Perhaps this is a reasonable place to open a discussion about why lobste.rs doesn’t have a politics tag. The way technology is built and used is political; it’s hard to entertain arguments against that. I have deep empathy with the point of view that technology is a craft and an engineering discipline and there is a whole set of discussions and a space to be made for talking about technology in as non political a way as possible, which is what lobste.rs currently does, and I do kind of like it like that.
However the reason I think it’s important to bring political discourse into this space is because you lobste.rs are making politics decisions when you choose your job, choose the work you do and make critical technological and political decisions as part of your work which affect All Your Relationships*; this is an intelligent, considerate and engaged community and I see much more harm than good in choosing to hide from that fact, though I will say again I have a huge respect for and enjoyment of this space as a non-political one.
So I suppose I’d like to pose the question, given that the tagging system allows any user to filter out posts they are not interested in, what does the lobste.rs community have to lose by opening itself to some political discussion? Is there a feeling that it will somehow pose a risk to this community? Is there a fear that a certain type of user will be attracted, that a certain type of behaviour will be allowed/promoted by this which will have a negative impact throughout the whole site?
I don’t want to promote the idea that lobste.rs should be a political space, I want to check in with everyone here that we are all ok that it isn’t and have properly checked in with what our fears and rationalisations are about that choice.
** The ‘All Your Relationships’ idea comes from the talk in this link which suggests the idea that all technologists are touching a huge network of people and that in some way you have a real relationship with many many people, e.g. all the people that worked to manufacture the phone in your pocket.
what does the lobste.rs community have to lose by opening itself to some political discussion?
see
this is an intelligent, considerate and engaged community
Long answer
Tag usage
First, a note on tags: every tag we add is an explicit endorsement that that sort of content is acceptable and encouraged on the site–the omission of a tag is a hint that maybe that content would be better served elsewhere.
If we were to include a politics tag, we’d in effect be saying “Okay, the distribution of topics appropriate for Lobsters now includes politics. This is valid to bring up in all conversations, because at worst it’s merely mislabeled and mistagged.” So, we’re then stuck with more politics in everyday use in the site.
Availability elsewhere
Simply put, politics are better covered elsewhere:
It’s not like our fellow crustaceans can’t find something to slate their thirst for politics elsewhere–not only that, but they have dozens if not hundreds of sites to choose from to match their political requirements.
By contrast, Lobsters itself is a rare gem (if I may say so myself) in that it is relatively pure technical discussion, a refuge from a world of blathering bullshit and ponderous pandering.
Politics is the boardkiller
I’ve explored elsewhere how political submissions can be used to farm karma at the expense of discussion. The key things to note about political articles:
They rarely have any technical content, as the point of politics is not education but subjugation
They tend to cover topics that everybody has opinions about but few have expertise in
They usually talk about things over which none of the discussion participants actually have any control, so you get a lot of yelling back and forth without any action
There is a gigantic industry devoted to crafting the most divisive articles possible
We probably share this board with a few tankies. We probably share this board with a few Nazis. We have folks here that don’t recognize a standard arrangement of genders or possibly even human identities. We have folks that are from the US, from the UK, from the rest of the world. We even have a few Windows users.
And we all get along (mostly) because we aren’t constantly pitted against each other in pointless tribal ideological posturing and signaling. We all get to respect each other as practitioners of technology instead of representatives of some other out-group.
Why would we want to risk sacrificing that?
EDIT:
I’ll point out that 4chan has created at least 2 containment boards for politics (the equivalent of your proposed tag), and not only has that failed it’s only fostered some of the most corrosive drivel on the internet.
Chat link is broken? Are you referring to IRC? For people that don’t inhabit that space is there any mechanism for decisions / important discussions that happen there to get filtered back to the website?
Fixed the chat link; should’ve been to /chat not /, sorry about that.
Discussion filters back into meta threads. We’re generally just shooting the breeze or kicking ideas around, it’s not very serious because it’s so transient and has only a fraction of the community on it. The only important thing I can think of that’s come out of it was this comment (though it’s been a long couple days for me so maybe I’m forgetting something).
Perhaps this is a reasonable place to open a discussion about why lobste.rs doesn’t have a politics tag.
