The problem that HN faces is the fact that as social news aggregators become larger and larger the quality and type of user changes. To enforce this we have flagging and removal of content. The problem with this aggregators is enforcement and policing doesn't scale. Also, as the aggregator becomes larger people want to discuss more and more topics.

Personally I would rather have a HN that doesn't have politically charged topics. Although some of those topics are relevant to the community if we start letting more and more political topics then we can have factions of users and once that starts HN won't be fun to read anymore.

Reddit attempted to solve this through subreddits but that didn't work. Slashdot used moderation. Digg died because they released a new version. I suppose either the censorship or the flagging and removal of political topics and otherwise will be the thing that eliminates HN.

I think that any social news aggregator has a shelf life and you can't keep it from degrading to either something you hate and or something that doesn't serve the people who run the site.

Maybe just add a special topic flag "politics" and let everyone have a convenient switch in the profile settings whether they want to see those topics in the feed or not?

I, for one, don't like the idea of readers having the ability to narrow what they read here. Part of what I value about HN is that it forces me to see what the community values. It's why I dislike Facebook's and Google's news feeds so much. I can control what I see there, either directly with settings or indirectly by liking topics.

I would rather not be trapped in an echo chamber, even if it is one of my own making (especially if it is one of my own making).

Note, "dead" comments are usually dead for reasons that have nothing to do with the same controversies. Turning off "dead" comments is, at least to me, a very different thing than turning off political submissions.

That topic flag is called reddit.com/r/politics. We are already choosing to come here instead of there.

I have always bowed to the wishes of PG and the mods when it comes to calling out articles as too "hot"

This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue.

I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about business. It's all of that.

This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics, we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for their use"

And here we are in a security and surveillance state that we've created. We're refusing to even talk about Google's desired monoculture because we're unable to maintain civil discourse.

I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer working towards the betterment of mankind.

Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.

> This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand.

This happens all the time. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further some political goal they do not agree with.

Being apolitical is fine. I try to be that way publicly and in my work. I fail sometimes, but I try.

But when I look at huge messed up things in society, and I know there are people on HN who had a big role in making them that way?

At some point you gotta cut the crap. Not taking a stand is taking a stand. Nobody gets a free ride. There's no special "get out of difficult conversations for free" card that we tech folks get that others don't have.

I do not think HN needs to be reddit. But yes, I do think a second room for the intersection of tech and politics (and only that topic) is way overdue. We are better than this.

> We are better than this.

We could be, but we're not. This is what we are right now, a bunch of people that can't even have a rational discussion on a subject such as this.

I spent my entire youth reading sci-fi stories about mankind making new technology that eventually wipes out the species: giant robots, viruses, nuclear bombs, and so on.

And this it what we got? Tweeting and liking posts? This is the scary tech that's destroyed mainstream media and now threatens to lay waste to civil discourse in general? Typing little comments into boxes? Really?

Nobody can say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.

Some of us have spent our entire adult lives working to prevent technology that "wipes out species". It's not an accident that these things did not occur.

There are places for cutting the crap, and taking a stand... that doesn't necessarily have to be here.

To call upon the topic of "safe spaces", I think HN ought to be a safe space for people involved in technology to simply... be... without having to constantly add disclaimers to their comments referencing their employer, or watching out for attacks due to their involvement in something that's suddenly politically volatile.

There are many different forums in the world, and the only way they stay different is by drawing a line as to what topics and discussion patterns they won't except.

The line drawn on HN is hardly a "hard line". Political topics are acceptable, but only one at a time and only if participants remain somewhat aloof.

In conclusion, I think HN is nice simply because it has only one room. Adding other rooms isn't something I'd like to consider, whilst the existence of other multi-room sites exist with the same population.

I am on Reddit, but I use pseudonyms there ... merely because I am afraid.

> Adding other rooms isn't something I'd like to consider, whilst the existence of other multi-room sites exist with the same population.

That doesn't parse, but even if it did I disagree with it, i don't think that those other sites exist with the same population.

And the thing is, by being a startup board, we support exactly the kind of actions, movements, and organizations that have greatest new impact on fellow humans

It might be okay to turn away if that "new impact" is something like faster pizza delivery. It's another thing entirely when we're instrumenting every action that every cell phone user does and then selling the data off to the highest bidder.

