Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy just as many normies do. Earlier there was an NYT opinion piece from a sad conservative college professor (flagged), and before that a page from GOPUSA.com calling an internal Google presentation "the end of free speech as we know it" (flagkilled).

How is this stuff getting upvoted?

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The general mix is probably about the same as ever. Streaks of otherwise are probably just random; that of course is how randomness works.

Complaints like this go back about as far as HN does. I wrote a thing about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day.

I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later.

I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. I certainly don't post things to promote any kind of political agenda per se.

I also didn't notice the things you are specifically commenting on. I recall different details from the front page. So there's possibly a certain amount of "You just happened to see X for some reason." which isn't conclusive proof of objective fact.

Yeah, HackerNews seems to be getting closer to Reddit by the day.

I don't know what you mean by that. I participate on Reddit. I experience HN and Reddit as completely different animals. I see them as very extremely an apples to oranges comparison.

Perhaps my comment was the prime example ]=

What I meant is:

Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y. Opinions were mostly well thought out. When they weren't, they were challenged (thanks for calling me out [= ).

Now it just seems like the break-room banter. A lot of sensationalist articles seem to make the front page. A lot of purely comedic comments (which I do appreciate). A lot more unfounded anecdotes. A lot of promotional posts, etc.

Also -- and I'm admittedly putting on my tin hat here -- I've seen a lot of discussions that seem like they're just troll accounts trying to further polarize the community.

Maybe I'm part of the problem ]=

Hacker News is a single entity. Reddit is a conglomeration of sub forums, each with their own interests, rules and moderators.

Reddit is a very cosmopolitan environment. It's like a big city, where you can participate in different social groups and there can be overlap in members, but it isn't guaranteed. Your behavior on one sub forum can impact your reputation on another, but it isn't the same as a situation where you deal with the same moderators and same group of people all the time for everything.

I don't hang on "the front page" of Reddit. I have a few niche interests I dabble in a bit over there.

I occasionally consider writing a blog post to talk about some of the differences between forums of various formats that I've experienced. It's more than I care to try to catalog in a comment here.

But when you say "HN is like Reddit," that doesn't even parse for me. Because it's like "So, exactly what part of Reddit are you comparing it to?" It strikes me as a six blind men and the elephant scenario.

> Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y.

Had you read the site guidelines then (or now!) you'd know that the very first thing they say is that HN is about more than this.

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

It really depends on the topic. Certain topics get very tribal, and generally the snarkiest, least useful comments float to the top.

People have been saying this literally since HN started. In fact the HN guidelines used to include a line asking people not to post about it ("it's a semi-noob illusion"). We removed that guideline for brevity a while ago, but maybe we should bring it back.

> I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons.

As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about, and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political.

There's likely also an increased number of political articles as well, which contributes it's own little bit.

Hacker News' evolution feels a lot like Slashdot's, which also had it's roots in hardcore tech.

I hope it doesn't impact the content or discussion too much.

This perception has also been around forever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485.

Presumably it's a mirage, since "turning into Slashdot/Digg/Reddit" would hardly have been a steady state.

Well, I posted a tweet recently about the difficulties facing (some?) Native Americans in registering to vote. I hesitated to post it knowing it was clearly a political subject. But my interest was in how it was a kind of "bug" in the political system.

Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.

I'm very slightly Cherokee. I've begun following more Native American twitter accounts and I started a new blog to explore my Native heritage a bit. I've posted a number of items about Native issues because that's something I happen to be reading here lately.

There's no political agenda there, though I keep waiting to be accused of such. I post things I happen to trip across. HN can upvote or flag (or just ignore) as it sees fit.

I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.

> I've largely given up on predicting what works here. I have essentially zero ability to do that.

That's part of what makes it fun, at least when it's general randomness that pulls really interesting people into the discussion :)

> Most likely, the two things were not specifically intended to disenfranchise Native voters. Neither taken alone is malicious. Taken together, the outcome is de facto disenfranchisement.

I think that would have been an interesting discussion, if it could have avoided devolving into political tribalism. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it could have. I will say it's interesting to be early in a submission that slightly contentious and to help or see some early comments steered or redirected usefully, and see an article that spent a few minutes flagged come back to life.

> both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs"

As someone who identifies as a relatively apolitical moderate, this has gotten ridiculous in recent years. I mean, whoever thought that "social justice", "science", "reality-based", "clean air", or "international relations" would be identified as partisan liberal issues, or "freedom of speech", "strong economy", or "life" could be partisan conservative issues?

Even more strangely, both sides have claimed "rule of law", and yet it seems to mean completely opposite things depending on who says it.

Definitely. I'm left more and more with feeling like I was happily walking around the center of a party chatting with people, and next thing I know, I look up and the majority of people have rushed the walls, leaving me milling about with with a few other people just as surprised as me.

