Why… would that be ideal? I certainly do not consider my opinions on policy and politics to be forbidden on this site? The topic of politics itself should be approached with care, but certainly it would be if anything a pretty bad violation of what I would consider good conduct if people systematically kept their opinions on politics and policy hidden. Those things matter!
My worry is one or two people loyal to the red team leave the site, which makes people on the blue team feel more free to use the site to criticize the red team, causing more red teamers to leave (and attracting blue-team zealots who filter everything through an ideological lens) in a positive feedback loop ending in a site with the same problem as Bluesky already has and many subreddits already have, namely, the zealots produce large quantities of low-quality writing, which drowns out the high-quality contributions and discourages many who can make high-quality contributions from even starting to contribute.
ADDED. Since LW is currently very far from Bluesky, perhaps it would’ve been more persuasive for me to argue that if LW were to start to have even half as many low-effort political comments as Hacker News, many would probably stop reading LW, or at least that is my worry.
Yeah, definitely agree. I just think the standard of “admins should comment in a way that makes it impossible to tell what their political opinions are” is not the best tool to achieve this. I think it’s better for people to be open about their views, and also try really hard to be principled and fair.
Why… would that be ideal? I certainly do not consider my opinions on policy and politics to be forbidden on this site? The topic of politics itself should be approached with care, but certainly it would be if anything a pretty bad violation of what I would consider good conduct if people systematically kept their opinions on politics and policy hidden. Those things matter!
My worry is one or two people loyal to the red team leave the site, which makes people on the blue team feel more free to use the site to criticize the red team, causing more red teamers to leave (and attracting blue-team zealots who filter everything through an ideological lens) in a positive feedback loop ending in a site with the same problem as Bluesky already has and many subreddits already have, namely, the zealots produce large quantities of low-quality writing, which drowns out the high-quality contributions and discourages many who can make high-quality contributions from even starting to contribute.
ADDED. Since LW is currently very far from Bluesky, perhaps it would’ve been more persuasive for me to argue that if LW were to start to have even half as many low-effort political comments as Hacker News, many would probably stop reading LW, or at least that is my worry.
Yeah, definitely agree. I just think the standard of “admins should comment in a way that makes it impossible to tell what their political opinions are” is not the best tool to achieve this. I think it’s better for people to be open about their views, and also try really hard to be principled and fair.