could secretly match votes to names.)

Whether or not they have it now is irrelevant (it's an example) - any proposed technology would inevitably see this requirement, and others, being identified based on opinion, not fact.

Voter ID is not necessarily a bad thing and doesn't necessarily lead to suppression you just also need balances like making it mandatory for citizens over 18 to be enrolled to vote - that's what we do in Australia and it solves a whole bunch of issues.

You don't get problems with large swaths of demographic groups being disenfranchised/turned away from the polls, because everyone is on the electoral roll.

And oh look, this is how a technical discussion about voting machines will drift in to non-technical political discussion. Viva la detox week I say.

Well, for instance, one might want to discuss whether it would be right that an unaudited private entity would have access to voter data - or is that on the taboo side of the line?

Unless some actual, new technical evidence turns up - and there doesn't seem to be much sign of it so far - voting machines are a pure political football right now. There just isn't that much new discussion to be had outside of speculation and partisan bickering. It was certainly interesting watching them go from unhackable to insecure in the mainstream political discourse despite the actual evidence not changing, though.

I'm happy to see particularly interesting pieces that deal with politics here, but I've seen far too much "breaking" political news here for my tastes. I'd much prefer if HN's politics were more deep and analytical, rather than following the same reality show that I can watch on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.

I've had a hard time finding a good place to have substantive political discussion outside HN. Anyone have suggestions?

The best I've found is reddit.com/r/neutralpolitics. It's strictly moderated, with minimum comment lengths and required source links when making factual claims.

I too have not found a good place to have any type of political discussion. Even on HN it's better but still almost impossible especially if you have any type of opinion or have done anything in the past that doesn't align with what the majority of opinions are on this site.

Politics seem to work like religion in the brain. I'm not sure it's possible to have a good discussion.

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