Comment by inimino
9 years ago
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.
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.
That's only the case because the guidelines and moderation practices are set up to keep political flamewars off the site. Those benefits would evaporate very quickly if HN was allowed to become a political free-for-all.
The perspective that politics shouldn't be discussed because it is difficult is the rationalization.
The difficulty of political discussion isn't the rationalisation; the rationalisation is the predictability and mundaneness, and pointless incivility; i.e., people get emotionally heated, but resolve nothing and nobody learns anything. Nobody benefits and the quality of the site only degrades.
Topics related to politics are discussed here quite successfully all the time, and when it happens it's because the topic and resulting discussion is gratifying to one's curiosity and/or evidence of some interesting new phenomenon , as per the site guidelines.
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.
Few people are intelligent and socially-aware enough to be a high achievers in their business or career and yet naïve enough to think that their work is apolitical. And plenty of prominent HN contributors are perfectly capable of expressing strong political positions in their tweets and blog posts but keeping them out of their comments on HN.
> That's only the case because the guidelines and moderation practices are set up to keep political flamewars off the site.
I agree. But it's not the political topics that are the problem, it's the incivility.
Keeping incivility out of political discussions is more difficult than keeping politics out of technical discussions.
However, there are discussions that we should be having, around professional ethics, data privacy, censorship, advertising, etc, that are inseparably both political and technical.
I do think plenty of people are high achievers as engineers but want to regard their work as apolitical.
While we should not tolerate incivility, we should also be willing to face political issues and differences with consideration and respect. If the people on HN can't do that, who can?
>However, there are discussions that we should be having, around professional ethics, data privacy, censorship, advertising, etc,
Those tech topics intertwined with politics wasn't what I was talking about. (That is why I used the more purely political example of "Trump denies climate change" instead of a tech story like "Facebook attacks data privacy.")
And that example is the same theme dang was explaining in a previous comment[1]:
2016-12-06 -- "We can clarify, though. The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents. Those stories aren't going to be evicted from HN or anything like that."
dang's examples are very different from your political topics such as "professional ethics, data privacy, censorship, advertising". You'll notice that your examples are the type of topics that virtually all of HN readers will pile on the comments in violent agreement. Those topics don't create incivility. In fact, (modulo a few contrarians) they tend to foster a lovefest instead of flamewars!
Unfortunately, dang buried the "politics" clarification deep in that thread instead of spelling it out at the very top of the detox announcement so a lot of people got confused into thinking that political topics like "data privacy" and "software patents" was being censored.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614
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