There's no consensus about what is "political". The question "is X political or not" is just as hotly debated as the political conflicts themselves. Arguing about whether "X is political" becomes a proxy for arguing about X. Most users won't bother with a "mark story as political' button, but you know who will? All the politically passionate users. In other words a "mark as political" button would simply become a new weapon for warring sides.
Worse, once a story got marked 'political' and removed from some feed, the side that lost—i.e. that didn't want it removed—would come back to HN to complain about that, repost the story, and generally try to fight the battle on other fronts. We don't need any of this.
Even the users who wanted politics removed from their feed would be unhappy because they would eventually find out that lots of stories which they actually wanted to see, had been removed for being 'political'. Maybe they still want to read about topics like technical interviewing, or end-to-end encryption? Well, a lot of people believe strongly that those are political topics—and they have a point, since at minimum there's some political overlap there. It's not at all obvious how/where to draw this line. All you'd get by adding up a bunch of different opinions about where to draw it would be a line that satisfied no one. It would feel crazy and arbitrary, too, like an image of a face made from bits of lots of different faces.
The idea is tempting because it comes from a false assumption. It's easy to imagine that the question "is X political" would be answered in a way that approximately corresponds to your own feelings about what counts as political. In reality, it wouldn't; how people answer that question is intensely personal and, as I've explained, already intensely political. It is an egg out of which the entire political arena would eventually re-hatch. It's not a way to solve or avoid the conflicts we already experience—we'd just end up with the same fires, but burning in more places.
Ultimately, I'd say this is a variant of the principle that you can't solve human issues with technical mechanisms. It's tempting to try, because technical mechanisms are easy to add and human issue are hard to solve. But after a while the same human issues will re-express themselves, like how water erodes and works around obstacles. There's no substitute for the hard human work of relating to each other.
There's another aspect that I think is relevant here. It's part of HN's DNA that it's a non-siloed site. That is, people don't choose what/who to follow. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—which all have mechanisms by which users self-segregate into subgroups—on HN everybody sees the same feed. Whether we like it or not, we're all in one big room together. This leads to a lot of uncomfortable experiences because, much of the time, we don't like being in the same room with people we strongly disagree with. Nonetheless I think it would be a mistake to sacrifice this quality and subdivide HN into siloes. Every online community needs to deeply understand what it is and not try to be something else—trying to rewrite the DNA would likely turn HN into a poor version of some other kind of site, rather than being the best form of this that we can be.
I've written elsewhere about how important I think the non-siloed aspect of HN is, if anyone wants more:
Worse, once a story got marked 'political' and removed from some feed, the side that lost—i.e. that didn't want it removed—would come back to HN to complain about that, repost the story, and generally try to fight the battle on other fronts. We don't need any of this.
Even the users who wanted politics removed from their feed would be unhappy because they would eventually find out that lots of stories which they actually wanted to see, had been removed for being 'political'. Maybe they still want to read about topics like technical interviewing, or end-to-end encryption? Well, a lot of people believe strongly that those are political topics—and they have a point, since at minimum there's some political overlap there. It's not at all obvious how/where to draw this line. All you'd get by adding up a bunch of different opinions about where to draw it would be a line that satisfied no one. It would feel crazy and arbitrary, too, like an image of a face made from bits of lots of different faces.
The idea is tempting because it comes from a false assumption. It's easy to imagine that the question "is X political" would be answered in a way that approximately corresponds to your own feelings about what counts as political. In reality, it wouldn't; how people answer that question is intensely personal and, as I've explained, already intensely political. It is an egg out of which the entire political arena would eventually re-hatch. It's not a way to solve or avoid the conflicts we already experience—we'd just end up with the same fires, but burning in more places.
Ultimately, I'd say this is a variant of the principle that you can't solve human issues with technical mechanisms. It's tempting to try, because technical mechanisms are easy to add and human issue are hard to solve. But after a while the same human issues will re-express themselves, like how water erodes and works around obstacles. There's no substitute for the hard human work of relating to each other.
There's another aspect that I think is relevant here. It's part of HN's DNA that it's a non-siloed site. That is, people don't choose what/who to follow. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—which all have mechanisms by which users self-segregate into subgroups—on HN everybody sees the same feed. Whether we like it or not, we're all in one big room together. This leads to a lot of uncomfortable experiences because, much of the time, we don't like being in the same room with people we strongly disagree with. Nonetheless I think it would be a mistake to sacrifice this quality and subdivide HN into siloes. Every online community needs to deeply understand what it is and not try to be something else—trying to rewrite the DNA would likely turn HN into a poor version of some other kind of site, rather than being the best form of this that we can be.
I've written elsewhere about how important I think the non-siloed aspect of HN is, if anyone wants more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all...