We don’t have a politics tag, in part and sufficiently, because the topic is too broad for a contributor to have a meaningful understanding of the topics and discussion that would fall under it. For folk that can make meaningful, informed, truthful, and constructive contributions in an on-topic matter, there is the law tag.
We’re a community of practitioners. The practice of politics is law. Practitioners of law, whether legislators, lawyers, judges, or any of the various roles in courts and the extant legal system are welcome here. Along with the technical discussions these practitioners engage in.
However the reason I think it’s important to bring political discourse into this space is because you…
This is called entryism: “…an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program.”
Here you providing a totalizing reason (“All Your Relationships”) as to why a new tag should be added. Tags are deflationary, not inflationary. They identify areas where a subset of our readers and contributors can expect detailed, operational, consistent, and where possible even scientific discourse. And that further they can measure their own understanding of the topic because it has clear and defined boundaries.
Politics is off-topic here because it lacks parsimony. In order to create space for technical topics we do not discriminate on the basis of people, groups, or fields of endeavor. Folk are here to talk about and work on their own and their field’s issues in sufficient technical detail to coordinate with their peers. Ideology, politics, propaganda, framing, and other fictionalisms are an impediment to dealing with the technical and material nature of our work and world.
The chattering class has plenty of places on the Internet to proselytize. This isn’t one of them.
“Perhaps this is a reasonable place to open a discussion about why lobste.rs doesn’t have a politics tag.”
We did. The were a large number of people in support of or against politics or tags. No clear winner. Further, most that support it want to be able to talk about it on any article to push their political views. Of them, some want many views to be discussed as part of the political process and others want all opponents censored and/or ejected. For different reasons, both need political comments available on every thread. There’s some others but that’s the major groups based on what they said or did.
Im in the group that’s for banning most politics or limiting it to politically-focused threads tagged as such. Like I said, the prior discussions got nowhere for my side. So, I discourage even talking about it to avoid polluting more threads. We can just do a yearly meta or something to assess if the community’s preferences have changed. That’s assuming @pushcx would go with the popular vote to begin with. His own convictions might lead him to do something different.
Who knows except to say we’re better off not talking about banning politics or a new tag more than once a year since it’s wasted bandwidth that also often causes headaches for our moderators when fights break out.
I can’t find the ones about tags past the comments we just made. Search engine isn’t that good. The political arguments have mostly been scattered among many threads. No links to take you right to what you want. Sorry. The fact that I don’t have one readily available might be a good reason to do another one as a tag suggestion. Then, you’ll probably see people’s views real quickly. ;)
This talk is only tangentially about climate change, as one globally significant effect that technology has and a great example of how to think about the result of technological work.
‘politics’ is about how groups of people take action together, (in anything other than the most rudimentary ways). So climate change science is different from, but will inform climate change politics, which will be the process of figuring out as a group of people how to collectively respond to the information we understand from climate change science.
to bring this back to my original point, I’m suggesting that the lobste.rs community can have a positive benefit on politics (therefore directly influencing e.g. climate change) through technology by discussion, and therefore should consider carefully the choice to not do that.
You benefit politics by interacting with branches of government, bribes to politicians paid through lobbyists, court action, and last (in effectiveness for time invested) getting a huge pile of voters to push their officials for a specific thing. You can’t do any of that though a tiny, slow-moving, tech forum. We were neither setup for mass action or government interventions nor mostly capable of it. So, doing the people-oriented parts of reform on Lobsters is mostly waste.
Now, Lobsters can help on the legal or technical side by creating the alternatives along with cost-benefit analyses. Then, get folks to share and describe it in places that get lots of attention. Some can even be a business that becomes a Barnacl.es submission after succeeding financially and on mission as a nonprofit or public-benefit corporation. Lobsters has more talent for producing and reviewing the tech than many places. That’s what we should focus on, submit, and talk about here. As we already do. :)
I upvoted it even though I fully remember the lessons that I’ve learned from alynpost, friendlysock, et al… Something like “just because I like it doesn’t mean that it is healthy for lobste.rs”.
We crustaceans are part of the intended audience of this content and it is not meant to be healthy for our communities, any more than the cessation of cobalt mining would be…
I don’t want to discuss it here. Egads, I like some of you, let’s not ruin that. ;)
To wit: I think we should all watch this an mull over it privately. Don’t downvote it away, please.
