
Ask HN: Is There a Hacker News for Politics? - thomasec
I know politics are one of the more polarizing things to discuss, but are there any decent communities that have a similar level of respect and discourse to HN?
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zer00eyz
The closest thing I know of is a subreddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/)

Pretty well moderated and mostly rational if left leaning (not an issue for me
but...)

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tdhz77
Reading reddit politics makes me more knowledable than those that watch Fox
News, nbc news, msnbc. I’m more well rounded and know arguments made on both
sides.

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chatmasta
You sure you’re getting arguments from both sides? In /r/politics at least,
unless you’re sorting comments by “controversial,” you are definitely not
getting both sides.

What I liked to do before the election was bounce between T_D and HRC
subreddits. Finding any unbiased source of news is a hopeless quest. The next
best solution is to read bias on both sides and use it to triangulate the
truth so you can develop your own point of view.

I actually think bias is very useful. As long as you consider all bias
equally, it provides a mechanism for separating facts from narrative.

~~~
zer00eyz
> The next best solution is to read bias on both sides and use it to
> triangulate the truth

You might be able to make a conclusion comparing two rational arguments.

You can't compare a rational, or factual argument to a lie and make any sort
of progress. Unless your clear headed that one is a lie... Welcome to the
reality of post truth America.

~~~
chatmasta
I agree that America has a massive cultural + media problem right now, but I'm
skeptical that the problem is literal "lies," i.e. factually incorrect
statements presented as facts. The real issue is in embellishments,
misrepresentations, and generally mixing of fact and opinion.

The actual facts, i.e. _verifiably accurate descriptions of events_ , would
probably average less than 100 words per article. And yet every article is
800+ words. What are the other 700 words about? That, IMO, is the real issue
with the content of media these days (ignoring the larger problem with the
distribution of it, i.e. social media).

The other issue is lack of ability for the average reader to verify facts
presented in the article. There is so much information on every topic, but we
cannot be experts in every topic. So by nature, we must trust others to be
experts and accurately interpret the facts. Not only does this inhibit us from
verifying facts, it also makes it impossible to provably judge which facts are
true, but embellished.

Before a false claim exists, there is a vacuum. It takes no energy to create
false claim X. Anyone can post an article claiming X, with no real need to
cite any authority. But for someone to then disprove X, it does require
energy. They need to read the article, find motivation to disprove it, and
finally write and publish a counter-article disproving the claim of X.

There will inevitably be a delay between the article claiming X and any
article refuting it. Since there is a constant influx of new articles, there
is a constant subset of articles that are provably false but have not been
refuted. This comprises a certain percentage of news, which commands a
percentage of daily eyeball time. In recent years, both these percentages have
become way too high.

Interestingly, this seems like the same pattern of cat-and-mouse games that we
see repeatedly in infosec. Perhaps there's something to be said for that
analogy. False articles are like bugs in the global information system.

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TheAsprngHacker
Others have mentioned several subreddits; I would like to recommend
r/NeutralPolitics. I occasionally browse it and I'm blown away by the quality
of the discussion compared to the discussions at other popular political
subreddits, e.g. r/politics. Neutralpolitics's success is probably due to its
rules and moderation, which help promote constructive discussion, and its
lesser traffic compared to other political subreddits, meaning that it doesn't
suffer from the unconstructive comments that result from the popular audience.

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krapp
Yes. Unfortunately, it's Hacker News.

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ElectricalPast
[https://www.fark.com/politics/](https://www.fark.com/politics/)

Also good

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6_45
The best resource for dispassionate, objective and accurate information
regarding international politics that I know of is actually a YouTube channel
called Caspian Report. I have literally never found another place, in the
physical world or the digital world, where people are dedicated to being
objective about political or human issues. Hackernews is very bad in this
respect and it has gotten really bad recently. I've been on this website for
years and years so it's not the illusion mentioned by the moderators -- I'm
pretty sure that there has been a large influx of people who used to be on
Reddit exclusively. Refugees who were driven out by reddits own disasterous
decline in quality. This website can in fact be found when Google searching
"Reddit alternatives." This is extremely sad because if hackernews dries up
then I have no idea where to go.

