Ask HN: Why is there no mention of the manafort indictment on the front page? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is there no mention of the manafort indictment on the front page?

6 pointsphilipov8 comments

And it seems like when I try to post about it, it just gets blocked. What's going on?

In addition to what others have said: Many of us are tired of the endless micro-events in the current political scene. Give us the TL;DR. That is, wake us up when something big happens. This wasn't it. Something that the probe found, involving some of the players, but not directly related to the election? Yeah, I don't care enough to pay much attention. I sure don't need an HN discussion about it. (I know, I can just skip the HN discussion, and let those who care participate. But the point is, I suspect that many people here feel this way.)

Simple: it's off-topic here. Generic "world news" stuff is generally considered off-topic. Although they seem to have relaxed that a bit over the years, I still don't see any reason to have the Manafort stuff on here. It's not like there aren't thousands of places on the 'net to read about / discuss that topic.

They seem to be much more lenient with "positive" off-topic news. Meaning news that doesn't cause arguments or controversy.

US Politics by its very nature always causes a flame war, and definitely could overwhelm the front page if allowed to.

I for one am happy with the status quo, I come to HK to read HK relevant articles and discussions. If I want to read US Politics then Reddit, Twitter, and many other social media platforms/forums would suffice.

This is hacker news, not a political debate bulletin board. If you want to discuss politics there are forums and online communities for that. For example political crossfire.

It doesn't seem like that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, more an indictment based on shady personal business dealings rather than some serious political conspiracy.

It's off topic.

To make it on topic (going fictional here) it would have to have a hacker angle like: Manafort funded Russian hackers to flood FaceBook with ads denouncing Clinton and fostering opinions that support Trump. They used a cluster of ... something technical ...

It probably gets culled because it's off-topic according to the guidelines[1].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because this is HN not Reddit

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