It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.
It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:
As an Australian, I see most political HN discussion revolving around US interests. For the most part this is to be expected, but in the rare cases that other country's politics enter HN (particularly new laws that affect tech), there seems to be a heavy bias toward comparison to the US's laws, so much so, that I think I understand more of the US laws than I do my own! Again, this is probably to be expected with the big tech companies largely residing in SV...
But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community.
So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.
I point this out a lot [1]. The problem is the statelessness of the internet [2]. No matter how often you repeat something, the population that receives the message has measure zero.
There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].
It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.
Something I've noticed while traveling and staying abroad for long period: the content on HN tends to have a slightly different vibe depending on which continent/timezone group is awake and reading the news at a given time, especially on slow-news days.
In another comment, you said that HN isn't siloed[1]. I think otherwise, there's definitely a certain vibe of groupthink going on, which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day, but mostly has strong common undercurrents of what are acceptable lines of thoughts and what are not in the greater HN community. And then within a given timezone, there are thought-cliques that share common counter-positions.
I would say, HN is siloed, it just has a few silos.
> which changes ever so slightly depending on the time of day
This seems to be true. I noticed on my comments I get pretty consistent waves of upvotes or downvotes depending on the time of the day. My comments are usually pretty politicized and polarizing, so my guess must be that the US wave likes my content less and the European wave likes it more.
Thanks @dang, I recall seeing some of what you mention. One day you might care to write a book, but for now as others have pointed out, thanks for your delicate hand, you're a star amidst the darkness. You see everything :-)
Given the content is all ostensibly public, I'd put in a quick second for a blog post (or longer form) on "dang's informal observations from marinating in the raw stream of HN comments."
To state the obvious, I don't think anyone spends as much time on HN as the moderation team, in the sense of reading comments widely. At least... I'd hope none of us dedicate that much time. (Btw, always thanks!)
Thanks for the warning, dang. I often see Indian political flamewars here and I know what they are, but I didn't realize that online political discussions from Sweden exist on HN, and they're even more toxic than their U.S. counterparts (e.g. immigration, gender, etc). I just enabled "Show Dead" and went to your link and it instantly ruined my day, reminds me of 4chan /pol/ threads. Thanks again for keeping them under control, time to disable "Show Dead" and forgot what I just saw...
> The problem is the statelessness of the internet.
I fully understand your frustration. I always thought forums are much better since Twitter is a worse offender - you have to repeat what you've just said 10 minutes ago after a new person has joined the conversation - but for someone who moderates forums daily, I guess it's basically the same experience.
HN is more stateless than the average internet forum. HN could embrace moving the forum forward beyond threads and votes, and maybe you'd have a platform that you could moderate fairly and didn't require so much self censorship; a platform that elevated unpopular but thoughtful ideas. It seems like HN is proud of being low tech, your community management issues are solvable.
(this ended up longer than you probably want to read; thanks for your time and consideration)
I think the only "risk" of moving away from upvote/downvote (or at least publishing some type of suggestions for how they ought to be used) is that you'll start seeing more diverse opinions rise to the top of threads; and folks with majority opinions will have to engage instead of the drive-by-downvote. The positive feedback cycle of compounding diversity should be easy to imagine; and the chilling effect of downvoting as it exists today is a well documented bug in our reality.
As for the costs, even if all you could bring yourself to do is to separate downvote into "disagree" and "this is low-quality content", but scored them both just as you score downvotes today, you'd be providing better feedback to commenters as well as raising the quality of the discussion. Today the downvote (here and in so many other similar communities) is a huge contributor to the groupthink driven division-without-discussion that's poisoning our society.
To lower the cost to essentially zero, just turn off downvoting for a while and see what changes. If you're willing to experiment with cutting off entire topics, why not experiment with the structure of discussion?
I think there is even a strong case that HN's current policies are inconsistent. From the HN guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
But isn't that the essential function of the downvote? I'd much rather have someone say, "This isn't interesting to me" than just get the downvotes.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
OK ... but why is there nothing saying "consider a thoughtful, constructive critique instead of a downvote; use downvotes only for _________". What actually is the purpose of the downvote? Why is it a feature of this discussion tool? Was it included thoughtfully, or just because HN is a Reddit clone? Ironic that PG launched HN to be a "better" Reddit, but then you have in the guidelines:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
HN suffers from one critical weakness that Reddit pioneered - the downvote. I'll end the comparison there; HN isn't turning into Reddit; but it has an opportunity to pioneer this type of threaded discussion and really differentiate itself from Reddit; if you're sensitive to the comparison, eliminating or improving upon voting is how you'll free yourself from that complaint.
Fellow Australian, I even find myself wording things from the perspective that I am from the US by accident. I feel so part of the discourse thanks to technology and my line of work that I forget these aren't always my problems.
Australian politics has been pretty boring of late.
While not as polarising as a Jim Jordan or Ted Cruz, people like Christopher Pyne and Paul Keating made Australian politics mildly interesting. We seem to have two very centrist parties right now which is a welcome change.
Don't jinx it, I don't like the guy but I'm looking forward to an Australian prime minister lasting a full term in office. 2007-2016 aus politics was a blood sport, make politics boring again.
I also wish for that as a west Aussie, but I can't help but feel with the climate crisis the way it is, we're going to have more and more pressures on top officials (the bush fire saga with Morrison comes to mind, that was an embarrassment).
Just don't count of The Greens putting any such pressure on them - you might as well rename them The Australian Woke as they seem more intent on just being politically correct on everything than actually focusing on environmental issues.
As much as I dislike Morrison, he's done an alright job keeping the economy ticking over by throwing money at it as needed. Probably better him than a Labor Gov as you would have had nothing but endless politicking about them turning the country into a welfare state, etc, etc.
You wouldn't have noticed McCormack in charge but for him opening his mouth and spouting some retarded crap (about COVID19) and some very poorly thought out and articulated comments on BLM vs the Capital insurrection. The only person I think mostly has the right of it as far as comparing the two and the police responses was Sam Harris from his last podcast.
Completely agree. Also very proud of my home state Premier, Dan Andrews, for showing backbone when people needed it. Don’t agree with everything he did without qualification, but I’d vote for him again.
All in all Aus put in a solid performance with this pandemic - one of the best, I reckon, and markedly better than that of Japan, where I currently reside.
Dan did alright. My parents (lifelong Liberal voters) had nothing but praise for him and his daily stand ups. He did well to bring it back from the brink at the time and the rest of the country got a good lesson in how quickly it can take off. Dan just needs to stop doing dumb shit like sign up for Belt and Road funding.
I'm in Qld and the response/outcome so far has been better than New Zealand's (with comparable population size).
I've noticed the same thing and also react similarly.
It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.)
Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
Isn’t zoning and housing inherently specific to the location of the housing or whatever is being zoned? It seems natural to discuss it with that frame of reference implied.
Absolutely, but even within the states I suspect that a lot of things relating to zoning, taxes, etc, vary.
I hear people talk about "Proposition XXX" restricting "stuff", and I wonder if other Americans from different parts of the country would even know what that was.
We don't. All of the "Proposition XXX" stuff is from California. It's pretty annoying when people post those things without an explanation, assuming everyone knows what CA is doing.
I'm in Tasmania, and am glued to US political news at the moment.
I think some of us are acutely interested because what's happening now is historically significant and could have very interesting(?) downstream effects.
I've always been curious about this, as an American, and specifically as an American who experienced the 2016 US election results from Tokyo.
The US outputs a massive amount of media, news, and culture. But how much does it actually influence other countries, at the personal level?
I'd assume, in order of impact: (1) visa / immigration, (2) free trade deals, (3) sanctions, ?
Is there any truth to the "US sets world tone on climate change, etc"? It seems like even the smallest countries are more than happy to make their own choices (in their own best interests!) when the US isn't trying to compel a position.
