Earlier today the moderators on Hacker News, an influential online discussion forum run by Y Combinator, the startup incubator, announced that this will be "Political Detox Week" on the forum, and encouraged commenters to flag both political stories and political threads in non-political stories. "We'll kill such stories and threads when we see them," wrote Daniel Gackle, head of community for Hacker News, who goes by the handle "dang" on the site.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Gackle said the experiment in moderation was prompted by "an increase in accounts that have been using HN primarily for political purposes."



In a post outlining the rules of Political Detox Week, Gackle wrote said this experiment was meant to honor Hacker News values of "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation," instead of the flame wars that happen "when political conflicts activate the primitive brain."



When commenters asked how moderators intended to judge what was "political," Gackle elaborated: "The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet."



But many Hacker News community members objected to both the idea of censorship and the impulse to secede from politics, especially given the tech industry's inextricable role in national debates over job loss and automation, the way that social media can amplify political propaganda, and the fact that Silicon Valley is still largely dominated by white male gatekeepers.

The most upvoted comment on the site came from a user who goes by the handle tarikjn, who found the experiment troubling:

I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).



Hacker News was first launched by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham back in 2007 and still functions as the tech industry’s very own Reddit.



Y Combinator took a much different position on politics this year, when billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a part-time partner at YC, wanted to promote his views. In response to calls to cut ties with Thiel, who is now helping to run the transition team for President Elect Donald Trump, Sam Altman (president of Y Combinator's parent company) wrote, "Diversity of opinion is painful but critical to the health of a democratic society."