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Can social media even exist without political debate? What about trolls?\u00a0Hacker News<\/a>, the social news site run by Y Combinator, is trying to find out.<\/p>\n The head of the Hacker News community since 2014, Daniel Gackle (whose HN handle is \u201cdang\u201d)\u00a0on Monday initiated a site-wide\u00a0\u201cPolitical Detox Week.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n To introduce the temporary ban on political content, Gackle wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cFor one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we\u2019ll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we\u2019ll watch together to see what happens.<\/p>\n Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile\u2014they\u2019re like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don\u2019t mix.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n When users sought more detail on what, precisely, would be defined as politics and blocked on HN\u00a0this week, Gackle elaborated:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cPure politics: conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet. We\u2019re not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects\u2014like, say, software patents.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The post about the \u201cdetox\u201d or \u201ccleanse,\u201d as Gackle called it, has drawn hundreds of comments on Hacker News since it posted this morning.<\/p>\n Many users said this effort, even if well-intentioned, amounts to censorship. Many\u00a0warned it would have the unwanted consequence of silencing the views and experiences of\u00a0minority users, including women and people of color\u00a0who comment on the site.<\/p>\n Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman<\/a> tells TechCrunch,\u201dWe don\u2019t want to be the day to day US politics site. There are a lot of other\u00a0places for that. And this just shuts down the lightning rod for a few days.\u201d<\/p>\n The CEO also\u00a0acknowledged that, as is happening on social networks like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook,\u00a0bigots have infiltrated the Hacker News community of late.<\/p>\n Still,\u00a0every social network going back to\u00a0Usenet in the 1990s faces the same problem in abating trolls and maintaining a high level of discourse. Telling people they can\u2019t do or say something online never seems to make things easier<\/a>, or improve the quality of discussions<\/a>, for the moderators of these\u00a0online communities.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll see how Hacker News fares.<\/p>\n Gackle wrote in an e-mail to TechCrunch to emphasize that the \u201cdetox\u201d is just a one-week experiment, and he\u2019s not sure what Hacker News will learn from it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea came about because there has been an uptick in political flamewars and, worse, accounts that use the site exclusively to argue about politics and don\u2019t appear interested in anything else. We already ban such accounts, but the trend in that direction made it seem like a good time to clarify what HN is and what it is not,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n We asked Gackle specifically for his\u00a0response to\u00a0critics who believe\u00a0his project\u00a0will\u00a0silence underrepresented people on HN, and is essentially a form of censorship. He said:<\/p>\n \u201cWords like \u2018silence,\u2019 \u2018underrepresented,\u2019 and \u2018censorship,\u2019 are highly charged, and people use them to mean a lot of things,\u00a0even opposite things. So before trying to answer such a criticism, I\u2019d want to make sure I understand, and for that it\u2019s best to be talking to a specific user about their specific concerns, not arguing in a\u00a0general debate.\u201d<\/p>\n HN has developed and integrated software that tries to detect patterns of abuse on its site, but hasn\u2019t written anything specifically new for the Political Detox Week or around political content.<\/p>\n Gackle had plenty more to say to HN users.\u00a0You can read his comments here on a\u00a0reverse chronological thread<\/a> of\u00a0his answers to their questions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: Jirsak<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/guZKepjEXnA\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can social media even exist without political debate? What about trolls?\u00a0Hacker News, the social news site run by Y Combinator, is trying to find out. The head of the Hacker <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-2037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n
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