I remember my student housing in Europe delaying turning on the heating 1 winter, because of high oil prices.. then I thought, "God damn George W. Bush, I'm freezing because of his Iraq fuckery".
At the moment there's a xenophobia/refugee crisis in Europe, refugees that are escaping conflicts in e.g. Syria or Afghanistan. Arguably Syria isn't the fault of USA (although ISIS grew from the chaos of the Iraqi occupation), and the xenophobia has a bit to do with austerity politics of Merkel.
And then someone started bombing Yemen and now there's another proxy regional war there..
I think most people outside the US don't actually care that much about US visa/immigration policies, and care more about US relations and influence over their own country/neighbors, and the occasional "wow this is crazy, only in the US!" observations.
Where I am (israel), the influence is tremendous. And it's a shame. US media is so good at driving attention that american narratives which are very irrelevant to Israeli narratives take over completely. The alarmist style of discussion has permeated everywhere. We could see how a very media savvy politician like netanyahu adopted all the Trump manearisms and conspiracy talk the moment Trump came in power.
It's very upsetting to watch as we parrot a failed sort of political discourse.
I'm more interested in the collective psychology of a nation that voted Trump in to the US presidency. Also the individuals that constitute it.
Definitely looking less and less like the US sets the tone for much at all, but Australia and the USA have an important military alliance and we're part of the Five Eyes.
Hah, if you ever figure out that collective psychology - please let me know. My family is something like 15 generations into being Americans in the south, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that we don't understand each other at all. In fact, I'm always amused at how commonly I encounter sentiment of "I don't understand the mindset of anyone who lives anywhere other than here or why they would live somewhere else" (with "here" being a region of approximately 15 counties in western part of North Carolina). Even my younger cousins, who have traveled a bit and lived their whole life with the internet have said the same.
I'm the odd-duck for having lived in Seattle for 5 years. But I eventually moved back of course - because if I'm being honest with myself: Even I don't understand the mindset of anyone who lives anywhere other than here or why they would live somewhere else.
As an American I like it when discussion about politics from other countries comes up. It's very easy to get trapped in a US bubble and not hear from other points of view.
As an American who has lived abroad, I honestly will never understand this attitude. I sympathize, but honestly if I went into a .com.au forum and complained because the people there were talking about Australian politics, I'd be ridiculed mercilessly. And for good reason.
It's the same as if you complained that we're all writing in English, and you'd prefer that we didn't. Porque todos los articulos y comentarios estan en ingles?!? Debemos tener mas contenido en español! Es un comunidad global, no?! La gente aqui asuma que todos los lectores son anglos? Es un barbaridad!
Oh, wait. No it isn't. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You're insinuating there is and requesting the mods act accordingly. I disagree.
Seriously, I don't speak for the mods, but I don't recall it being stated anywhere that HN "serves the global community". In fact I just double checked the FAQ. It doesn't. HN has mostly been a site meant to cater to Silicon Valley tech startups for as long as I've been using it.
Let me know when ycombinator.com.au is up and running and we'll join you there and not talk about American laws. Until then...
> HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans
That's not accurate. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to everybody. The only prerequisite is intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Intellectual curiosity exists everywhere, HN's userbase is 50% outside the US, and at least 90% outside of Silicon Valley. That's important for people to understand.
That's not a bad idea. All Max would need to do is add a link to one of the comments where I posted this data. But I should probably run the numbers again - it must be 3 years old by now, if not 4.
Nobody asks you not to talk about American laws. We outsiders love to do that. Many of us know American criminal law better than our own, just because of television shows and lack of experience with criminal law in our real lives.
And incidentally, the FAQ don't mention the United States, either.
But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
I theorize it is because America is so big and powerful and there isn't a visible friendly society with different cultural views in the neighborhood that matters. Large societies that matter are far away, and rivals at best, enemies at worst.
There is a strong sense of "the American way is obviously the best, and everybody who disagrees or has been socialized on different norms is an idiot and must be destroyed".
Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
It's a minority of posters, I'm sure, but they downvote and flag just about everything that isn't "America's way or the highway".
Nobody asks them to declare the Finnish, German or Japanese way to be better. But they simply cannot accept that other societies might be happy with other choices.
Your comment made me realize the television show I've been missing all of my life: "Law and Order: International"
In which our multi-national law enforcement and legal protagonists grapple with translating their own expectation into their crime's country's actual laws.
I can understand why that may be thought to be that way, and maybe some folks are just exactly that way.
> But what's really obvious on this site is that many Americans cannot discuss other choices.
Many of us certainly can, however, America is often whalloped over the head for not being like other countries. In some threads this is made out peacefully, like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766884
In others, America is widdled down to very reductionist arguments that Americans already debate endlessly. Things like, "This is a very uniquely American point of view" as if to eschew our problems like they don't still deserve debate because we should be just like everyone else. An example is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486350 Of course, this can be pretty frustrating because America isn't all the same, though I know it can be easy to perceive it that way. States in America are more like countries in the EU with respect to their homogeneity, or lack thereof. In some ways we have some overtones that are the same, but we're all different. As dang pointed out, HN represents a lot of people from outside Silicon Valley too.
You seem to allude to this here:
> Every "by the way, in X we don't have Y, we do Z" on this site is a recipe for confrontation.
and I agree. Maybe this is people learning they actually are part of a more global community and how to respect one another while also fostering thoughtful, curious debate. I can tell you that I often wake up in the morning to read my threads from the night prior because I want to know what the global community, outside of America, has had to say. As I'm doing right now in fact. That's to say, hearing your voice matters at least to me.
I'll try to pay attention to what gets downvoted, and if that's happening you'll get my upvote.
I don't have any ideas to offer but I did want to say thank you. Based on the phrasing I can tell this takes a toll (eg: "this destroys HN and we must ban this account") on both you and HN.
This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
Have you considered something like the mega threads reddit does on like politics? At least the crazyness is contained in one spot. Like there really didn't need to be all the articles rewording parler, Twitter, Amazon news the last week
I think those megathreads just attract repetitive and incurious debate, things you see play out over and over, especially without specific context to differentiate.
The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing.
One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
Keep doing this work. We need sound moderation. It's required to have an open forum like this on the internet. HN is literally the only place I will discuss anything online. And it should be recognized that the rules and the general willingingness of the users to follow them combined with the care taking of those rules that make HN work. Keep at it Dang. It's nice to skip politics for a while.
"..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."
I don't think that argument applies here because HN is not a general-purpose discussion site. It has a specific mandate which explicitly doesn't cover everything [1], and that's the most important fact about it. Plenty of things are off-topic here, and that's not "robbing the human race" any more than, say, not letting people walk their dogs in the library.
To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above.
If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work.
Even with all the rancor around politics right now, I've seen genuine discussion of the pros and cons of free speech and other topics of "classical governance" here. Where people are genially getting their curiosity assisted and enhanced by this group.
There's not many places for that. It happens here because of yalls dedicated work and magic touch. I say you're doing the human race a service, and thank you for it.
That's gratifying to the people who are curious about that topic, but it has the effect of starving other topics of oxygen. Worse, politics are divisive, and people that might genuinely enjoy spirited debates with each other on less charged topics are instead driven apart.
If you watch the moderation actions on this site, you'll see people corrected every day for using the site solely for nationalist or political or ideological flamewar. I can't think of many times anybody has ever been called out for problematical linguistics flamewar, or for using the site solely to litigate a particular way of writing SQL queries, or for using the site solely to talk about quantum mechanics.
Someone else can download arc and create political_news.arc or off_Topic.arc I remember playing with news.arc a while back when I wanted to create one for auto news.
