Ask HN: What did you learn from the “no politics” experiment?

7 points·jdp23··7 comments

Elsewhere [1], dang discussed what the moderators learned from the no-politics experiment. The main thing: "a change like that won't solve HN's civility problem". He shared several other good learnings as well, in his original comment and the replies.

I'm curious, what did others learn from this experiment?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131585

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My take was it was too broad.

Several things got taken out for "political" that frankly shouldn't have been.

The post of YC’s Winter Reading List, as the list contained some political volumes, was the most silly to my mind. Book lists usually spin up excellent recommendations in the comments and are especially topical this time of year. Yet it got flagged off the front page and discussion died.

An international story completely unrelated to US or EU politics, Trump or Brexit etc.

Thanks, I had missed the discussion of the reading list!

I learned some people get really bent out of shape if you tell them they can't talk about politics for a week. I noticed heaps of people complaining. As far as content goes, I didn't notice a difference.

Disagreeing is not always equivalent to "complaining" or getting "bent out of shape." Plenty of people disagreed and said so.

I didn't even know it ended. I read the initial post but since then forgot about it and HN seemed like usual business.

'wingerlang, I quoted you in https://medium.com/a-change-is-coming/learning-from-hacker-n...

I have a feeling that this post will turn political discussing what we learned from the no-politics experiment.

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