Comment by Sparkle-san
7 days ago
> I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
I don't think that's an accurate framing of the situation. It's a single post that enough people decided was worthy of being upvoted to the front page. I think allowing the community to decide is far more inline with the spirit of hacker news than the outright banning a category of posts.
Without taking one side or the other I just want to point out that a large part of the utility of guidelines or rules is that communities left to their own devices typically develop toxic patterns that are detrimental on the whole. They enable the community to decide not to leave something up to the community in the future.
It's a large part of the idea behind countries having constitutions for example.
Agreed. In the ideal, I would love for politics and many things to be part of HN, because I yearn for the thoughtful, objective, "hacker" analysis on all topics. But in practice I've seen that generally speaking HN isn't capable of this. And realistically it's not fair to expect that as it isn't really consistent with human nature (despite my wish that it was). Someday though I hope to find the "hacker news for {politics, news}" but I realize it may just not be possible.