That's a great idea. One of these years we will open-source the up-to-date version of the HN codebase. I wonder how much of the diff would actually be useful to the general community.
I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the political threads. I think the reason they often devolve into "discussions" of sub-par quality is that much of politics can't be explained by reason, and so is it with most of our values. We might attempt to do so, and philosophers and logicians have, but in the end that feels hollow. So then we might devolve to social pressure (i.e. resenting those who do not agree with us). When that fails, there are insults and after that violence.
It does not look like there will be any underpinning of all values and morals that a majority of us will accept or understand. So that leaves us the question: how should we disagree? I think the current way is fine, perhaps we could all strive to be less enflamed by views contrary to our own held beliefs, but do not think that the situation couldn't be way, way worse.
Do you know the Monty Python line "God would see through a cheap ploy like that?" People would see through that and rip it to shreds the same way.
Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
I'm racking my brains and Google and can't seem to pull up which Monty Python sketch or movie that one comes from. Give a hint?
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
Wasn't the "cheap ploy" tried long ago with a week of Erlang? It probably didn't work as intended then either, but I'm curious if it's just the scale of HN that has changed, or if it's something else, that makes such an experiment seem even more out of the question now.
I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.
Maybe politics keep popping up because it's a conversation that needs to happen?
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
It definitely needs to happen. From my perspective the question is whether it needs to happen here on HN. The answer is yes and no, for the reasons I linked to above.
There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.
In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].
My working theory of the eigentweet is that it's more internal than people "wanting to target this audience." I don't think it requires much if any outside influence or explicit bad faith. (I'm a moderator on a non-American political subreddit, so most of my opinions below come from my own observations and musings.)
Instead, the decay of social media happens as the platform transitions from a place where one talks with people to a place where one talks at people.
If I reply to your political thoughts by telling you off, I'm probably not trying to convince you to change your mind. Instead, I'm performing for the attention (and upvotes / retweets / kind comments) of like-minded peers.
That's obviously alienating for the person who gets attacked, but this kind of performance is also self-radicalizing. The validating reinforcement preferentially goes to the strongest attacks or defenses, favouring rhetoric (as you noted) rather than substance.
One of the few things that suppresses this cycle is exactly what HN does reasonably well: have the community be about something else, diluting political content such that there's less often a chain-reaction.
Its usually when there is a fundamental difference between ideas where no compromise can be made. For example, I think cities should ban personal car use while others think this is a horrible idea. We could go on and on repeating these same conversations but its not particularly useful or interesting.
Maybe, maybe not. If the goal of both people in that discussion is to convert the other to their point of view, then yes, often times these discussions are not worth having. But we're not having private conversations here. The views of both sides can educate others who are participating in the discussion or even merely observing it. Sometimes it is good to watch a discussion on a topic you feel passionate about play out without participating. While you still might get irritated by those with opposing views, it's easier to digest what they are writing/saying when it's not directed to you individually. This helps with understanding why they have a differing view and in some cases, might even help you see a weakness in your own position that you never realized was there.
> Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
Due to rightwingers often feeling unwelcome elsewhere a lot go to those places, meaning both communities think they need more leftists to balance things out.
Frankly, their election fraud thread - which has hundreds of comments demonstrating both extreme misunderstanding of statistics and the voting process, coupled with a willingness to make or support incredible claims without any substantive evidence or knowledge of the subject matter - says a lot about that community, in my view.
Way way back in the day there used to be a sortof rate-limiting function of sorts where if too many people showed up and tried to talk politics, we'd post lots of stories about...arc, or lisp or something?
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
Nothing is stopping anyone from posting more of the kind of content they would rather see, as opposed to complaining about the content they would rather see less of.
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
It's the same algorithm, but it only considers upvotes by users who registered before (checking the code...) December 13, 2008. That's long ago—only (checking the data...) 1.5% of HN accounts existed back then. Yet the "classic" frontpage is not that different from the main frontpage. This was the main conclusion when pg launched the feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271, and again in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513.
What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.
It's an interesting result - it only counts upvotes by users from before December 2008 who are still active on the site
After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.
That's a good point. But there are a lot of users from 2008 still active on the site. It would be interesting to see how the attrition rate has changed over time, but I've never looked into that.
My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.
as has become more and more obvious over recent years in particular, technology and politics are intrinsically linked. Most obvious was always when topics like Urbit come up on HN. People's political and social views influence the technologies they built, be it clubhouse, or bitcoin or Parler. Even if the designers themselves may not even be aware of it.
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
Of course, and we were well aware of that line of thinking. But the idea was to just try something as an experiment and see what would happen. It turns out that there is no space for experiment with this, not even for a week—there is only space for battle-to-the-death. That brought me a new level of understanding.
In another comment, you were lecturing me on community values. How do you think the above claim, applied to a wide swath of the site's users, fits with those so-called "community values"?
You're pretending to be above politics while engaging in it in a dirty, underhanded fashion.
Yes, in large part as it is a policy biased toward status quoism. Those with complaints against the status quo, reasonably or otherwise, are disadvantaged if discussion and debate are restricted.
I suspect this applies to societal taboos in general, though there may be an opposite effect -- forbidding certain types of discussion can rapidly destroy the status quo if the discussion that remains is biased in some way.
Problem is that attempts at change are important, so fights about what should change and in what direction get very very vicious. To use a non-political example: Some new starters want to switch to Rust, some lifers don't want to have to learn yet another toolset or be made redundant. The stakes are future career prospects and continued employment respectively. Imagine how much higher the stakes can be when you think your political opponents are plotting your genocide? (which is a real, if fringe, belief of some on both the American left and American right)
On the other hand, the status quo at least is known and not as bad as it could be (e.g. Bronze Age Collapse)...
Fads, or fad-generating phenomena, seem often to serve as highly-perceptible signifiers of deeper, hard-to-assess social and political patterns and groups, operating in a strongly information theoretic manner.
Everything these days seems to be politicised, but politics isn't so much the problem, it's the tribalism that it generates and why you were probably brought up to never talk about politics, sport or religion in a social setting.
I imagine the problem is no one could possibly agree on what politics is so you will have endless bikeshedding over if something classifies as politics.
Does a post on climate change count?
Does a post on city design and public transport count?
I think you’re getting downvoted because there are plenty of us interested in political science here. Recently I’ve seen discussions of why we need civilian oversight of military, invoking Clausewitz, exploring why large transportation projects cost twice as much in the US as in peer nations, and how local zoning causes our infrastructure problems.
I think you're right. I didn't mean to downplay the interests of people here wanting to have civil discussions about politics. I've too seen very civilized discussions here involving politics recently. I've also noticed an uptik in political posts. Most of the ones that have 1000+ comments have the most number of downvoted comments I've seen here on HN. Most of those comments don't seem to have a genuine curiosity about political science.
There's something I've wondered about but I haven't seen addressed in your posts (I may have missed it):
It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently?
I have the same feeling; it seems the 2020 election fight was far less intense than the 2016 one - but it might just be me being less on Reddit.
One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
My deeply unscientific opinion on the cause of the difference between the 2016 and 2020 election discussions on Reddit:
- As you said, concern about Covid diluted the vitriol in a lot of political threads
- In 2016, t_d was in ascendancy, and its members would flood other subreddits with their talking points. After that, sub moderators established stronger anti-brigading rules. In 2020, t_d was either banned or made private, I forget which.
- A lot of the highly charged flash points of 2016 were no longer that relevant in 2020: Syrian refugees, trans bathrooms, 'identity politics'
- 2016 also had 2 polarizing candidates. In 2020 only one was still looked at that way.
Sorry, even after looking at those links and rereading your edited comment, I'm not sure I follow: How did it make things worse? Was it that "nothing even remotely political" was just way too broad?
