Ask HN: What is the 'hacker news' for politics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the 'hacker news' for politics?

11 pointsrubyrescue11 comments

I was reading a series of nonsensical, ranting comments on blogs like politico, sites like NYT, and WSJ, guardian, etc... and it just struck me - why is there no "hacker news" for politics - good debate, differing opinions, a general attitude of respect for differences. I'm most interested in US and UK politics but as I live in South America would appreciate a site that covers other countries. And if it doesn't exist, is it a startup idea worth building?

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There's a couple key issues with it: current comment voting techniques don't do a good job of differentiating validity from user sentiment (how many times have you had someone need to rebuke the community for using the arrows to denote disagreement?)

Secondly, you will always to deal with trolls. If you have mechanisms in place to make people spend less time responding to trolls, you'll retain the sanity of the sane users and diminish incentives from trolls.

Thirdly, you have to rethink the way stories are voted on.

Thankfully, we're building that. If you sign up on forrus.org, I'll let you know when we roll these features out which should be in a month. We're actively just inviting people who are enthusiastic about these ideas because we want to grow the community slowly but with lots of quality.

Political discussions tend to derail into ideological rants far more often than technical matters. They also tend to turn into echo chambers, attracting like-minded individuals who circle-jerk their own opinions.

That said, I'm a fan of Debate and Discussion subforum of SomethingAwful, which is remarkably intelligent and reasonable (although admittedly slanting heavily towards liberals and libertarians).

That's where the comment voting would help, but I guess it's still not a perfect system. I really just want a place where I can have political discussions/debates with people who form their opinions based on facts instead of being strictly democrat/republican because that's the way their parents brought them up.

It doesn't make sense for the same reasons that a 'Hacker news' for religion doesn't. People attracted in such topics are usually too invested emotionally in their personal beliefs to entertain the idea they might be wrong.

This is why any successful political community needs to be largely made up of people with the same beliefs, just like almost everyone at Hacker News believes the same thing about startups and are too emotionally invested to change their beliefs.

My brother and I had this exact idea and started to build it, but we've both been too busy with our normal jobs to be able to do anything with it. We even have a pretty decent domain name (I think).

Many of the comments on online Economist articles are excellent.

createdebate.com is the closest thing I've seen. But it isn't that good. I think a good political debate site is definitely worth building.

reddit.com/r/politics

That is not a good site for politics, unless you like the echo chamber. r/politics is dominated by one group, another group has their own subreddit etc.

The problem with /r/politics is that it's thoroughly dominated by left wing / socialist types. If you show up there and try to have a reasoned debate that promotes a libertarian ideal, for example, you get shouted down and/or down-voted into oblivion. By and large, the members there only want to talk to people who already share their own beliefs, they're not really interested in being challenged, in debate, or in rational discourse.

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