There might be plenty of other places for this discussion. There are no other places with these people who are responsible for doing these things.

And this is exactly what the social media companies want: everybody to find some other place besides their forum to talk about difficult things, because difficult conversations turn away eyeballs.

It's us. The founders, inventors, and senior executives and engineers at these companies that are most in need of these discussions. And we not only have created a world where these things don't happen, we revel in the fact that we've separated all these concerns into different compartments

It is a vile and corrupt system. I refuse to believe that people who give some time to think about it would continue supporting it the way it is.

Spot on. Thanks for these comments and this discussion.

That's a nice notion, but being called out as "vile and corrupt" is exactly what my fear is. I would want a teensy bit more nuance before we decide to stake people out as corrupt.

There are some challenges, especially in written communication, and especially when it involves large audiences. Many times there's no comprehension, yet communication happens anyway. That's when we say people are "talking past one another"

For instance, you said "I would want a teensy bit more nuance before we decide to stake people out as corrupt."

But I never said that. I said it was a vile and corrupt system. I also explicitly said that I had faith in people. I believe if they consider these systems (that I believe they created in good faith) they would realize that they are hurting mankind, not helping it.

I also believe there is a difference between "wanting to be right" and "wanting to have a difficult conversation" I have no desire to be right. Like everybody else, I believe I am in the right. But one person or group of people wanting to be proven right is not what this is about.

Jacques and I probably disagree on this particular Google issue. I don't know. I am a right-leaning libertarian and, I think, Jacques leans left. But I'm okay no matter how this shakes out. The reason I'm speaking out is that there is a innate conflict between efficiency, usefulness, and attractiveness of the public square and tolerance of dissent.

Mankind solved this problem and it gave us all of the technological miracles we see today. But now the concept of "public square" is primarily being owned by multinational corporations or governments with no knowledge or desire to hear or apply those lessons from our past. They just want a more attractive and useful public square, not one that encourages and tolerates difficult conversations.

The irony here is that this one conflict is driving what many perceive to be the greatest technological danger to the species.

The system we have created in response to this conflict made sense at the time. But it was short-sighted. By trying to compartmentalize troublesome people and conversations, oddly enough, it is contributing to a vicious cycle where the net swings wildly one way or the other. It is a vile and corrupt system. I continue to believe the people who created it are not.

I thing some of these topics are the most interestng we have.

I mostly accept that they don’t belong on HN though.

But it feels deeply hypocritical when some political stories stay on the front page for hours until more information starts to arrive and they get flagged off swiftly.

So, I've vouched for it too, mainly because it would be nice to have the option on HN to simply ignore the flags for those who feel they can handle it and don't need to be told by others what they can and can not discuss.

It would be a pretty simple affair software wise, those that need it can have their safe space and those that don't can discuss whatever they want without being shouted down.

Seems like the optimal solution to me.

The thing about no moderation spaces (above and beyond legal requirements) is that they become tools of organized trolling efforts (harassment campaigns and the like). Having an unmoderated space on the internet is basically the social equivalent of having an open smtp relay.

But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people.

> But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people.

I highly doubt that. Typically a normal discussion (such as this one) is underway and the suddenly the whole thing is killed. That's rude, to put it mildly and I see absolutely no harm in letting those discussions continue with the normal 'up/down' vote mechanism taking care of the moderation. Flagging just affects the ordering of the stories and does not have anything to do with the comments within those stories.

Note that there is no reason that you would not be able to discuss this site and yet the discussion is flagged so the majority of HN will never see it. I don't like that, I think it puts too much weight to the flags in relation to the upvotes.

So limit contributions to active valid accounts (minimum membership time / minimum karma level etc), again from a software point of view that's beyond simple. Whether it's the right thing or not for HN is another matter.

Mysteriously, many thread, including this thread itself, has been revived from dead (but could possibly still be flagged):

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962366

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961857

And it seems this thread itself is excluded in HN top

> funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed!

Flagged because of the stupid -rule breaking- title.

What is rule breaking about it?

Come off it, you've been here long enough to know that it's an editorialised title.

Ah in that sense. Oh golly, you're right. Well best we don't discuss that then, who knows what kind of subversive stuff might be said.

No, i can ensure you the title is same as what i submitted