Comment by jdp23
9 years ago
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...
Yes, and the key words there are "intellectually interesting" (as opposed to other kinds of interesting) and "some".
The other thing to understand is that this has always been the policy. It hasn't changed, other than the few times we've run explicitly temporary experiments, like the no-politics one or Erlang day as described elsewhere in this thread.
Right. In fact, I included your quote saying "the existing guidelines have it about right" in my essay. So I thought it was pretty entertaining that the top-rated comment here summarizes the discussion in the post announcing the experiment without paying any attention to the result of the experiment.
>without paying any attention to the result of the experiment.
The results are not relevant to my criticism of JM's specific essay:
He's misrepresenting the people who don't want politics discussion as "ostriches". The extra nuance he ignores is that many HN'rs acknowledge the pervasiveness of politics. Many also desire political discussion -- but not on HN.
He equates "avoidance of politics" == "politics not important fingers stuck in ears"
His essay does not address the issue of "avoidance of politics" == "avoidance low-quality emotional posts".
By omitting the full nuance of the opposing position, he's distorting the argument in his favor.
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