Title: Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we&#x27;re going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it&#x27;s Political Detox Week on HN.<p>For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we&#x27;ll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we&#x27;ll watch together to see what happens.<p>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—they&#x27;re 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&#x27;t mix.<p>Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.<p>Why don&#x27;t we have <i>some</i> politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that&#x27;s exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it&#x27;s insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can&#x27;t be both at the same time.<p>A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don&#x27;t want that to happen, so let&#x27;s all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.<p>Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we&#x27;ll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don&#x27;t have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.
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