Ask HN: Keep November politics off of HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24645191

by troughway • 6 years ago

11 5 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Looks like the threads have started rolling in.

Dang can we keep US-centric politics off of HN for the next 2 months?

November of 2016 on HN was shitflinging without any benefit to anyone. Empty, useless outrage. News outlets have already started to champion whichever candidate they are aligned with for this November. If anyone needs their political news/drama fix, there is no shortage of it elsewhere.

Thank you ahead of time.

dvtrn• 6 years ago

I enjoyed the press coverage of Political Detox Episode 1.

mtmail• 6 years ago

I'm torn on the various tools that start to show up like election visualization, prediction via ML or vote-now initiatives. Example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24640214 They're technical but hard to keep the disucssion focused on the tech side of things. The very first comment on my example is already "Why would I vote for the blue candidate?"

chmaynard• 6 years ago

Or to paraphrase Laura Ingraham, shut up and code.

uniqueid• 6 years ago

I'm torn.

On the one hand, whatever HN is doing with the forum clearly works, in terms of fostering polite, rational discussion.

On the other, if the outside world goes further to pot, we may regret having missed opportunities to address that.

Maybe a compromise would be to have a new feature on HN: when a user posts a political item, the comment section could be disabled, but someone (the user? the mods? all users?) could add links to appropriate (for the story) third party discussion forums?

This feature would allow, for example, leftwing HN users to follow one "discuss off-site" link and make Trump Nazi comparisons, and rightwing users to follow another "discuss off-site" link where they can roll their eyes at Nazi comparisons.

If the feature had preset "groups", and the same third party forums popped up often enough, it could work out well. Someone could create a browser extension where the user chooses a persistent group, and the extension loads any political post off the appropriate forum, restyling it to look like the user is still on HN.

nunez• 6 years ago

Agreed. Reddit’s a great place to discuss politics. I’d like to keep HN strictly for tech.

Ask HN: Keep November politics off of HN

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