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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

No, it hasn't. The rule has been the same for years: most politics are off topic. Check it out: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The difference between "most" and "all" is significant. HN can't be immune to what's going on in the outside world and we've learned from years of experience that it doesn't make sense to try. At the same time, we're not going to let politics overwhelm the site, since that would kill it.

The concern about HN becoming too political or not political enough is as old as HN. There are at least as many users complaining that we're suppressing all the political stories and what not. I wrote more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433 if anyone's interested.

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I wish I had the time to gather the data. Someone please do this. Make sure to normalize against total activity.

I'm a hn user since at least 9.8 years ago (my first HN handle was different than current, which is 7 years old).

To my impression as a relatively apolitical person, the site has become MUCH more political in the past year. I may be wrong in that though.

The issues affecting the tech community seem to have gotten a lot more political in the past year as well. Immigration issues, net neutrality, surveillance, women and diversity issues have all been particularly politicized recently.

> To my impression as a relatively apolitical person, the site has become MUCH more political in the past year. I may be wrong in that though.

It's an election year.

Some of the policies and statements on display are extremely divisive.

Divisiveness breeds discontent at all levels, discussion, intimidation, outright violence.

The entire world became much more political in the past year. Looks like 2017 will increase it even more.

HN comments are available as a public dataset in Google Bigquery, so you're perhaps 30 minutes away from an answer.

I used the word 'mainly' because I understand that HN has always had some political conversation in the background. I have personally learned about immigration issues, digital privacy, etc. etc. on HN. Those are valuable things to understand, and I enjoyed reading about them.

Now, it is clear that YC leadership has taken a highly liberal stand. I won't make a judgement on liberal or republican, but it feels more and more extreme. When an organization leans either direction too hard, it loses its purity. YC is becoming the liberal version of the Koche Brothers. HN is reflecting that in YC's movement.

I'm sure that Sam Altman and the rest of your team feel that it is worth it, but in my opinion, overt political support by an organization feels like a losing long-term strategy.

I guess we will see

> Now, it is clear that YC leadership has taken a highly liberal stand.

How do you figure? It seems more that the GOP has driven off of a sanity cliff, and the "liberal" party is the only party left for sane people to join.

Supporting civil rights is not taking a "highly liberal stand". Just because American politics has shifted to the extreme right doesn't mean everyone needs to shift with it or that people who were moderates yesterday are now extreme liberals.

I would be very afraid of anyone who thinks that protecting the rights guaranteed by the Constitution is "highly liberal". You do realize that the ACUL has been known to defend the rights of KKK and Nazi party members too, right? They stand up for everyone's rights, not just liberals.

I'm a supporter of the ACLU, my cousin even worked there for a bit. Regardless of your personal beliefs, it is clear that YC's involvement with the ACLU is a political decision which does not match their business model. They are even referencing the recent election and republican party's decisions as the reason they are doing it.

There were lots of civil liberties eroded during Obama's presidency, but YC & Sam Altman at no point in time stood up and said anything or did anything like they are doing now.

YC is a business. They're a tech company, really. And like most tech companies, they employ a lot of immigrants. It's not hard to imagine they've been impacted by the president's recent policies. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Uber, Lyft, Netflix, Slack, Facebook, and a ton more have directly spoken out against Trump's order. It has a pretty major impact. Are all of those companies shameless liberals, too? Just playing politics? Or are they speaking out against something that will directly hurt their business?

Donald Trump's order is not conservative, and opposing it is not liberal. The order is authoritarian. This is not a conservative vs liberal fight in any way and the ACLU is not a liberal organization. If you want to be cynical about it, this is a business move. They didn't stand up in the past because Obama's policies didn't threaten their business model like Trump's do.

YC is a private, early stage investment company that also has an asset management arm. They focus on making technology related investments including everything from web apps to nuclear power. They are not a technology company any more than any VC is. YC is a finance company, more similar to Goldman Saches than Apple.

The rest of your comment is too political for me to comment on.

HN is reflecting that in YC's movement.

I think it's uncontroversial that there are likely a large number of HN members who have favorable opinions of Y Combinator. That said, I don't see evidence of Y Combinator exercising any kind of persuasion or manipulation of the members where one can reasonably say that HN members are following Y Combinator's lead. And there's enough vociferous, contentious, argumentative political discussion on HN that it's clear to me that HN doesn't represent a single bloc of anything other than all participating in the HN forums.

As for YC becoming the liberal version of the Koch brothers, I think it's hard to underestimate the difference in scale. In January 2015, the Koch brothers budge for the 2016 campaign was nearly $900 million.[0] Along with Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers largely bankrolled the Tea Party into national government[1] in 2010.

Another significant difference, in my opinion, is that the Koch brothers themselves are not very vocal or public. They operate largely behind the scenes. Y Combinator has been much more vocal about what they're doing.

And it bears keeping in mind that YC has kept Peter Thiel on as a part-time partner: if YC's motivations were purely political, I think it's fair to say they'd have cut ties with Thiel just as so many have been clamoring for them to do.

All said, I don't think the comparison has much merit.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/kochs-plan-to...

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

The last election clearly showed that dollars are not as important as they once were. Mobilizing individuals is now becoming more and more powerful and YC surely understands it.

I do appreciate your comment

HN moderation isn't particularly connected to developments like YC funding the ACLU. I add 'particularly' because maybe there's some weak action at a distance that none of us are conscious of, but it's nothing like the close correspondence your comment suggests. We have well-established methods for moderating HN that don't fluctuate a whole lot even as the world fluctuates around them.

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