"The person who shot the gun did not read HN, I may be wrong but I feel this is a fair assumption"

The systems on which that person read the false information that drove them to shoot the gun were built by people who read HN. That may sound like a lot of levels of indirection, but to ignore politics for a week seems like a symptom of pretending that we are not a part of the problem.

I think the technology running the web needs to be thought of as a part of the fourth estate. We are not separate from the media which we have restructured.

While I think that we should use every tool at our disposal to work to mitigate disasters like the one you mention, I also don't think it's on Technology to fix this issue itself. Facebook isn't the cause of people being stupid, people are. This is not a new issue and it is not something that the people who read this site are responsible for.

It is also an experiment. I'd like to emphasize that. It is an experiment. It is OK to not get politics on HN for a week. It will not be the cause of a global meltdown in society.

I'm also pretty confident that if some ground breaking news broke about Donald Trump wanting to launch a nuclear weapon that dang would allow that, but the current noise that is happening can be removed for a week is a good experiment.

As an experiment it is interesting, and there certainly community management is hard. Also, I think that better community management is maybe some of the problem on Facebook and Twitter, so there is quite a bit of irony in me arguing against it.

But...

The media and technology revolution that we are both living through and shaping with the technologies that we deploy should be something that we actively discuss and wrestle with. I've recently been reading more history of the impact of the printing press (scientific revolution, monarchy => democracy, reformation, and a lot of war).

"This is not a new issue and it is not something that the people who read this site are responsible for."

I could not disagree more strongly. The web is quite new, and we don't understand its impact on society. Certainly the people on this site are not entirely responsible for it, but I think that we should feel some responsibility for it. I certainly do.

An experiment has clearly defined goals and a control. What are we testing here? Whether we are better educated when the week is over? Whether we feel better about what we read and how we participated here? What are the metrics?

HN might not should be or should strive to be the place where you get your news about politics - but it has certainly educated me about political positions and history in the past.

2) It's not relevant whether the shooter read HN, but there could be very fruitful discussions as to how this was instigated because of social media of which is mainly built by tech in the bay area.

3) 24 hour news may be an issue of degradation but fake news perpetuated within giant tech companies is also an issue. You cannot talk about fake news without going into the politics of it.

OK I'd go on and emphasize. 1) 1) 1) 1).

It is an experiment. That's a good thing. Let's talk about solving Fake News in a week. If they try to ban politics on HN in a week I'll get up in arms with you.

3) perpetuated by the users of software distributed by giant tech companies

To finish up: It is an experiment.

It's the evaluation of the experiment that I am most worried about. How do you evaluate a decrease in people being exposed to diversity of opinion? How do you evaluate how many articles are willfully suppressed but might have been lead to good discussion?

I am afraid that potential benefits of this policy are easier to measure (I.e. less flame wars) and the bad parts are not (less deep and critical discussion), we will lead to the conclusion that it is better to keep such a policy in place without a good sense of what we are losing in the process.

1. This experiment is directly harmful in that it is using living subjects, without ethics review.

2. The person who shot the gun was informed by Reddit, a company that had it's genesis here. The Y Combinator is a function that makes other functions.

The Internet is not like a blank canvas. The decisions we make about a platform, about news optimization, and about community structure affect our public discourse. If Twitter had set it's character limit at 280 characters, that would have had a profound effect on the marketplace of ideas in the public sphere.

3. The issue is that the particular forms of communication which enabled these thought-bubbles to exist were created by a handful of decisions by software developers.

4. HN is where I get my news about technology. Technology is a crucial area of political discussion, and right now the very basic freedoms of the internet are under direct threat from political forces.

Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?

1) No it is not going to harm it's living subjects. That is complete hyperbole. You having to go somewhere else for your news for a week will not affect you. Sweet baby Jesus. Seriously?

2) The person was informed by the hive mind of a subreddit that reddit allows. I mean look at what happened when the Steve went and edited user data on Reddit. We talk about not wanting censorship, but then we blame technologies that don't sensor for having toxic communities. How do you find out if the community or the individual is to blame? Would you perform an Experiment?

3) Software has perpetuated the thought bubble issue, this is one thing I can think of being introduced to society purely by software so I agree on this point.

4) Which is why I think after the experiment we should go back to politics on HN.

> Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?

I get my political news from other sources, I'd suggest anyone reading this does too.