Edit: Oh, I wonder if it's a spillover effect; the amount of politics doesn't change, so having those threads on topic avoids spill over into other threads
It doesn't seem counterintuitive to me. Of course people on a discussion forum who want to talk about a thing and are suddenly told they cannot talk about that thing are going to be upset.
It turned every thread into a political battle and made every political side 10x madder at us than they already were.
given that HN isn't an analogue for the world at large, one wonders if this lesson learned on HN translates at all to what may happen elsewhere as a result of the ongoing corporate 'de-platforming' campaigns.
So many stories are political regardless but it really gets worse during election cycles when nearly every story is nothing more than a policy announcement or trial balloon being floated by one candidate or another. Usually its found after a few paragraphs and suddenly candidate X's name appears.
What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label.
on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
It's against the values of this site to laugh at and put down people who know less than you do. Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely.
If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
So you "knew all of that already," but decided "no politics for one week" during one of the most politically charged periods of our time was a good idea?
I'm sorry, I don't care enough about your community values not to laugh at that.
Besides, this idea of the value of civility in the face of much worse issues is the worst kind of enlightened centrism. You're quite right that "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege," but it's clearly a lesson you haven't learned.
> Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely.
If you could explain how you reconcile everything you quoted about politics with the ban on politics, I could perhaps help you understand. I can't really grasp what it is you don't understand.
In 2019 my New Years Resolution was to avoid all news and social media. The reason I started the ban was because I found my mind unsettled after reading the news and I had trouble coming back to a tranquil headspace.
The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus)
I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over.
At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.
I started this concept ten years ago. Dropped Facebook, no more economist subscription, no papers, never had TV. That doesn't mean holding a hard line and hiding your head in a pillow. There is enough overflow from HN, the radio, friends, occasional newspapers.
It seems I have a much healthier laid back attitude to work, friends, family. I see them all uptight about some event. Following news story breathlessly, fuming or arguing. Meanwhile, I'm trying to calm every one down, don't worry about it, it doesn't matter. Political parties change, administration doesn't. Think about long term goals, and affects you can have on that. Skip the day to day arguments.
There is so, much valuable news and information on HN, and so much valuable discussion, often from experts in their field. (More rare lately?)
You can gather your data, and solve most of your issues, from links provided in HN. So many interesting intellectual topics to pursue. For example:
Need covid numbers? Look at worldometers.com
Keep it up Dang.
Lucky for you that politics doesn’t have any direct influence on your life, but in the US having a semi-functional government during the Covid pandemic would have led to a lot fewer deaths and a lot less economic damage.
Nearly anyone is capable of voting, helping with voter turnout efforts, donating to campaigns and advocacy groups, and voicing their opinions in public or private regarding political situations and outcomes.
You can't conclude from "I don't have full control of the outcome" to "nothing I will do will matter".
For many upper-middle class technology professionals it may be true that the personal outcome is not evidently different (but you might be surprised), but for many people this is drastically not true.
That idea actually seems like a good demonstration of how corrosive politics actually is. Like, if you look at the actual evidence... France, whose current leader was hailed as the anti-Trump by the US media, is at about 1 Covid death per thousand (and they're not the worst-affected in Europe, not by a long shot), the US is at 1.2, former success story the Czech Republic is about 1.3. The evidence just doesn't seem to support the claim at all. Yet because the current President of the US is hated by the press, every right-thinking person knows otherwise.
The death rate doesn't capture the full impact of covid. As ICUs fill up, they delay treatment for patients that have non-Covid related illnesses that still require an ICU.
The criticism of the President comes from the demonstrable fact that he simply did not take it seriously, and constantly contradicted and undermined the scientific leadership in an attempt to prop up the stock markets long enough to win re-election.
Yeah no.
If you think that cherry picking facts counters the US government's waffling on basic preventative measures like mask-wearing, public contradictions of lifelong non-partisan health experts, and failing to muster sustaining economic relief then I don't have time to argue with you.
The fact that the richest country in the world has had the worst statistical response to Covid in terms of cases, deaths, and hospitalization speaks volumes.
And keeping up with politics changes that how? You have no power to change anything, no reason to enjoy the comfy seats on the train just because it is heading into a wall when you can't stop it.
These things fluctuate. Political stuff has been more intense lately, for obvious reasons—we can't expect HN to be immune from macro trends in society at large.
It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this »
I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it.
You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.
> It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you
I do not consume the news or social media and don't find this to be true. Politics do impact me.
I was arrested when I was 21, prior to joining the military, for an offense that was quite trivial. I was man-handled, hauled off to jail, and forced to wait until a friend read that I was arrested in the town paper (yes, that was pretty humiliating too) and bailed me out.
I'm a veteran, one that's been to Afghanistan with mild to average combat experience. When I got out in 2012 I watched my friends struggle, I struggled, and there were few options to get support and help. The help that was available often came with a catch 22. There was a time I spoke about these experiences more candidly under my real name and I was attacked by other veterans and even non-veterans for doing so. The statistics are grim from my point of view and that's not just speaking about suicide statistics. Things have, in some ways, gotten better. I've used my success to help fund some of my friends starting foundations that focus on jobs and mental health but progress is slow.
A number of my childhood friends were killed during the opioid epidemic, some while I was mid-service and was unable to go home to bury them.
The list goes on. When I read things like:
> You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
It always comes across as a dismissal, that I must be just living in denial or that I've somehow reached some stage in life where these things don't affect me anymore. Feel free to read through my post history, they do. When I talk to my friends that are still patching their lives together post-service I am reminded that my own journey continues on-wards and often with them. They are the only people I can readily depend on to know experiences I know the way I know them.
The problem with politics is that change is slow. Getting a whole country the size of the United States to realize why and how your group is important and worth paying attention to takes time, energy, and resources which do not appear over night. People will doubt you, even question you, and it takes a piece of you with it every time they do. These are exacerbated if you appear mad, vindictive, or frustrated in the process and it's hard not to.
News on the other hand moves at the speed of lightning. Attitudes and windows of understanding rapidly close and open and it can be difficult to watch in real time. I've told people before that history is macro-understanding, news is micro-understanding, and social media is nano-understanding. History I can do, the rest; well, it's a bit overwhelming and it has everything to do with my attachment to these subjects and the discourse in between that inevitably belittles me as a human with real experiences.
That ties right back into the original comment, though. The quantity of suffering in the world is great, and even those of us with the ability to do something about some small part of it (already a pretty small number) are severely limited in their impact.
For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs.
For me, the calculus works out like this:
1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial")
2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally)
3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on.
The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.
This is a profoundly dispiriting stance. Many individuals have made a difference in the past and will continue into the future. The primary way individuals make differences is either by changing the way people think about something, by assembling a group to strategize around their issue, or physically preventing the bad thing from happening.
> The primary way individuals make differences is either by changing the way people think about something, by assembling a group to strategize around their issue, or physically preventing the bad thing from happening.
As someone who spent time in both volunteer groups and activist groups, I can assure you that well intentioned people can easily make things worse, not better. It's why I got out of such groups.
The first method you cite: "Changing the way people think about something" is a common example of this. It's very easy (in fact, I would say it is the norm) that people's beliefs are strengthened the more they feel besieged, and that often happens by others trying to make them think about something differently (or about something they don't want to). Easily 80-90% of such interactions have this outcome, and definitely over 50% even here on HN. I noticed this earlier in life, and it was confirmed when I started studying communications and influence (almost all books will mirror what I have said).
That's not to say you can't change people's minds. You do need to have the skills to do so, and the ability not to make things worse in trying to do so.
It's great if you want to change things, and I don't aim to discourage you. It is, however, your responsibility to be able to gauge how effective you are, and know whether you are causing damage or not. Do it poorly, and you will merely make it harder for those who do have the skills.