Some political assumptions made in this piece only serve to discredit the author in my eyes, and lobsters is not the right place for discussion on the topic. Not downvoting, but I don’t like seeing content like this.
Perhaps this is a reasonable place to open a discussion about why lobste.rs doesn’t have a politics tag. The way technology is built and used is political; it’s hard to entertain arguments against that. I have deep empathy with the point of view that technology is a craft and an engineering discipline and there is a whole set of discussions and a space to be made for talking about technology in as non political a way as possible, which is what lobste.rs currently does, and I do kind of like it like that.
However the reason I think it’s important to bring political discourse into this space is because you lobste.rs are making politics decisions when you choose your job, choose the work you do and make critical technological and political decisions as part of your work which affect All Your Relationships*; this is an intelligent, considerate and engaged community and I see much more harm than good in choosing to hide from that fact, though I will say again I have a huge respect for and enjoyment of this space as a non-political one.
So I suppose I’d like to pose the question, given that the tagging system allows any user to filter out posts they are not interested in, what does the lobste.rs community have to lose by opening itself to some political discussion? Is there a feeling that it will somehow pose a risk to this community? Is there a fear that a certain type of user will be attracted, that a certain type of behaviour will be allowed/promoted by this which will have a negative impact throughout the whole site?
I don’t want to promote the idea that lobste.rs should be a political space, I want to check in with everyone here that we are all ok that it isn’t and have properly checked in with what our fears and rationalisations are about that choice.
** The ‘All Your Relationships’ idea comes from the talk in this link which suggests the idea that all technologists are touching a huge network of people and that in some way you have a real relationship with many many people, e.g. all the people that worked to manufacture the phone in your pocket.
see
Long answerTag usage
First, a note on tags: every tag we add is an explicit endorsement that that sort of content is acceptable and encouraged on the site–the omission of a tag is a hint that maybe that content would be better served elsewhere.
If we were to include a
politicstag, we’d in effect be saying “Okay, the distribution of topics appropriate for Lobsters now includes politics. This is valid to bring up in all conversations, because at worst it’s merely mislabeled and mistagged.” So, we’re then stuck with more politics in everyday use in the site.Availability elsewhere
Simply put, politics are better covered elsewhere:
It’s not like our fellow crustaceans can’t find something to slate their thirst for politics elsewhere–not only that, but they have dozens if not hundreds of sites to choose from to match their political requirements.
By contrast, Lobsters itself is a rare gem (if I may say so myself) in that it is relatively pure technical discussion, a refuge from a world of blathering bullshit and ponderous pandering.
Politics is the boardkiller
I’ve explored elsewhere how political submissions can be used to farm karma at the expense of discussion. The key things to note about political articles:
We probably share this board with a few tankies. We probably share this board with a few Nazis. We have folks here that don’t recognize a standard arrangement of genders or possibly even human identities. We have folks that are from the US, from the UK, from the rest of the world. We even have a few Windows users.
And we all get along (mostly) because we aren’t constantly pitted against each other in pointless tribal ideological posturing and signaling. We all get to respect each other as practitioners of technology instead of representatives of some other out-group.
Why would we want to risk sacrificing that?
EDIT:
I’ll point out that 4chan has created at least 2 containment boards for politics (the equivalent of your proposed tag), and not only has that failed it’s only fostered some of the most corrosive drivel on the internet.
It’s not. We have the meta tag and chat for meta discussions.
Chat link is broken? Are you referring to IRC? For people that don’t inhabit that space is there any mechanism for decisions / important discussions that happen there to get filtered back to the website?
Fixed the chat link; should’ve been to
/chatnot/, sorry about that.Discussion filters back into meta threads. We’re generally just shooting the breeze or kicking ideas around, it’s not very serious because it’s so transient and has only a fraction of the community on it. The only important thing I can think of that’s come out of it was this comment (though it’s been a long couple days for me so maybe I’m forgetting something).
We don’t have a politics tag, in part and sufficiently, because the topic is too broad for a contributor to have a meaningful understanding of the topics and discussion that would fall under it. For folk that can make meaningful, informed, truthful, and constructive contributions in an on-topic matter, there is the law tag.
We’re a community of practitioners. The practice of politics is law. Practitioners of law, whether legislators, lawyers, judges, or any of the various roles in courts and the extant legal system are welcome here. Along with the technical discussions these practitioners engage in.
