Ask HN: Can we please ban Political Conversations on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we please ban Political Conversations on HN?

3 pointsalephnerd14 comments

I understand that HN has a strong free speech ethos, but Political conversations are inherently divisive in our modern world.

I've said this a couple times, but toxicity and divisive conversations are increasingly common on HN.

Inevitably, there will be a conversation on HN that is so divisive and virulent, it will have a reputational impact on YCombinator as a whole.

Please, please can we finally ban these kinds of divisive conversations and return to the collaborative tech, innovation, and business ethos that existed in this forum?

@Dang

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Yesterday you submitted the story "Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel over Several Weeks" plus the comment "This is on-topic for HN. 6 of my direct reports are SWEs and HN commentators, but have been drafted and mobilized by the Israeli army due to this crisis."

That's very much political. You can't have it both ways.

I agree.

I am part of the problem.

Hence why I am asking for commentators like me to be purged.

I posted in a fit of emotion, which goes to show why we need to prevent political conversations - plenty of rational people lose rationality when faced with divisive conversations.

Generally it's the users who do the purging and banning. If something isn't automatically filtered in the submissions bar, it usually has to be flagged by enough users to disappear.

It creates this illusion of double-standards, but it's mostly just decided by popular choice. I think a lot of people here take certain discussions on good faith, but flag articles and discussion threads that turn toxic or violate guidelines.

I see your submission yesterday is marked [dead] so other users didn't see it. That's pretty much purged.

In the last 24h I've flagged several news submissions about the war following roughly "if CNN reports it as major story the frontpage and it's a still developing story, then it's offtopic".

I hope that mandatory tags for submissions, filters based upon these and profile blocking will be eventually implemented.

I'm pretty sure that advocating censorship, as you are doing, is starting a political conversation on HN

Hmm if done respectfully, public deliberation on important social issues can be an important part of coming up with actual solutions that consider more elements of a problem rather than being totally polarised and taking only one view. Perhaps this is difficult to achieve because people’s political views are strongly tied to their identity, but I personally think being open-minded is a strength and being able to understand something from someone else’s perspective is a good skill (in my opinion)

How do you define political? Does net neutrality count? What about laws mandating backdoors in encryption?

To quote Justice Stewart on pornography - "I know it when I see it".

Snark aside, you pose a good question.

Fundamentally, the existing rules within HN are vague, and that formal definition of "political" needs to be decided by the HN moderation team, or by YCombinator themselves.

They already are: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yet I personally have been on multiple poltical threads that have existed on this forum.

Take a look at my own comment history (I sadly have been a part of the problem) for proof.

0) dang once tried to actually ban politics on HN and people rioted[0]. Unfortunately the nature of politics means few will interpret anything neutrally or even favorably - any ban on politics will be interpreted as a nefarious attack on the Red Ream by the HN establishment which clearly aligns with the Blue Team.

1) So politics aren't banned, only politics without some "new and interesting" (read: non-political and preferably tech oriented) phenomenon are banned. See this comment from dang[1].

2) Almost nobody really cares about the above, and big political stories will inevitably brute force their way past initial attempts to flag them, and will take up as much space as they can, for as long as they can, regardless of how relevant anyone finds them.

Whether you see this as a degradation of or improvement upon HN culture is up to you. There's nothing much anyone can do about it.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

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

> Whether you see this as a degradation of or improvement upon HN culture is up to you. There's nothing much anyone can do about it.

It's going to inevitably have a reputational impact on the larger YCombinator org (speaking from personal experience).

It takes one controversional flame war to blow up this entire forum, especially given how much more divisive the world is.

So, are we allowed to have a divisive political discussion about how algorithms are creating divisive political discussions, say?

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