Giving money is the safest way to help without doing harm - provided you have the ability to identify which organization to give the money to.
In that sense, I have no problem with folks who tune out. They could make things much worse by trying to help.
All of those people you mention had something where they could physically and practically do something about the problem. My comment addresses the vast majority of instances a human learns about a problem where that isn't the case.
Your sphere of concern and your sphere of influence are two different things at the end of the day. If you've decided some social problem is within your sphere of influence, then by all means, take whatever helpful action you can - just do not pretend that this encompasses all problems, or for that matter that the number of problems is not infinite.
Don't pretend you can. What would you suggest I do about North Korea's or China's human rights abuses, for instance? These are the kinds of problems I'm talking about.
That's going pretty far afield. I would recommend following the rubric I learned from Scahill and Greenwald which is pay attention to things happening domestically because you can do something about them.
I don't pretend there aren't infinite problems, or ones difficult to access, but I strongly caution against treating political problems as something that are immovable.
> They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.
And yet, every post about H1B visa rule changes will have hundreds of comments bemoaning the selling out of the American IT worker. There will also be much hand-wringing about the on-shoring of foreign jobs and anecdotes about how terrible it is working with Indian consultancy firms.
HN commenters want to vent as much as anyone else. They just do it on political posts that they feel affect them personally, even if it's not something they can change directly.
See, keeping your communities clean is the kind of thing that very much is in your sphere of influence. So is voting (and campaigning, if you can) for good candidates.
I'm talking about larger problems than that. Most anything that happens at the federal/geopolitical level, for instance, is non-actionable for the vast majority of people outside of voting or sending letters/phone calls.
So what's the stronger interpretation of what they are saying?
My reply is certainly bombastic, but I don't see much room for interpretation, they are saying we shouldn't bother much if something doesn't harm us personally.
They're saying it's impossible to get worked up about every comparably bad thing that happens in the world. It's not a matter of compassion or even emotional bandwidth; there's simply not enough time in the day. So one way or another, you've gotta pick and choose which issues to focus on - and choosing based on which issues are splashing around political media seems both unhealthy and unproductive.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but it's an argument based on pure statistics. HN doesn't have the headcount necessary for a significant number of its members to either be directly or indirectly (via relatives) affected by either of those two events.
And of what good is that discussion and other attention if you can't actually do anything about it (or have already done all you reasonably can), other than ruining your own mental health?
Nobody said anything about dismissing anything, only being realistic about what you have the ability to do and how you let your attention be directed by third parties. If something is not within your sphere of influence in any way, then it is, by definition, a waste of your energy to be concerned about.
OP already addressed that. When it's time to vote or choose your charitable donations or whatever, you can:
> ...go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.
>> It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this »
My grandparents paid attention to politics, as did many in the United States at the time. TV news was watched, no Internet, lot of newspaper reading.
They were sent to Tule Lake and interned for being Japanese-American all the same; their possessions stolen by a government who doesn't care if its citizens "care" about politics.
The average person has no control over "politics." Caring about it didn't save my grandparents, nor the protests of all of their friends.
No one took care of that dirty work. That's the great delusion.
>Are you willing to die for what you believe in? And, before one answers this hastily, think about it.
Your point is well taken. Certainly there are issues and problems that gravely trouble people of integrity and good conscience.
However, while sometimes there are things we can do within our own lives to address those issues and problems, often there isn't any way to have a measurable impact.
That's not to say we should just give up. On the contrary, I think it's important to try to improve the lives of those around us within the scope of our focus, abilities and resources.
When I was a young man (in my twenties), I would often wonder if the work I was doing (tech) was really making the world a better place in a serious way. That really bothered me for a while.
But I came to realize that while we can't all have a measurable, global positive impact on the world, we most certainly can have a local positive impact on the people and world around us.
Do I create better working conditions for people in Bangladesh? No. Can I genetically engineer a more effective SARS-CoV2 vaccine? No.
But I can treat those around me with respect, act with integrity and support my community. I can do constructive work within my chosen profession. And I can speak out when I see injustice, intolerance and hate.
Will that end the pandemic or halt the war in Syria or end world hunger and poverty? No.
But if I can do my part to lift up those near me, act with honesty and integrity and create constructive solutions for the projects I contribute to, I can be satisfied that I'm having a positive impact on the world around me.
None of that requires that I be willing to die for that, but that doesn't mean I'm not having a measurable, positive impact on the world.
Your question is begged. People are not actually killed for their beliefs. Rather, people are killed for their actions. Nobody can be killed simply for holding a belief, because it's not possible for the killers to tell who does and does not hold the belief.
So, really, what you're asking is whether people are willing to, once they start acting in a way which risks their life, continue acting in that same way. And it turns out that the vast majority of people killed by this reasoning are killed by genocide or as collateral damage of war; they're swept away by hate and violence which they did not invite.
The question really should be, then, rather one is willing to risk their life for the specific action of interrupting those who are trying to kill others in this way. And such interruptions often turn out to not be very risky, unless the interruption is happening very late in the process, at the moment of violence. It was not risky to yell at street fascists in 2017, before they were creating so many street fights, because they were not yet strong enough to simply fight, but instead had to justify their hate before a largely non-violent crowd. Now in 2021, though, yelling at street fascists is dangerous, but referring them to the FBI is relatively safe. What was acceptable praxis has changed.
From this POV, we must recontextualize your original message. Who is pushing and shoving? Fascists. Who are they pushing and shoving? Undesired minorities. By what means are you allowed to be selfish? Well, you might not be in an affected class! This is a failure of solidarity. You must be willing to defend the rights of others, if you expect them to defend your rights as well.
Dear @myWindoon, we can play the pedantic game, and set the cause on those who are killed for their "actions" simply by saying or being something that got them killed.
Allow me to introduce a few samples who disagree with your nuanced analysis.
You didn't read my comment. I said that most people who are killed for their actions are indeed killed in genocide or war. I know that you want to have an attitude where you are indignant that I am minimizing genocide and war, but no, I agree with you that it has been the main killer of people.
Pragmatism cannot be escaped simply by complaining that I am pedantic. Saying something is an action. Practicing a ritual is an action. Dressing a certain way is an action. Eating certain foods is an action.
Recall that your original post insinuated that most people are too selfish to choose to die for their beliefs. I am trying to explain to you that people do not choose to die for their beliefs; rather, they choose to take certain actions, and then their killers choose to kill them because of those actions. It is the selfishness of those personal actions which we are considering.
And, once we have achieved this scale, we can clearly see that killing itself is an action. It is simply another tool for achieving our selfish ends. A person can choose to selfishly kill as many people as they can reach. This suggests that our morality needs to not just account for making the choice to "die for what you believe in", but also the choice to kill for what you believe in.
Finally, let us consider the context of your original comment. The comment recounted a tale of folks who were sent to concentration camps in the USA during WW2. They claimed that the average person has no control over federal politics; you agreed and asked people to consider how they would prefer selfishly to not stick their necks out for the sake of ending the concentration camps. However, there are two grand ironies there: first, that we today claim to have entered WW2 in order to destroy concentration camps; and second, that we today have concentration camps on our southern border.
I don't know exactly what your point is, since you're not using your words well, but I think that you should take a step back and try to figure out where you're headed. I have the luxury of an elected representative who already is trying to close down the concentration camps, so I know which side I'm on.
Please omit personal swipes and please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for something different here, and it's not possible to have both.
Also, please stop using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which politics they're battling for), because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. I had to go quite a way back in your comment history to get to a place where you weren't doing that. Fortunately I eventually found it so I'm not going to ban you right now, but can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit?
Thank you for your follow up. Yes, I am not using my words well as English is not my native or languages I use often. My apologies.
>I know that you want to have an attitude where you are indignant that I am minimizing genocide and war
No.