This is called entryism: “…an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program.”
Here you providing a totalizing reason (“All Your Relationships”) as to why a new tag should be added. Tags are deflationary, not inflationary. They identify areas where a subset of our readers and contributors can expect detailed, operational, consistent, and where possible even scientific discourse. And that further they can measure their own understanding of the topic because it has clear and defined boundaries.
Politics is off-topic here because it lacks parsimony. In order to create space for technical topics we do not discriminate on the basis of people, groups, or fields of endeavor. Folk are here to talk about and work on their own and their field’s issues in sufficient technical detail to coordinate with their peers. Ideology, politics, propaganda, framing, and other fictionalisms are an impediment to dealing with the technical and material nature of our work and world.
The chattering class has plenty of places on the Internet to proselytize. This isn’t one of them.
“Perhaps this is a reasonable place to open a discussion about why lobste.rs doesn’t have a politics tag.”
We did. The were a large number of people in support of or against politics or tags. No clear winner. Further, most that support it want to be able to talk about it on any article to push their political views. Of them, some want many views to be discussed as part of the political process and others want all opponents censored and/or ejected. For different reasons, both need political comments available on every thread. There’s some others but that’s the major groups based on what they said or did.
Im in the group that’s for banning most politics or limiting it to politically-focused threads tagged as such. Like I said, the prior discussions got nowhere for my side. So, I discourage even talking about it to avoid polluting more threads. We can just do a yearly meta or something to assess if the community’s preferences have changed. That’s assuming @pushcx would go with the popular vote to begin with. His own convictions might lead him to do something different.
Who knows except to say we’re better off not talking about banning politics or a new tag more than once a year since it’s wasted bandwidth that also often causes headaches for our moderators when fights break out.
Is there a link to where we (who?) did?
I can’t find the ones about tags past the comments we just made. Search engine isn’t that good. The political arguments have mostly been scattered among many threads. No links to take you right to what you want. Sorry. The fact that I don’t have one readily available might be a good reason to do another one as a tag suggestion. Then, you’ll probably see people’s views real quickly. ;)
[Comment removed by author]
This talk is only tangentially about climate change, as one globally significant effect that technology has and a great example of how to think about the result of technological work.
‘politics’ is about how groups of people take action together, (in anything other than the most rudimentary ways). So climate change science is different from, but will inform climate change politics, which will be the process of figuring out as a group of people how to collectively respond to the information we understand from climate change science.
to bring this back to my original point, I’m suggesting that the lobste.rs community can have a positive benefit on politics (therefore directly influencing e.g. climate change) through technology by discussion, and therefore should consider carefully the choice to not do that.
You benefit politics by interacting with branches of government, bribes to politicians paid through lobbyists, court action, and last (in effectiveness for time invested) getting a huge pile of voters to push their officials for a specific thing. You can’t do any of that though a tiny, slow-moving, tech forum. We were neither setup for mass action or government interventions nor mostly capable of it. So, doing the people-oriented parts of reform on Lobsters is mostly waste.
Now, Lobsters can help on the legal or technical side by creating the alternatives along with cost-benefit analyses. Then, get folks to share and describe it in places that get lots of attention. Some can even be a business that becomes a Barnacl.es submission after succeeding financially and on mission as a nonprofit or public-benefit corporation. Lobsters has more talent for producing and reviewing the tech than many places. That’s what we should focus on, submit, and talk about here. As we already do. :)
I upvoted it even though I fully remember the lessons that I’ve learned from alynpost, friendlysock, et al… Something like “just because I like it doesn’t mean that it is healthy for lobste.rs”.
We crustaceans are part of the intended audience of this content and it is not meant to be healthy for our communities, any more than the cessation of cobalt mining would be…
I don’t want to discuss it here. Egads, I like some of you, let’s not ruin that. ;)
To wit: I think we should all watch this an mull over it privately. Don’t downvote it away, please.
I feel like the OP would have avoided the downvotes if they didn’t try to derail the comments with an off-topic appeal for a politics tag.
Some political assumptions made in this piece only serve to discredit the author in my eyes, and lobsters is not the right place for discussion on the topic. Not downvoting, but I don’t like seeing content like this.