[58]

I am disappointed by the lack of political discussion on Hacker News. Can't we trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly? Technology and governance increasingly have an extensive, nuanced relationship and HN is the exact place where that meta-discussion needs to happen!

[dang]

> Can't we trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly?

Unfortunately, no we can't. That's clear empirically. We can all come up with speculations about why it is; mine is that politics is tribalism and activates the pre-rational brain.

What's clear from years of experience is that such discussions degenerate rapidly, that the degeneration compounds—i.e. the more it happens, the worse it gets—and that allowing it to go unchecked would kill what's valuable about this site. That's why the HN guidelines' definition of "off-topic" leads with an admonition against pure politics: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There are some political topics that can be substantively discussed here, but that's because they're not pure politics: the drug is cut with something else. An example from yesterday is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178.

[devnonymous]

Here's my perspective :

* While I am interested in broad scocio-political discussions about technology's impact on how we live I have zero interest in US specific political discussion. Not because I think it doesn't affect people outside the US - it does, but because anything I have to say, or anything most people (including US citizens) would say would just be armchair activism or pointless what-if pontification.

* I come to HN mainly for tech discussions and insights into things that influence me and those that I can influence as part of the tech community. US politics is neither of those.