I re-read your original message. Your examples in some can be prevented by interrupting specific actions, as you describe it.
Indeed speech, clothing, ritual, and any other behavior can be interrupted. For the OP, how would s/he interrupt being Asian?
>people do not choose to die for their beliefs; rather, they choose to take certain actions, and then their killers choose to kill them because of those actions
What is the substantive difference? I am also uncertain on "kill them because of those actions", or more precisely I do not believe there is a way for making such nuanced distinction. Looking through the list of genocides, I am hard pressed to find a set of actions that could have been interrupted to prevent death. At State level, maybe.
> This suggests that our morality needs to not just account for making the choice to "die for what you believe in", but also the choice to kill for what you believe in.
I had no disagreement with this statement in your first post, which is why I did not comment to it.
>concentration camps on our southern border
I do not know what country you live in.
>I don't know exactly what your point is
My original post was in response to describing the current willingness to '"care" about politics' but not to "die for" or "kill for".
(As part of the "kill for", I am certain neither of us are advocating murderous rampage, but more like a para-/military action to liberate.)
How many people that keep up with the news actually do a damn thing about it? The vast majority of people that check social media everyday also let "others do the dirty work".
And who are the "people around you"? With the internet that could be half the damn world. It sure is a privilege for you not to have to worry about injustices in the Middle East.
I'm not saying people should be selfish, but I don't see how what you're suggesting is productive either. Even the most well meaning person on this planet cannot possibly have an impact on all these different issues. Pick some areas you know you can contribute to and focus on that.
Exactly. As members of society we have an obligation to participate in society whether or not we are impacted negatively by its current shortcomings. In fact, the greater our privilege, the greater our obligation. Society would unravel if this were not true, because it would place undue burden on those lacking power to fix society - an impossible task without power. This is the subject of MLK's writing on justice and mutuality, that 'an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere' as well as Niemöller's poem about 'first they came for...'.
The question is really how to optimize awareness & participation with personal wellbeing. There's a big difference between getting psychologically clobbered by the outrage engines of social media or TV news, and being able to take in and understand current events in a way that encourages contemplation of how to best participate.
One way is to focus our attention and efforts on the things we can control as OP mentions. Another is to shift sources from fast/reactive news to more infrequent and considered sources. Another still is to participate locally and learn things firsthand.
You may not realize this (or you might, I don't know), but many people who don't want to participate in politics have the sense that our opinions are not at all condoned by the majority of employers or coworkers in our industry.
If I were to go around, attaching my real name or face to my opinions as some form of "participation" in society, I would be quite fucked. I don't call that a privilege by any means.
To argue to the extreme for a moment, one can have privilege, such as by way of relative wealth and power in society, and still hold views that powerful groups in society believe are contemptible. Holding certain views does not cancel out privileges one has, nor transform one from privileged to victim. This is especially true in privileges that one has less control over, such as physical and intellectual attributes, place of birth, wealth and opportunities like education and socialization, etc.
One may also act on those views believing they are helping society, while consensus in society views those actions as detrimental. A recent example of this is the rioters and insurrectionists at the Capitol believed they were doing something to help society, whereas society judged their actions otherwise.
A possible solution to this conundrum is to focus one's participation on areas that are broadly agreed upon to be beneficial to society, so as to avoid accidentally becoming part of the problem, or simply minimize blowback from a disapproving environment.
This is a solution that is intentionally sidestepping any particular ethical framework, which may guide one's actions toward different tradeoffs.
Another thing worth considering is not all participation in society need be political at all, nor attached to your real name, nor known to your employer. Those are conditions you've attached to your response that were not part of mine.
> ...because it would place undue burden on those lacking power to fix society - an impossible task without power...
That in itself is an irresponsible view. Nobody has the power to change society. The power we have is to make arguments and present ideas and then sometimes society changes of its own accord. Nobody is powerless to make persuasive and compelling arguments.
Society improves due to ideas, influence and technological change. In a democracy, everyone has notionally equal potential and responsibility for society's improvement whether they are currently powerful or not. Power can be moved around if someone new is obviously a better wielder of it. The powerful have special responsibilities but 'fixing' things isn't one of them. That is a shared responsibility. The powerless also have a responsibility to talk, argue and come to agreement on how to improve things.
I don't know what you mean when you say privilege. It is a very broad word. The powerful being privileged is something of a tautology, but the privileged are not necessarily powerful.
I appreciate your response and the nuances you're striking. Nevertheless, this still feels like splitting hairs and/or not seeing the forest from the trees. Powerful people have always had extra influence over societal changes. Someone working 70-80hrs/wk striving to make ends meet has far less time or ability to develop ideas or drive influence, as do people with little education or with health conditions, people shut out of certain parts of society, etc. Meanwhile someone born into privilege with time, connections, education, and wealth can participate in this game of ideas and influence and become a better wielder of those.
What I said before didn't imply people without power do not also have responsibilities, just that those with power have more, because of their position in society. Part (perhaps much) of that responsibility is to work towards a better society; I used 'fixing' as shorthand for this. In the US that is 'a more perfect union' but there are other concepts enshrined in other countries. I don't think this is a particularly controversial position to take.
Similarly the concept of 'with power comes responsibility' reappears throughout human history and I don't think is controversial.
Maybe we're in agreement on this, I can't tell from the way you're picking things apart. Anyway, I'm going to politely bow out.
The entire story of MLK and the civil rights movement is the story of people without power (quite literally, without equal rights under the law) driving change. Same for Ghandi and indian independence, to take one contemporary example out of many.
Perhaps there is a moral obligation for people with privilege to engage; but it's clearly not a practical necessity for change to happen. Given the lack of progress in Black civil rights ever since the 60's; as this discourse around "we all must participate!" has strengthened, it is far from clear that it is helpful.
I propose that the other way is best. Live your life, respond with genuine outrage when injustice crosses your path, and don't feel like media consumption fixes anything.
I'd put it a bit differently: people with very little power banded together to create a movement that together has some power and was making incremental progress over the decades, but allies were needed to accelerate it and make big change. After Kennedy's assassination Lyndon Johnson lent his enormous political capital to revive a dying civil rights bill and get it passed, and that was a big push, so much so that it lost his party the south for 50+ years.
I fully agree media consumption doesn't fix a whole lot, and certainly not in today's media environment, I merely advocate for staying informed and engaged enough to discover a useful way to make impact. I want to live in a world where we mostly just live our lives as we please, but society's state right now is such that I don't think it will let us off that easy.
> It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you.
And it doesn’t for 99.999% of the US. How much time and energy was lost on the first Trump impeachment and the year investigation leading up to it. Absolutely no relevance for the day to day life of US residents.
How much time was spent hearing about a phone call to Ukraine? Also not relevant to real life.
Even the events in Congress last week were bad, but literally had no impact on people’s lives outside of the politicians/cops/etc in the building.
I want to share with you an important quote. It sits at the top of [0] and is used by libertarians, but it is applicable across the political spectrum. "We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis." ~ Milton Friedman
The goal of staying politically informed is not so that you will necessarily take direct action. It is so that you will be able to take direct action if it becomes necessary for you to do so.
As many others have pointed out in the thread, it is quite selfish for you to do what you did. Millions of folks do not have the food security, income security, or essential freedoms and rights which are secured to you. However, selfishness is not inherently bad. What is bad is the myopia and the willingness to be ignorant which comes with it.
At the end of "Game of Thrones", nothing of interest happened. We all just turned off the TV and went on with life. However, politics is not just on TV. Your username suggests that you live somewhere in California; I live in Portland. Not all of us have your luxury.
Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion. Presumably one of the benefits of living in such a regime is the ability to participate in policy formulation through voting, political campaigns and various forms of public service. As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy? Therefore the majority of political discussion would be rigorous, fact based and consider a wide variety of points of view.
