
Ask HN: Why was “Ask HN: Is discussion of wikileaks not allowed?” flagged? - 58
The thread is here. Why was it flagged?<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12840284
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dang
Ok, you guys, I've given you three detailed explanations:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845426),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845549),
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12845679).
The short version: all these posts are being flagged by users in accordance
with the site guidelines.

Now, please stop, so I don't have to answer a "why was my post about why was
my post about being flagged flagged flagged?". Politics is strychnine and meta
is crack.

------
58
I am disappointed by the lack of political discussion on Hacker News. Can't we
trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly? Technology and
governance increasingly have an extensive, nuanced relationship and HN is the
exact place where that meta-discussion needs to happen!

~~~
dang
> _Can 't we trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly?_

Unfortunately, no we can't. That's clear empirically. We can all come up with
speculations about why it is; mine is that politics is tribalism and activates
the pre-rational brain.

What's clear from years of experience is that such discussions degenerate
rapidly, that the degeneration compounds—i.e. the more it happens, the worse
it gets—and that allowing it to go unchecked would kill what's valuable about
this site. That's why the HN guidelines' definition of "off-topic" leads with
an admonition against pure politics:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

There are some political topics that can be substantively discussed here, but
that's because they're not pure politics: the drug is cut with something else.
An example from yesterday is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178).

