I'm personally as engaged in reading and debating politics as I ever have been, but elsewhere. As dang put it: "Political conflicts cause harm here."
>Respectfully, can we maintain the ban on political articles on Istambul Hacker News?
Sure, we can close our ears, and also we can argue that here we only discuss tech all the time. But as long as the world we live in influences tech, and all of us, there should be a political discussion here.
HN comments are one of the sharpest for online forums, and it is a shame that we are not allowed to a medium to read what the tech community feels about the current issues
An alternative would be to use the same software, same group of passionate people to start the discussion, and the backing of Y Combinator in a different forum with a different identity, norms, etc.
I'm also happy to be wrong / downvoted. It's for the community to decide, but it has to be a choice.
What I don't like at all is people abusing flagging. You can flag any new article with ~4 votes, so less than a handful of active users can shape what we end up discussing.
This is not the time for discussion, because in our minds the battle lines are drawn.
I wish HN enforces a month of political moratorium. I will live and die on HN and will not make a single low info comment!
Yes, and discussion can make those battle lines disappear by finding common ground if possible and if not possible it will at least help assess how far the damage from all this bs can spread.
Sticking your head in the ground is not going to make the problem go away, in fact might make it fractionally worse.
On another note, in the US the choice has been made, but there are other places in the world where it is not too late and discussing this might throw up an argument or two that could be used to deflect disaster elsewhere.
> I wish HN enforces a month of political moratorium.
Because it's too much trouble to not click on links about subjects you wish were not discussed?
>Because it's too much trouble to not click on links about subjects you wish were not discussed?
The weakness is thoroughly mine.
Eh? I read new in plenty of other places. This is supposed to be news kept to tech topics.
'dang summarized the results of the detox week and has made some recent comments on it as well. I'll dig around for them and update this comment with links to them in a bit to provide more context.
Edit: Here are some, with some identifiable snippets only so it's not a list of links. I encourage you to read the comments themselves. They don't all directly address this, but I think they all shed some light on the topic.
---
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.
---
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433
There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now.
---
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.
---
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480
On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.
For all this community has generated inspired commentary on the technology world, I maintain that we don't have the framework to manage net-positive political debate. My point is we should choose to address that deficiency or choose to avoid political debate.
We'll see where flagging and voting take us - maybe it's enough. So far I would summarize the karmic reaction to my first comment as: "meh."
Perhaps you can maintain a personal detox by avoiding political topics. Preventing everyone from discussing 'politics' on HN would be shortsighted because technology and startups are, and continue to be impacted by politics. Startups and immigrants have a long history.
My understanding of current events would be significantly worsened if I didn't regularly get the thoughtful perspective of dragonwriter, tptacek, bluejekyll, throwaway8383495, and so many others.
I can appreciate that one of the attractions of using HN for this kind of topic is because the normal clientele are not overly political. A more reasoned discussion is possible. I'm old enough to remember a time when this was also true of Slashdot. I couldn't even imagine seeing the kind of discussion going on there today. Beware.
Are you serious? Have you been to /r/worldnews?
I get more insight here than any reddit sub.
That said, I'm trying to keep the politics out of my own posts and comments...
you must run in some small circles. There are lots of communities out there.
Like or not, it is quite difficult to disentangle politics from everything else. A desire to remain apolitical is pretty political in itself.