Maybe just add a special topic flag "politics" and let everyone have a convenient switch in the profile settings whether they want to see those topics in the feed or not?
I would rather not be trapped in an echo chamber, even if it is one of my own making (especially if it is one of my own making).
Note, "dead" comments are usually dead for reasons that have nothing to do with the same controversies. Turning off "dead" comments is, at least to me, a very different thing than turning off political submissions.
This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue.
I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about business. It's all of that.
This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics, we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for their use"
And here we are in a security and surveillance state that we've created. We're refusing to even talk about Google's desired monoculture because we're unable to maintain civil discourse.
I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer working towards the betterment of mankind.
Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.
This happens all the time. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further some political goal they do not agree with.
But when I look at huge messed up things in society, and I know there are people on HN who had a big role in making them that way?
At some point you gotta cut the crap. Not taking a stand is taking a stand. Nobody gets a free ride. There's no special "get out of difficult conversations for free" card that we tech folks get that others don't have.
I do not think HN needs to be reddit. But yes, I do think a second room for the intersection of tech and politics (and only that topic) is way overdue. We are better than this.
We could be, but we're not. This is what we are right now, a bunch of people that can't even have a rational discussion on a subject such as this.
And this it what we got? Tweeting and liking posts? This is the scary tech that's destroyed mainstream media and now threatens to lay waste to civil discourse in general? Typing little comments into boxes? Really?
Nobody can say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.
To call upon the topic of "safe spaces", I think HN ought to be a safe space for people involved in technology to simply... be... without having to constantly add disclaimers to their comments referencing their employer, or watching out for attacks due to their involvement in something that's suddenly politically volatile.
There are many different forums in the world, and the only way they stay different is by drawing a line as to what topics and discussion patterns they won't except.
The line drawn on HN is hardly a "hard line". Political topics are acceptable, but only one at a time and only if participants remain somewhat aloof.
In conclusion, I think HN is nice simply because it has only one room. Adding other rooms isn't something I'd like to consider, whilst the existence of other multi-room sites exist with the same population.
I am on Reddit, but I use pseudonyms there ... merely because I am afraid.
That doesn't parse, but even if it did I disagree with it, i don't think that those other sites exist with the same population.
It might be okay to turn away if that "new impact" is something like faster pizza delivery. It's another thing entirely when we're instrumenting every action that every cell phone user does and then selling the data off to the highest bidder.
There might be plenty of other places for this discussion. There are no other places with these people who are responsible for doing these things.
And this is exactly what the social media companies want: everybody to find some other place besides their forum to talk about difficult things, because difficult conversations turn away eyeballs.
It's us. The founders, inventors, and senior executives and engineers at these companies that are most in need of these discussions. And we not only have created a world where these things don't happen, we revel in the fact that we've separated all these concerns into different compartments
It is a vile and corrupt system. I refuse to believe that people who give some time to think about it would continue supporting it the way it is.
For instance, you said "I would want a teensy bit more nuance before we decide to stake people out as corrupt."
But I never said that. I said it was a vile and corrupt system. I also explicitly said that I had faith in people. I believe if they consider these systems (that I believe they created in good faith) they would realize that they are hurting mankind, not helping it.
I also believe there is a difference between "wanting to be right" and "wanting to have a difficult conversation" I have no desire to be right. Like everybody else, I believe I am in the right. But one person or group of people wanting to be proven right is not what this is about.
Jacques and I probably disagree on this particular Google issue. I don't know. I am a right-leaning libertarian and, I think, Jacques leans left. But I'm okay no matter how this shakes out. The reason I'm speaking out is that there is a innate conflict between efficiency, usefulness, and attractiveness of the public square and tolerance of dissent.
Mankind solved this problem and it gave us all of the technological miracles we see today. But now the concept of "public square" is primarily being owned by multinational corporations or governments with no knowledge or desire to hear or apply those lessons from our past. They just want a more attractive and useful public square, not one that encourages and tolerates difficult conversations.
The irony here is that this one conflict is driving what many perceive to be the greatest technological danger to the species.
The system we have created in response to this conflict made sense at the time. But it was short-sighted. By trying to compartmentalize troublesome people and conversations, oddly enough, it is contributing to a vicious cycle where the net swings wildly one way or the other. It is a vile and corrupt system. I continue to believe the people who created it are not.