It will be interesting to see how we look back on the moderators' decision to stifle political discussion on HN. In my opinion it is a horrible abdication of responsibility among technologists to simply hide any content that pertains to politics.
But it is fitting that the political monoculture of the valley would give rise to an HN moderation regime that includes aggressive censorship.
I love HN and have learned a great deal from the articles and comments, but censoring political discussion is a form of sides-taking and HN mods are unabashedly responsible for it. It's a truly shameful dark cloud in what is otherwise a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem of ideas.
Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip, and mainstream discussion dilutes the intellectual quality and purpose of the community and only hastens the Eternal September effect.
If anything, the moderators have probably been too lenient about letting political content through. It's starting to become the HN equivalent of a junk buffet. Far too little of it passes the bar of "satisfying intellectual curiosity," and far too much appeals only to tribalism and emotion.
> Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip...
This may be true of some political discussion, but one could equivalently say that most technological discussion is about big screen televisions and mobile phone service plans.
Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
>Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
It should, but it often doesn't. For some reason, politics short circuits people's brains. And one way to encourage people to dig deeper is to keep shooting into the trenches, being more aggressive about downvoting political content than apolitical, technical content.
I think this is a very cynical view. To some extent the demagogues and "ruling class" among us try to oversimplify things and create emotionally potent talking points.
But ultimately as citizens we must figure out reality for ourselves without the emotionally potent, over-simplified explanations offered by partisans.
We must be patient that some of us may not have realized (yet) how to think in a rational way about politics, not just abandon it completely.
"people who were strong at math were able to effectively solve an analytical problem. However, when political content was added to the same analytical problem – comparing crime data in cities that banned handguns against cities that did not – math skills no longer predicted how well people solved the problem. Instead, liberals were good at solving the problem when it proved that gun control reduced crime, and conservatives were good at solving the problem when it proved the opposite"
Not an endorsement of this paper, just something I've seen going around on social media. When I followed the citation for the statement quoted above, it didn't seem quite as cut and dry, that summary is eliding quite a few details of the the experiment I think, but I just skimmed.
I agree; it is an abdication of our responsibilities to our communities (Internet, countries, world) to say the current political situation, including the lack of intelligent and productive interaction, is not our problem and to abandon the field. Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work, and then which could be duplicated elsewhere (and arguably many people here are directly responsible for the currently poor performance of online communities in this regard). Rather than give up, people at HN are accustomed to taking on problems that others assume are intractable, and are comfortable and flexible enough for experimentation. Imagine the effect success would have on the world - is there any app that would have a bigger impact?
At the same time, the unfounded assertions and exaggerations ("horrible", "aggressive censorship", "unabashedly", etc.) in the parent are, IMHO, the kind of communication that causes political discussion to fail.
> Hacker News is an ideal community to develop technology and policies that would make political discussion work ... is there any app that would have a bigger impact?
Exactly.
> the unfounded assertions
Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.
Because of the aspect of HN that is professional networking, most people are afraid to call out the mods on this, but someone needs to.
> Not sure how much contact you have had with the moderators, but I think those are quite well-founded. The mods are self-righteously happy to be censors.
I've had contact with them, and I haven't observed any self-righteousness or interest in censorship.
I love the statement of fact here, as if your opinion alone determines what "went well" means.
The outcome that people threw giant hissy fits about not being able to Trump-bash or insist that Silicon Valley is the most sexist institution ever created for a week does not mean that the experiment didn't go well.
In fact, I'd argue the exact opposite. It illustrated how deeply embedded a certain sociopolitical view is on this site despite everyone constantly patting themselves on the back over how smart, tolerant, and accepting they are. I think the experiment went quite well at illustrating what HN has become.
I've seen what you describe as "hissy fits" (and well-reasoned, substantive comments for that matter) come from all points of the political and ideological spectrum. The most deeply embedded sociopolitical view I'm aware of is the natural human bias that "it's the $otherSide that's responsible for misbehavior".
HN is politically divided, much as the surrounding societies are. But each side feels like the other side dominates this site, often with intense conviction. It's striking.
If political discussions that evoke partisan loyalties end up being classified as “flame wars” due to the definition in the article, then if those involved in the so-called flame wars are censured (throttled etc) then effectively the topic has been discouraged simply because the votes averaged lower than the number of comments. Over time users learn to ignore such topics.
The big goof up is in the idea that all discussions with widespread disagreement are harmful. It’s an absurd view of manners akin to saying that discussion about the ethics of slavery is simply rude to participate in regardless of one’s views and regardless of whether any of the comments are actually rude or disrespectful (or are even, themselves, partisan. The votes may be where partisanship gets introduced).
Slavery is a bad example because it seems morally obvious and thus the enlightened side seems obvious. But many issues today lack moral clarity which is why intelligent discussion of them is deeply important.
Politics can be messy but in many ways political topics represent the conflict between values as some values gain or lose prominence.
As a received impression, it may accurately reflect an emergent property of HN, and many other popularity-based ranking sites.
It's possible to either vote up, or flag, articles. Political articles which hit a major divide may see much of both actions. I've seen and been disaappointed by articles I thought should get more play that were flagged off the front page.
That's not a direct reflection of HN admin actions, but is undeniably tied to site mechanics, and so is something of an admin metaaction.
I've inclued several of these in my Favourites list
But it is fitting that the political monoculture of the valley would give rise to an HN moderation regime that includes aggressive censorship.
I love HN and have learned a great deal from the articles and comments, but censoring political discussion is a form of sides-taking and HN mods are unabashedly responsible for it. It's a truly shameful dark cloud in what is otherwise a vibrant and flourishing ecosystem of ideas.