> I certainly don't post things to promote any kind of political agenda per se.

Posting factual and informative articles is promoting a certain kind of political agenda, truth-based.

That's a nice-sounding claim but "truth" isn't a coherent agenda. There are many things that are true, and a finite life; which true things are worth paying attention to?

Five hundred star-bellies Sneetches and five hundred plain-bellied Sneetches died in combat yesterday; reading just the obituaries of the heroic star-bellied Sneetches and how they gave their lives for peace is truth-based, but it's a very different agenda from the equally-truth-based approach of reading the obituaries of the martyred plain-bellied Sneetches and how they sacrificed everything for their people's freedom.

It's not truth-based if it omits different relevant claims. Naturally there is no such thing as absolute truth but there is a choice of whether more truthful should be of primary concern or not.

Saying that truth doesn't matter because "everybody has their own truth" is a political agenda whose purpose is to make people believe any "truth" is as good as any other and therefore we should not even try to look for evidence.

HN has 5M visitors a month. Well, 4.5M at present. It fluctuates some.

Thanks. I didn't bother to qualify the remark, though I figured it was likely outdated or inaccurate info. Glad to see better data posted here.

This is a report on the competitiveness of the US economy. Seems pretty very relevant to a group of entrepreneurs.

Yea I've noticed that too, especially the number of bogus Bloomberg articles. They get upvoted because people don't know the guidelines and just vote on stuff they find interesting, so perhaps it's a moderator who should be trimming the feed a little more closely?

People always bring up “the guidelines” when they see content they don’t like.

However, the fact of the matter is that people are free to upvote things they find interesting. If you don’t find something interesting, you don’t have to read it or comment on it.

I suspect there is something at play here. I've also noticed the front page is constantly bombarded with economic/political news. Everyday is a new nytimes article, bloomberg twice a day, etc.

It's as if startups have slown down and programming novelties have died off, and it's being padded with politically driven articles.

I’ve been noticing this for some time as well. Either HN is becoming more political or someone is manipulating the voting. I honestly think HN is at its best when it’s apolitical.

but sometimes non political stuff can become politicized

What about when technology or a technological platform is used for political purposes, and the stewards of said technology or technology platform are slow to acknowledge or catch up?

You know honestly I don’t have a good answer for that. On the one hand I feel like we’re intelligent enough to rise above partisan or two sided politics but on the other hand we’re not intelligent enough to realize what the true implications of some of the platforms we’ve built are. And we’re definitely don’t have the forethought to understand that our platforms will and should be used by people we don’t agree with.

I appreciate your answer, and answers like yours are reason enough for me to believe that this topic is one we should talk about more openly despite the risk of the conversation devolving into something undesirable and unhelpful.

Isn't the Bloomberg thing literally about hacking? Or are you talking about a different China Bloomberg article than I am

Well, big argument about this was as it's technically "about" hacking, it just seems that they made most of it up. It is definitely China fear-mongering, though, so I'd say you're both right.

I think they mean the one that is #2 right now about China's hidden debt.

Economics is totally fair game IMO.

But if we start seeing articles about, say, midterm elections, that would suck. :)

I would like it if submitters could tag their posts in three different categories or so; pure tech, economics, and politics. Users could then configure their settings to see the content they want.

I think that this approach could be taken too far so that we would end up with a reddit clone, but a step in this direction seems to be in order now.

News about the economy is only political if you dislike the current administration and hope to blame them for all economic bad news while finding ways to avoid crediting them for any good news or the exact opposite of that. If you look at economic news as just facts about the current situation avoid forming strong opinions about which policies may or may not have brought that situation about, you won't see such things as political issues. You'll also probably be better positioned to make the most out of whatever economic climate you find yourself in.

Both of these are about economics moreso than politics. A lot of HN readers are interested in economics, since the current state of the economy can have huge impacts on startups.

Why are all the examples of bad political news ones that have a right-bent to them?

If we have a sufficient corpus of flagged and flagged killed submission. Maybe we can train a classifier for it. And maybe send for review if the confidence of the classifier is high enough for a new post.

idk if it's that the articles get up voted or the comments on the article and how it sucks and shouldn't be here getting up voted :P like I definitely just up voted your comment here

The upvote threshold for getting out of "new" is tiny. And the US is now so polarized that almost nothing is truly apolitical.

This is not really political per se, and I think it is relevant to an audience of entrepreneurs. Hacker News was once called Startup News.

As for why things are upvoted, they are upvoted because registered users click the button. You can promote your own preferred stories by upvoting them.

How is this stuff getting upvoted?

I dunno... prob because it's popular and people want to read it.

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