Emphasis mine unless otherwise noted.

The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces
Many technical spaces have become extremely partisan

The author flings back and forth between "political" and "partisan" as if they were synonymous, when they aren't. So, to be clear:

Something is political when it regards the defence of interests of human beings. If it involves 2+ people, you got politics. Yes, it's that wide; everything related to human groups has at least some political aspect, there's no way out. (Even picking which topics to discuss in social media, by the way.)

In the meantime, partisanship is the association with a group of people that share the same values, regarding some political issue, and seek to promote those values.

Both things need to be kept distinct and clear.

We need not look at the particulars or righteousness of any involved side to recognize that this politicization is an undesirable thing

Politicisation ("to make things political") is typically desirable — it acknowledges that everyone's actions have an impact on everyone else's life, and that sometimes will incur in conflicts of interest, that need to be somehow solved.

Partisanship is also sometimes desirable, when it gives people power to defend themselves against other people. That's the case with the partisanship you typically see in tech sites; it boils mostly down to "some group is trying to deny us right, we should warn other people about this, and we should gather together so we can exert political pressure so we keep those rights". Stuff like right to repair, deplatforming fascists, not letting big tech have its way, privacy, guess what, it's all partisanship!

So no matter how you interpret the slop the author said in this utterance (as politicisation strictu sensu or as a complain against partisanship), it's clear they're 1) vomiting an assumption, and 2) treating the reader as if they were gullible filth, eager to eat the author's vomit.

As a side effect, we can develop a bit more empathy or at least understanding for the people who’ve said “hey, can we just keep politics out of tech spaces”.

Yeah, nah.

In another situation I'd potentially agree with the author, given a lot of people use the word "politics" to refer to "divisive off-topic, derailing the discussion into the same handful of topics regarding GAFAM, government affairs and individuals, and parasites/billionaires/leeches". In those situations "please no politics" conveys "I want to discuss the topic at hand, and share info", so it's mostly fine.

In this case, though? Screw it. To "show empathy", in this case, means "stop fighting for your own rights! You should shut up, and lower yourself from a human being into a living doormat".

The types of games we play // There are three types of payout structures in game theory:

More often than not, when you split a quantitative matter into a dichotomy (or tri-, or tetra-, etc.), the conclusions are bloody dumb. It's simply better to acknowledge you have a quantitative matter; otherwise you'll end lumping together things that are orders of magnitude different as if they were "the same shit", and wrongly cancelling things out. (For example: "-100 is negative, +5 is positive, so if we add them it becomes neutral". Yup, it's that dumb, but when you simplify things like this you don't notice it.)

This will be relevant later on.

Every participant comes away with knowledge at no real cost beyond that of the time spent participating.

"At no real cost, except the thing that matters the most in this context". Pfffffft.

at this point, things go from being positive-sum to potentially zero-sum, as every work I share must compete for limited headspace

First off. Following the idiotic categories the author himself set up, "zero-sum" would mean either

• the interaction neither benefits nor harms either side of the interaction; or
• the interaction harms one side of the interaction as much as it benefits the other

Neither is the case here. The author is coming up with a dumb model, but not even arsing himself to follow it.

And when you do follow the model, you get the following:

• if the submitter is a perfectly rational agent, they'll only share something if the cost associated with producing and sharing the content is outweighed by the sum of the benefit associated with each visualisation of the content, including further interactions. As such, from the PoV of the submitter, it's always a positive; otherwise they wouldn't bother.
• for the people viewing the content, the interaction can go from a mild negative (that submission is junk) to a large positive (the submission changes their life meaningfully, to the better) to anything in between. That is of course expecting submissions that actively harm viewers (e.g. harassment) are removed/moderated.

It's almost always positive, except if the submission is something people actively don't want to see. But to realise that you can't really split the gradient into a trichotomy, you need to deal with it as a gradient.

Now, which "tech sites" was the author talking about, again? Slashdot, Reddit [sic], Hacker News? All of them have a voting system exactly for this reason — things people don't want to see get out of the way.

How politics destroys discussion // Politics is ultimately about which group has power over other groups.

Wroooooooooooooooooong. As already explained.

Power–by which I mean the ability to make binding decisions without the consent of all parties (e.g., use of force but equally importantly things like status and access)

Yeah, soft power doesn't exist at all. *rolls eyes*

in bounded communities is, by definition, a zero-sum game. This is unavoidable: if I get my way then you cannot also get your way (unless it agrees with mine).

Only if you use such an esoteric definition of "politics" that excludes the outcome of the policies being defended.

Alright. This text is shitty enough for me to bother further with it.