Analogously it would seem that citizens of dictatorship-based regimes don’t have to worry about these details (hopefully the dictator and their lieutenants have taken care of everything) and can focus on enjoying their lives.
> Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion.
It's turning HN into r/politics, I personally don't come on HN for that, there is already many many places online where political discussions happen, like reddit. When I say politics here I'm talking about USA cantered partisan politics.
HN is a great place for tech discussion AND it's also an opportunity to talk directly to founders, or important people and technologists in IT, in a better format than Twitter. I'd like for HN to stay in that niche.
How though? You don't have to click on the discussion? Just ignore it and move on to the next item. I do think it might be a good think to require a [political] tag or something though.
At 41, I'm not sure I'm old enough to comment on "how things were", and I'm not enough a student of history as I should be. But I believe the current trend across the globe is from democracy to autocracy[0], and toxic political polarization[1] is moving opinions so far apart as to effectively eliminate meaningful discussion about compromise or allowing yourself to change your opinion closer to what you believe to be a wholly terrible if not blatantly false perspective.
To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation.
On most of the political issues dear to me, it is impossible to have a scientific study decide the truth. To believe that science could; that would be replacing morals and beliefs with scientism, not far removed from religion and ultimately a worship of intellectual authority and the elite.
David Hume pointed out the problem with trying to draw moral conclusions from objective knowledge [0]. Since many political issues are essentially moral—what we should or should not do—the power of scientific studies to resolve them is limited.
> Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion.
Generally, they shouldn't want to do this. In specific spaces, however, this makes a lot of sense.
From a more distanced perspective, political discussions are exhausting at best, as you need to discuss many varying aspects influencing a complex system, and harmful at worst, as soon as they turn toxic (which they tend to on some topics). Having a break from these is necessary. That doesn't mean we don't need those - having these discussions is important. But there is a reason politician is a full time job.
Additionally, HN has a very international audience. Internal politics is irrelevant to a large part of the readership - irrespective of the discussed country - and therefore these discussions are simply annoying.
>Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion.
There is nothing to inhibit. An open political discussion on the internet between the left and the right is no longer possible. That train has left the station.
In the USA, yeah, because it's a left and right divide. Nuance gets completely lost and it's hard to find common ground because you may agree on one thing but then you'd have to 'give in' and lose face.
> Presumably one of the benefits of living in such a regime is the ability to participate in policy formulation through voting, political campaigns and various forms of public service.
As someone who has lived in both types of regimes, I can assure you that it is also one of the downsides of living in such a regime, as you yourself allude to in your last comment.
> As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy?
This really doesn't follow from the premise, and I would argue is demonstrably false. No - most individuals are not very knowledgeable about them. Just as many who have the privilege to eat healthy still do not.
I'm not sure if you are being serious or satirical (if the latter, I salute you!)
It's healthy for all citizens to have the option of such discourse, and to exercise it regularly. I'm not sure it's healthy to feel unable to leave it for a moment, lest $_scary_opponent seize the day.
It is a representative democracy after all. Citizens should feel like they've done their duty after choose a representative. Not (poorly) running a thousand mini-parliaments online.
(Edit): If we had the ability to tag posts, and then ignore categories like politics, this might help. While American politics is generally fascinating (whichever side you happen to end up on), everyone likely already has their own means to get this. Some find it divisive and exhausting.
It's part of the ethos of the site that it isn't siloed. When Dan says there needs to be room for sites like HN, that's part of what he means: sites where we're all encouraged to read and discuss the same ideas. If what you want is something with tagged posts and categories, you've already got that in Reddit, at a much greater scale than HN, or in lobsters, if you want a smaller scale.
I think they mean tags come with the content and you can hide whole tags. Hiding individual stories requires you see the story to decide to hide it so you can't really hide ones you don't want to see rather ones you don't want to see again.
I wrote a user script that compares each entry to a blacklist and removes the post from the page. Just by blacklisting the top 15-20 news sites I've been happier.
Do you know of any already-established scripts that do something like this? I was contemplating introducing a block site extension, but I don't know how much self control I'd have to not just remove it when I see a juicy article I just have to read.
no sorry. but the code I shared is really short and sweet. I don't even see the entries on the homepage on the blacklist so there's no temptation to "just remove it".
Try pasting my snippet into your JS console on the homepage to see what i mean (code is short, no HTTP calls)
Humans are tormented by choice/options. The hardest time for someone on a diet is when they have the option to choose junk food. My user script removes it from your HN homepage.
From what I've seen of Biden's plans, that's what he's going to do - just calm, very little changes.
He isn't going to overturn Trump's things, but also not continue them. (At least the things I checked on - for example he won't keep building the wall, but he's also not going to take it down.)
But he'll probably have pressure to actively overturn everything, so who knows.
Seeing so much political topics, and especially bad news most of the time makes us feeling bad and pessimistic about many things that are objectively not so important.
A big part of the people working for influencial companies (GAFAM) are most certainly members of this community.
So this made me wonder: would it be possible that we have a collective responsibility or influence over those companies through those people? Would making the debates and trends here more interesting, sane and positive have a positive influence on those?
For some people, politics isn't a choice, a luxury, an option to discuss or not, just because of the breadth and width of what politics means. T
Even then, there'd probably be a better time for a politics detox week than the current week, since it will be so impossibly difficult to not discuss the goings on. I mean, these are historic times (in the US, with international repercussions).
I think it's a bad thing to use "political" in this narrow sense. It cultivates the mindset that politics = party politics at the highest level of government. And then paints it as a bad place. Whereas actually people do political things all the time in their work and personal lives and even most of the decisions made by formal political system are made at the local government level in most western democracies.
Redefining a thing narrowly as its uncouth and hard-to-participate subset, and then blasting the thing (using its original wider definition) is a good way to drive people away from participating. Which is what we don't want.
I have been somewhat successful generally avoiding news. This has a benefit of taming a lot of the political backwash that everyone ends up gargling. And as many have mentioned - this doesn't equate to not caring, or being ignorant. Instead, I try trading the quick hit junk food, for material of better lasting value such as research articles, old books, historic writings, etc. (Don't get me wrong, I'm no stoic or saint. It's still easy to get dragged into some current affair. But I always feel stressed, and discouraged which encourages me to keep trying to avoid... ;)
The funny thing I have found is that there truly is 'nothing new under the Sun.' For instance, read through some of Frédéric Bastiat's stuff from the 1850s:
http://bastiat.org/
It could have been written this year.
Another goal of mine has been, if I get tangled in some current affair, to try and dig into what first principals are being addressed (or ignored) and reflect on my core beliefs in that area (rather than arguing the more surface issue that is being currently discussed). It's certain I don't have very much correct.
And lastly, and most obvious: avoid Teh socialz except where they build up value. Like, I might engage other illustrators through instagram - where we encourage each other, but completely avoid the fomenting and political bickering etc.
Well met. Just curious if one has approached this site from a usability perspective? For example, one formality in usability studies is that of personnas. The name "Hacker"suggests a preconcieved personna? Who is this hacker? My usability and marketing spidey senses tell me hacker embodies on one hand a elite group of programmers and on the other hand a lawless band of brigands? Have you ever conducted studies on how just the name Hacker alone gates this community? Who shies away from this place and who doesn't? I highly recommend courses by NNG for usability. The word hacker certainly has stigmas associated with it. The last study I read from NNG concluded that while many gains have been made in usabilty in the last decade, their findings were that IA, information architecture, lags significantly. IA is about word choices. If I saw an application menu with the word Hacker as a selection I would definitely flag that for review? Also I enjoy the site and Happy New Year!
I wanted to emphasize to people that there's a date attached to this post. I don't think they're currently considering having a political detox week. It seems there are a lot of comments that assume they are.
