Ask HN: Change Policy on Politics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Change Policy on Politics?

Hacker news is filled with political posts. These types of posts include posts on Government regulation, legal, politics, international politics, party politics, European politics, US/China relations etc. Its well within our right and within the HN policy. However I wonder if we should change that policy?

I find the community is unwelcoming to ideas other than establishment Democratic Party views, and that makes discussion particularity boring, nonconstructive, and tends toward flame war type discussion. Users that express the wrong opinion, are met with downvotes and this feels very unnecessary.

I propose either 1) ban political posts (we did this after the 2016 election for 1 week or 2) create a politics tab, whose posts are not featured, allowing users to flag posts as politics.

What do you think?

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Yesterday I read that HN is filled with business posts, today that it's filled with political posts. I can't see any of either on the front page right now.

Dang has some classic comments filled with links to countless people insisting in the strongest terms that HN is intolerably and totally far-left, far-right, and everything in between. People see it as whatever they are not.

If you don't like political stories, then hiding, flagging them is not enough, or just not reading them? I'm sure whatever the topic you could find people totally sick of that topic and wish it was banned on here. You find the discussion boring?! Don't read it! Why isn't that enough for you?

I don't find that talk of "the wrong opinion" helpful.

You find downvotes on certain comments very unnecessary?! Your proposal to ban politics seems like a vastly larger downvote/flag, on a whole subject area.

It just seems so off topic and in the US, it is dominating almost everything. I used to come to HN for a break; and now I see political flame wars here too. I'm training an AI to get rid of this and I easily see 20% of all posts are political. Way too many.

I understand Australia has a spat with China! And with China's growth I expect to read more and more on it here. What a bummer when all I want to read about is computers.

I think that everything of import to many people ends up being politics.

Rather than banning or relegating politics, I would prefer a policy that all politics must be directly and specifically related to a technical or startup topic. So, for example, a submission about a reduction in H1B visas would be allowable, but a submission about UK VAT or US income tax would not be -- even though one could argue that many HN members are affected by VAT or income tax, so is everyone else in those countries.

In the end, though, everything interesting will be of interest to some hackish minds. I think it's reasonable to argue that a serious UBI would result in a larger number of startups, but not everyone would agree that this is a suitably specific application.

This seems constructive. Thank you for this comment and idea.

I've wondered how HN would change if it added topic-identifying tags or "flair" next to headlines on the front page.

Downside: it's adds one more bit of extraneous information to process through.

Upside: It would do what all tags do: give you a way to quickly find more related articles on the same topic. (Or warn you if it's a topic you're not interested in.)

But one feature that would really make tags more powerful: adding the ability to pre-filter out tags that you know, in advance, you're not going to be interested in.

Today an AI could tag things for us. I just want a filter. I really just come here to read about computer and startup news. Not about the latest regulation or China spat with the West.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

> we did this after the 2016 election for 1 week

Then you probably also remember what clusterfuck that was...

I make use of the "hide" button when it starts to annoy me, works for me. (And of course flagging discussions that go totally of the rails, or submissions that are effectively dupes of the same thing is also always an option)

Was it? I remember it being peaceful. We purged the topic for 7 days.

That matches my recollection as well. Here's the announcement thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

And some follow-up from 'dang at the time:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480

My understanding is that HN-related metacommentary should be sent to the mods via email.

Just flag the posts you think are off-topic and then hide them.

Is this a policy? Is this in the rules?

We live in an era where tolerating the wrong political or social opinions, or even being accused of same, you can be de-platformed, with a bonus helping of banks and lawyers won't serve you for fear of repercussions, either.

I think the HN folks are bravely doing a civil service by encouraging actual discussion and tolerating the diversity of opinion they do.

Explicitly inviting more / making an editorial nod towards such tolerance is a risk they may not wish to take. Not to mention something that might be viewed as a dilution of and distraction from the stated goals of gratifying curiosity.

I often wonder if the people who "killed religion" ever considered that what they were doing was uncorking the snakes of religious intolerance thinking they could use them without getting bitten themselves. "Ban political posts" ... what's political? Studies of vaccines? Only those that show the "wrong result?"

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