HACKER Q&A
📣 ITB

Can someone explain the No Israel-hamas policy?


I understand there’s a code of conduct, but just because a topic gets a lot of people derailed, it doesn’t mean it should be banned. Those who can’t debate in a civilized manner should be banned instead. Are we to assume that this community is incapable of having difficult conversations? Doesn’t this exacerbate the accusation that tech lives in its own safe bubble?

  👤 Someone Accepted Answer ✓
Why would a site for baseball fans ban most basketball discussions? Because it’s not the place for such discussions.

Also, is there such a policy? AFAIK, all there is are guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

“Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

👤 r721
A clarification: "[flagged]" means a certain amount of HN users clicked "flag" button, not that moderators banned a topic.
👤 mikequinlan
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

👤 bitxbitxbitcoin
Guaranteed derailment is grounds for banning when moderation is a limited resource.