Hacker News Reader

Comment by Flemlord | Hacker News Reader

Create a Hacker News clone for politics.

Ah yes...the technical aspect of the problem will be easy to solve but the social aspects will be nigh impossible.

I would moderate it like pg does here. High-quality political articles only and moderators would remove inappropriate content. Partisanship may come into play, but only in the article rankings via votes.

You would need a large number of like-minded moderators to manually remove off-topic articles and idiotic comments.

It's hard enough for HN to keep a high level of discourse. A community based around politics will attract partisans and weigh heavily against people's identities. Eventually one group or another will reach enough critical mass to bring the site to one political center or another, and it will be socially impossible to stray too far from that center. Most forums get around this centering problem by explicitly declaring a center. HN does this implicitly by centering around pg's views--a programming social news site founded by Jeff Atwood would have a much different bent.

Likewise, political forums either implicitly or explicitly center around left-wing, right-wing, libertarian, feminist, socialist, or some other default viewpoint where there may be a core community of e.g. leftists, and right-wing commenters who show up to the fight are something of a different social group than the core of people who agree with the site's ideological bent. (Huffington Post comes to mind).

It's a hard and interesting problem though, so if something comes of this discussion I'd be glad to help.

Well not necessarily, though it will be hard.

What you basically need is an incredibly thick skin (you will be attacked from both sides of the political spectrum) and remove trolls/bad debaters with an iron fist.

You would need a lot more hands-on moderation than other communities, since it would be harder to build a self-governing community like HN that largely knows who to mod up and who to mod down.

In principle, but you could do things like making an upvote within a clique mean a lot less than an upvote to somebody you haven't agreed with in the past; give additional weight to people who often vote outside their own cliques (so as to reward those who have a more balanced view); letting stories initial weight depend on the previous balancedness of the source, optionally make it gain points fast if it gets upvotes from those who wouldn't normally upvote stories from that source. There are endless improvements that could be made. As a side effect you are likely to get more interesting discussions precisely because you go for the more "unusual" stories.

Very much so. Maintaining neutrality is incredibly tricky when you run a political community. You want to ban people who wave nazi flags, but then people ask you to ban the guys with the hammer & sicle flags. It's pandora's box, the horror.

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