Comment by jasode

Another intrinsic problem with politics on HN:

A lot of the best posts on HN are narrowly specialized, so that apart from maybe asking questions, most HN commenters can't contribute much (but benefit from reading!).

But political arguments are available to every member of the site, no matter how specialized the story might be.

So we get situations like Amazon announcing Route 53, and the thread being hijacked with comments about how Amazon handled Wikileaks, or a new paper on measuring and mitigating statistical bias in machine learning algorithms hijacked with comments about political correctness.

Politics often literally prevents us from discussing technical stories, by forcing us to wade through banal political detritus to get to the comments that have anything to do with the technical issues.

Maybe the quality of the political discussion is so crappy because we don't talk about it?

My experience is that one has to express their emotional relationship to problems and be aware of it before they can actually insightfully engage with problems; if people don't, they just introduce their emotional biases into their problem solving and pretend they're not.

But wait a second, the "detox experiment" was abandoned after only two days. 'dang summarized the learnings as

"it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus because that question is itself highly political, and that HN is at its best when it can meander through all the (intellectually) interesting things, some of which inevitably have political dimensions."

More at https://medium.com/a-change-is-coming/learning-from-hacker-n...

> 4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of emotional comments instead of insightful ones.

Disagree. Because what about that phrase from extreme programming / devops: Bring the pain forward.

Maybe if there hadn't been censure, we'd be inclined to work here on better ways to have controversial, emotional conversations. See: pol.is https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5

I was personally really disappointed in premise of the detox -- though perhaps more retrospectively as time wore on and I saw this place neutered. I now go elsewhere for my fix of political ideation and creativity.

> Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN.

I grudgingly fell into this category. For a long time, I was frustrated that certain technology-related political topics were being banished from HN, but watching what is happening to other online communities I must accept that this is the best practice. I used to love Slashdot, but that community has grown completely toxic, and I blame the flame-war political discussions for its decline.

I heavily follow the Science Online community on twitter because I loved the sense of wonder I got from the articles all the PhDs were sharing. Now I open twitter, get infected with their outrage, and take it out on my political-opposites on Facebook. I've had to limit my social media exposure and unfollow a lot of people in an effort to stay out of that bad mental place.

I need a place where I can forget about politics and recharge my sense of wonder. We need to keep HN a sanctuary for rationality and promoting human-improvability.

This is just a rationalization.

Yes, much political discourse on HN tends to be lower quality.

However, trying to establish HN as a "politics-free zone" is not only impossible but deeply problematic when so many of us work on things that are politically important. (I'm trying to avoid rehashing the whole article's argument again here.)

Getting your diet of political discourse somewhere else effectively means staying in your ideological filter bubble when you talk about politics. The political discussions here are valuable precisely because we can't do that here; HN members are self-selected by interests that cross-cut political lines.

The perspective that politics shouldn't be discussed because it is difficult is the rationalization, and the underlying motivation for some is the desire to treat tech and the work we do as apolitical, because to do otherwise would have uncomfortable consequences.

I agree that the net effect of general political discussion on HN is negative.

Jacques M did not post his article to HN though - that was someone else. He put it it on his own blog, where surely he's entitled to talk about politics if he wants to.

Furthermore, in the article there's no mention of Trump anywhere. He's taking about the intersection of politics and technology, and surely there needs to be a metaspace to talk about that somewhere, even if that space is not on HN? (For example, SO has a meta.) Otherwise, if we Hackers cede that metaspace entirely then the lawyer types who run the world from Davos will just decide for us. [1]

[1] I don't agree with everything he says, but IIRC I first read that sentiment expressed by Eben Moglen, though I don't

"Trump denies climate change" is not a political story.

It's a story that takes a place of a tech politis story that could be there.

I disagree with you on 4): there are quite a few insightful interesting discussions on HN about politics I've observed and been part of. They have changed my mind and made me think about things. I find political comments on HN to be noticeably higher quality than other sites, though I'll grant political HN comments are lower quality than technical HN comments.

But the main point I'd like to bring up is this: what you're saying is true about politics in general. But there are a lot of politics which are explicitly about technology and more specifically software technology. Political decisions are being made and laws are being passed that effect our industry, livelihoods, and lives and the community as a whole is infected with this head-in-sand "I'm above politics, politics isn't truly 'geeky' so I don't deal with it, I check out when people describe their emotions or lives instead of technical runtime analysis" attitude. I've observed it online in forums, in industry, in academia, it is an unfortunate facet of the cultural place the tech community inhabits.

But if all of the technical experts eschew politics then these political decisions that seriously effect our lives and our work will still be made: but without our input. By refusing to discuss and create politically active technical communities we cede all power to people who know nothing and care even less about the important technical issues of our time.

The tech community is pretty wide ranging in its political beliefs, but when we discuss the politics of technology there is general consensus on many issues among most: NN is good, banning encryption is bad, unrestricted access to the Internet is of fundamental importance and a liberating force, it would be better to have a choice of ISP, software patents are too broad, copyright/IP law is too extreme and stifles creativity, mass surveillance is troubling (whether you think it is also necessary or not).

There are a variety of extremely political issues that are fundamental to tech:

1) Should developers have a professional organization or union with e.g. ethical standards and certifications?

2) As a fundamental moral question, how do we feel about/what should we do about the millions of workers we personally displace and leave jobless through automation?

3) How, if at all, should the Internet be regulated? Is it a utility? Antitrust?

4) Immigration and outsourcing technical jobs.

5) What should happen when law enforcement demands information that is protected by encryption? Should encryption that the FBI cannot break be allowed?

6) How should copyright and IP work with respect to software, algorithms, APIs?

7) Should developers be held accountable for writing software that leaks data? Should users have fundamental rights to their own data? Privacy?

8) Regulations on IoT devices like cars

The list can go on and on and on. While I'd agree a thread on climate change might not be particularly insightful or interesting here, it is crucial the tech community discusses the issues above regularly so that when a bill is put forth, or input is elicited, there is an actual community of experts that present a (reasonably) united front, who have discussed these things amongst themselves.

If we had banned political discussion on HN and sites like it, SOPA would probably be law right now. It was stopped because the entire tech community discussed it constantly, came to an agreement that it was bad, and took extreme collective political action against it.

I'd agree here. There's no reason to discuss politics on HN when there are numerous other places to do so.

HN is a forum about technology and the startup world, let's keep it about that.

I would add though that the HN community at large, when we do slide into politics, does have by far and away the most interesting discussions on that topic I've ever read. There's no comparison to Facebook IMHO.

If the net effect of political discourse on HN is negative, it's a pretty good sign that the community needs to grow the fuck up. If we're unable to examine our role in the world -- what is happening and how our work fits in -- anyone advertising a startup as "world-changing" is dangerous, naive, or dangerously naive.

That said, dang almost ran me out of here for daring to call out conspiracy theorists out on their BS, so perhaps things are broken by design.