Ask HN: What is the 'hacker news' for politics?

jamesteow · on July 30, 2011

There's a couple key issues with it: current comment voting techniques don't do a good job of differentiating validity from user sentiment (how many times have you had someone need to rebuke the community for using the arrows to denote disagreement?)

Secondly, you will always to deal with trolls. If you have mechanisms in place to make people spend less time responding to trolls, you'll retain the sanity of the sane users and diminish incentives from trolls.

Thirdly, you have to rethink the way stories are voted on.

Thankfully, we're building that. If you sign up on forrus.org, I'll let you know when we roll these features out which should be in a month. We're actively just inviting people who are enthusiastic about these ideas because we want to grow the community slowly but with lots of quality.

polyfractal · on July 30, 2011

Political discussions tend to derail into ideological rants far more often than technical matters. They also tend to turn into echo chambers, attracting like-minded individuals who circle-jerk their own opinions.

That said, I'm a fan of Debate and Discussion subforum of SomethingAwful, which is remarkably intelligent and reasonable (although admittedly slanting heavily towards liberals and libertarians).

jrsmith1279 · on July 30, 2011

That's where the comment voting would help, but I guess it's still not a perfect system. I really just want a place where I can have political discussions/debates with people who form their opinions based on facts instead of being strictly democrat/republican because that's the way their parents brought them up.

reinhardt · on July 30, 2011

It doesn't make sense for the same reasons that a 'Hacker news' for religion doesn't. People attracted in such topics are usually too invested emotionally in their personal beliefs to entertain the idea they might be wrong.

rotoscoped · on Aug 3, 2011

This is why any successful political community needs to be largely made up of people with the same beliefs, just like almost everyone at Hacker News believes the same thing about startups and are too emotionally invested to change their beliefs.

jrsmith1279 · on July 30, 2011

My brother and I had this exact idea and started to build it, but we've both been too busy with our normal jobs to be able to do anything with it. We even have a pretty decent domain name (I think).

impendia · on Aug 3, 2011

Many of the comments on online Economist articles are excellent.

JesseAldridge · on July 30, 2011

createdebate.com is the closest thing I've seen. But it isn't that good. I think a good political debate site is definitely worth building.

mangala · on July 30, 2011

reddit.com/r/politics

mindcrime · on July 30, 2011

The problem with /r/politics is that it's thoroughly dominated by left wing / socialist types. If you show up there and try to have a reasoned debate that promotes a libertarian ideal, for example, you get shouted down and/or down-voted into oblivion. By and large, the members there only want to talk to people who already share their own beliefs, they're not really interested in being challenged, in debate, or in rational discourse.

dantheman · on July 30, 2011

That is not a good site for politics, unless you like the echo chamber. r/politics is dominated by one group, another group has their own subreddit etc.