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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin discussions for example have similar limitations and I would be happy to ban them as well. In the end HN has limited bandwidth and there are more interesting things to discuss.

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Not sure how HN has limited bandwidth. It would seemingly be easy to simply ignore Bitcoin discussions if you don't care for the topic. I avoid discussions of Ruby on Rails but do not believe they should be suppressed.

There are only a certain number of spaces on the front page, and I think there's a legitimate argument that the vitriol political discussions tend to generate will subtly seep into a community over time. I'd rather see the political garbage relegated to the many other places more suited for it.

This means accepting that certain topics are not a good fit here. Do we really need to re-litigate "what about the jobs?" anytime an AI discussion comes up? Or "what about Trump?" every time Twitter comes up?

I agree that there is a need to limit topics that can result in vitriol, but I disagree with the notion that we should blanket-ban stories that are deeply intertwined with tech as an industry or as a concept.

This story about the inexorable scope creep of surveillance technology is far too important to ban discussing simply because some users will be vitriolic.

Surveillance and the technology that enables it will be the defining issue of the next decade.

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