I don't have to be oblivious to the intersection between my work and politics to believe that HN is a poor venue for politics. Politics is inseparable from technology in a very similar sense as it's inseparable from woodworking, but we don't imagine a woodworking forum would have a hard time enforcing a ban on purely political posts that were crowding out hand-cut dovetail tutorials.

This dichotomy that keeps being presented on HN --- that one either supports politics on HN or is oblivious to politics --- is obviously false, and a little offensive. People who feel a proprietary ownership over political awareness are often missing something.

I don't know what your politics are, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they're comparable to my own. Respectfully, I'm going to keep playing this card until my deck runs dry of them, which could be awhile: I think there's might not be anybody else on the site who has put more effort into political persuasion about racial and gender equity than I have (not because I'm a great person, but because I'm a quintessential message board nerd that happens to have strongly held beliefs about structural injustice in our field). I've learned a couple of things in that work:

* It takes way more effort to compose a careful, persuasive comment about political issues on HN than it does to compose a shrill, superficial, partisan appeal to one issue's pole or the other. The bad comments have a structural advantage.

* Political threads on HN are invariably nastier than technical threads, in part because they attract a lower grade of commenter that thrives on accumulating karma from shrill partisan appeals.

* The rest of the tech community does not appreciate thoughtful political commentary on HN, and in fact has created an ongoing schtick whose premise is that HN should be written off --- politically engaged tech people are less likely to have an active HN account than a Wicker Park hipster is to own a TV.

* Despite the almost total lack of support I feel from the rest of the tech community (or at least that portion of the community that shares our beliefs about structural injustice) --- really, the almost total lack of awareness of HN they have, apart from the circulation of egregiously awful comments in the few moments they exist here before people like me flag them off the site --- these people all have curiously strong opinions about how the site should be moderated.

* The net result of all these bullets is that political threads on HN are a shitshow --- they're almost guaranteed to be a shitshow, because all these people who feel so strongly that repressing politics on HN represents further repression of the underrepresented are unwilling to put the effort in to doing the required amount of writing to ensure that political threads are productive, rather than just an awful joke to share with each other on Twitter.

It's all a little galling.