
Ask HN: Can we get a ruling on political submissions? - daenz
There seem to be two sides to the debate here:<p>1) I come to HN to read about tech news and things interesting to hackers, not to read divisive political discourse.<p>2) Current political events absolutely should be on HN because the events concern the tech community and we have a unique position to be able to influence them.<p>Can a moderator make a ruling on what HN&#x27;s official position is going to be?  Over the past few months, I&#x27;ve seen more and more purely political posts rising up to the top spots on the front page.  Many times they are flagged off the front page, but the fact that they are rising so quickly implies that many people want them there.
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Mz
The moderating staff tried a one week ban on politics. It didn't work and
didn't last a week in part because it failed so spectacularly. One result:
Almost every single submission had people threadshitting with announcements
that "This is POLITICAL" as their way to protest the ban on politics.

Flag or downvote. Read the things that interest you. Ignore the stuff that
doesn't. There is no obligation for you to read anything in particular and I
have difficulty believing that anyone can manage to even read everything that
hits the front page, plus all comments, etc.

~~~
pen2l
Politics should be allowed in my opinion.

The HN crowd has a very interesting take on politics that I cannot get
anywhere else. Seriously, the most interesting stuff I read is here, and not
anywhere else... it's comments from potatolicious, rayiner, tptacek,
yummyfajitas, anigbrowl, etc. HN is still small enough to feel like a group of
friends having interesting discussion... of course too much of anything is
overbearing, and it's not like politics is all there is... but it should be
here. I _learn_ every time I read rayiner's comment or any and all of the
contentions that take place between so and so. I don't know any other place
where I can find thoughts of such people in such a raw form. I want it to stay
this way.

~~~
angersock
It's easy enough to feel like friends having a discussion if you have
similarly leftist and statist politics to match some of the folks you
mentioned. :)

For better or worse, a lot of the other folks and viewpoints here have been
quietly squelched, mocked, punished, or outright banned by the moderators for
being inconvenient or too abrasive or counter-message. In some cases, it's
improved the signal-to-noise ratio, but it certainly hasn't increased
diversity of thought.

The big problem with letting politics on here is that it tends, especially now
with people being suuuuuper lazy about critical thinking, to just end up with
folks shouting at each other and downvoting positions they don't agree with.

Time was one could dissent in a civil fashion here and receive upvotes for it
--that time has long since passed.

~~~
grzm
You participate on lobste.rs as well, correct? How do you find discussions
there in comparison?

~~~
angersock
I (and others) have made it an explicit goal to try and maintain civility and
to focus on things that are immediately useful to tech practitioners. It's
_amazing_ the amount of shit that gets cut out when you don't normalize the
mindless upvoting of news, marketing, and politics.

The closest we've come in recent memory was a long grumping in a subthread
about ESR in a submission involving Rust vs. Go.

The basic problem is just that there are a lot of people who want to inject
politics into everything--and that's fine, and frankly even _correct_ \--but
they don't realize that by doing so they destroy the safe space for civil
technical discussion, of which there are few these days.

Some of the things that keep the discussions civil (in my estimation):

1\. Public moderation logs, none of the secret cabal stuff that goes on here.
Thus, users never have a clear ground to say "help help I'm being repressed!".
Towards that end, at least one user banned multiple times here has been a
reasonably civil member of our community--though we do try to keep him from
getting to longwinded about certain topics.

2\. People have multiple reasons to select why they're flagging something, and
downvoting something just because you disagree with it is actively
discouraged. Allowing people to get used to knee-jerk downvotes has made HN
nastier, and it's something you can't really walk back.

3\. We have a clear tag system for organizing submissions, and a general
policy of pointing out things that don't fit (and adding tags for new things).
In this way, we get to ignore the brunt of articles--news, marketing spam,
other bollocks--that would have to show up and be flagged away manually by the
userbase. In effect, it seems people submit things with a little more care and
submit things that are actually in the wheelhouse of the community.

4\. People are not afraid to point out when community norms are being broken,
and are not afraid to use the mechanisms in place (meta threads, tag
discussion threads, PMing) to fix those norms when they aren't working
correctly.

5\. Invites are handled through the existing userbase, and we are all aware
that we are somewhat responsible for who we bring in. In some small way,
everybody feels directly responsible for the community and how it evolves--and
they often put some minimum effort into vetting the people instead of just
opening the floodgates to normies and marketers (for lack of a friendlier
term).

~

I guess the other thing that helps is that, in general, we've had open
discussion about the role of politics in the site, and the general population
seems to recognize that, while some discussion is to be encouraged (and
cultivated in places like our `culture` tags), we don't want to just start
indiscriminately hosting submissions and their resulting arguments. Some, like
me, would prefer that those submissions never appear. Others would be happy to
submit politics all the time. The community though, in agggregate, is
empowered enough and--for now--wise enough to strike a balance between those
two extremes.

It's a good place, and I hope we don't fuck it up too soon.

~~~
Mz
_and it 's something you can't really walk back._

It is not something _easily_ or _readily_ walked back.

Nothing takes the past away like the future. If HN wants to walk it back, it
can be done.

~~~
grzm
Agreed (and hoped for).

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RealGeek
If there are any political activities or policies that affect tech community
or companies, does that fit in here on HN?

Example: Many employees of tech companies are affected by Trump's immigration
ban, and tech companies are recalling their employees as a result.

Example 2: Protests at Uber's office, and tensions among it's team due to
CEO's relationship with Trump.

------
byoung2
From the guidelines [1]: _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
sports, unless they 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon._

The recent news in the US might qualify as "some interesting new phenomenon"
in a sense, but there's plenty of places to read about that elsewhere.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
greenyoda
HN's official position can be found in the HN Guidelines (see link at bottom
of page):

 _" Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless
they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on
TV news, it's probably off-topic."_

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alistproducer2
I'm firmly on the "I can get political news elsewhere" side.

~~~
Retra
Where? And where do you get good political discussion?

~~~
alistproducer2
From my experience, there's almost no such thing as good political discussion
via the Internet. I browse headlines from various sources.

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tomohawk
Politics is one thing, partisanship is another. I'd prefer neither on HN, but
most especially the partisan stuff to not be posted. It seems inconsiderate at
the very least. There are plenty of other venues for that.

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bbcbasic
I vote for a democracy. Let the system of voting and flagging decide.

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flubert
There has been a moderator comment on politics:

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

~~~
waterphone
And three days later it was quietly ended with a comment that noted that it's
impossible to separate politics from many the topics we discuss here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251)

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bsvalley
PG - "make something people want". We don't want politics here...

~~~
rimantas
Who are "we"? We, his majesty king?

~~~
bsvalley
We is the first person, plural personal pronoun (nominative case) in Modern
English.

~~~
bbcbasic
You mean "We are the first person, plural personal pronoun ..."

~~~
bsvalley
nope - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We)

~~~
grzm
Who are you including in the "we"?