I have another question, is profit a motive for HN? It does not appear to be. Before HN there was slashdot.org, whicj is still around. Slashdot lost the thread I think because of revenue concerns and change of ownership. If this place is truly 100% a finacial loss then it does seem to validate yet again that news for profit is a bad idea because the news is soon compromised in the name of more viewership to drive ad revenue. If Reddit went 100% loss then I'm sure better moderation decisions would be available to them, likewise for Twitter and Facebook.
What is politics not already a part of? Art is inherently political. Sports certainly are political. Games? Definitely political. News? Writing? Software? Food? Dance?
I cannot think of a thing that is free from politics.
Surely the existence of each of these things precedes their political essence. Even a black person like me; a very political thing indeed, clearly exists before becoming a vessel (in ways sometimes terribly real, and sometimes comically abstract) for the lens of the day.
In many cases, yes. Totally agree with your example. Some cases maybe not?
Some things are perhaps coincident with the politics of the thing. Whether manufacturing uses sweatshops or child labor, for instance. I'm not sure that's separable.
You're using a very broad definition of "politics", which most people aren't familiar with and doesn't strike me as tremendously useful. When people say "politics" in this context, they're generally referring to what we might call "party politics" or "electoral politics", arguments that soandso ought to be elected or suchandsuch group ought to have more power.
And that's fair, but it's also pretty easy to draw very, very short lines to things like "Who has access to the NFL?" (class politics), "What are players allowed to say?" (first amendment politics), "What was the artist/musician/writer trying to convey? Do you see their political beliefs reflected here?" (E.g. Rand, Orwell, etc.), "Does my workplace allow trans people to use the restrooms of their choosing?", "Who grows this food, and how are they compensated?", "Who makes this garment, and how are they treated?", "Where does my electricity come from and how is it produced?". Etc.
We can choose to ignore these questions, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. While they aren't directly answered with "The Democrats" or "The Republicans" or whatever, they pretty quickly have answers that fall into one camp or another.
I guess my analogy would be, I could draw a very short line between all of those topics and burritos - make a slideshow of NFL players with burritos in their mouths, argue about what kinds of fillings Orwell would have put in his burrito, build a little trans pride burrito with a blue corn tortilla. But it'd be both frustrating and bizarre if I insisted on redirecting every conversation to burritos. Burritos are great, sure, but sometimes they're just not what we're talking about!
That's about my feelings towards (partisan) politics. I totally understand the impulse towards politics; I have a preferred political camp too, and I think it'd be great if they achieved more power and influence. But I don't think my camp is so important that it ought to go around intruding on every discussion in the world.
Second, I think my brain is hardwired to ask these questions. To me, it's a systems problem like an engineering problem.
The difference between burritos and politics for me is that the questions I often ask are about people. Who benefits, who is being exploited, are people being treated fairly. I'd use the word justice, but that's a pretty loaded term. When I play a game, for instance, I wonder how people were paid, was there crunch, etc.
I cannot turn this part of my brain off even for things I enjoy. Again, it's like handing me an interesting engineering problem -- I'm going to be thinking about it when I'm not distracted.
Why not ban it forever? Unless it's directly connected to tech it just makes this site more of the same and means one less place to escape toxic politics.
The whole last 2 weeks was all about tech. Twitter ban, parler shut down, Facebook inciting and radicalizing people. Tech is so immerse in our life and society that I don’t know how you can turn off politics while keeping tech on.
It's hard to discuss net neutrality, or content moderation, or even applications of certain technologies (stems cells, for instance) without mentioning politics.
And that's not even touching science topics like evolution or climate change.
How about trying to encourage better political discussions rather than banning the whole topic?
We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out. At least let's encourage healthy and proper conversations.
Maybe even have a specific "political discussion guidelines". The using downvotes to remove noise/unhealthy conversations we can have some proper arguments.
> We are in a very tense political landscape. Obviously people on HN need to talk it out.
For what definition of "we"? As an EU citizen, Corona seems to have calmed politics down quite a bit compared to the trouble that brewed beforehand.
I agree that there are issues which need to be talked about, but I do not think that HN is the right place. That being said, as of now I find the political content to be either sparse or relevant enough to not be annoying.
That seems like not a great mood when the nation (USA) is apparently under attack by domestic terrorists. I can understand if people are just being overly political, but it's hard to be political when a sizeable faction of the country evidently thinks it's time for the US experiment to get cancelled.
The OP was an experiment from 4 years ago. We haven't done anything like that since, nor will we.
Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me.
In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.
Just realized this was from 4 years ago. But it's an evergreen concept almost even more needed now. I do appreciate even the political perspectives on HN which feel more reasoned to me then elsewhere, but also can apprectiate the one week sabbatical from it here.
One of the main problems with banning political subjects on the site is that it favors the mainstream political ideas and disfavors the alternative political ideas.
This makes it essentially a political move on HN mods side, ie. not neutral at all, even though it "bans everything equally".
Mainstream political ideas disseminate through all other sorts of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or even cable news. Whilst alternative ideas do not. (Arguably not even on Reddit anymore)
Whilst you can certainly make the argument that what we post here doesn't matter because there isn't a million users on Facebook that it might reach, I think reaching the correct people, even if only less than a hundred, is worthwhile and arguably more impactful.
Now, with the way the world is moving forward right now, with Twitter and Parler, it turns out that allowing political subjects to be debated isn't exactly a neutral stance either. That it is essentially a stance that is "for" the alternatives, at least according to some powerful people in control.
Which puts the HN mods team in a damned if you do damned if you don't kind of seat.
I think in a more healthy world a site like this could and should stay on topic, avoiding political subjects outside the occasional coding-language or distro flamewars. ;)
But since the world is arguably terminally ill right now, HN should continue on it's current trajectory and "keep siding with the alternative political ideas", and allowing politics to be discussed.
I don't want to come off as accusing them of actually siding with any side however, I'm just stating that in the current climate, they come off that way whether they like it or not. In my personal opinion, a forum that allows moderated political debate is truly neutral, period. But my personal opinion doesn't set the tone for the political climate just yet.
No one has banned political subjects on HN. There was a brief experiment to see what the site would be like without them—it was scheduled to last a week, instead it lasted 2 days, and we've never dreamt of trying anything like it since.
Right, I was speculating about what it would be like and my thoughts on that, IF it were so. But perhaps it came off as me commenting "a change on HN".
I'm glad to hear you've never dreamt of trying anything like it since. :)
Why is this coming up? Is it due to the five or so posts a day regarding the recent censorship? It's been pretty repetitive but I think it's definitely relevant to pretty much everyone here. While maybe it hasn't been the absolute highest quality debate, I don't think it's been at all nasty. I've found it quite interesting and I'm still thinking about it.
It's quite funny how badly some of those comments on the previous post have aged:
"We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry."
I have heard people shouted down with "No politics!" for mentioning a vaccine.
FOSS is politics. DNS is politics. Stray dogs is politics. The weather is politics. Banning political discussion is politics. Any disagreement or difference of opinion is politics.
There's usually just something missing from sentence e.g. "No politics (that I don't agree with)!" or "That's censorship (when they do it to people I agree with)!"
Can you ban discussing politics on a website largely about Technology (and heavy on the Silicon Valley/IT side of things) when one of the largest stories in the world at the moment is the interaction of the internet (read Twitter) and politics (read Trump) and how these things influence one another and lead to real world consequences (read January 6th)? Now, arguably more so than back in 2016, technology is playing an ever larger role in how we interact with one another. I fail to see how not acknowledging and discussing that is going to help anything.
In short, good luck sticking your head in the sand. If you ignore it, things won't get better. And you're free to not read any of links or the comments at any time.
It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.
These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251