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Comment by obiefernandez | Hacker News Reader

I'm glued to AlJazeera at the moment and have definitely been following the whole story with enthusiastic interest since the beginning.

BUT

Why are we discussing this topic here again? Seems completely off-topic...

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Pretty much every piece of really significant world news gets discussed here, no matter what the topic. I find that fine, as long as the bar is high enough that it's not all the time.

Agreed, it actually makes me feel proud that this community is so well rounded...unlike a lot of other fields.

This community is not supposed to be "well rounded". I think you're looking for Digg and Reddit.

If the community doesn't want this here then why does it have nearly 100 up votes in under an hour?

Have you stopped beating your wife?

For the downvoters, zeteo is referencing a logical fallacy used by the parent comment to his: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/loadques.html

It's not a loaded question, it's a statement of fact "100 upvotes", implied conclusion "community wants this", and invitation to provide alternative explanation "question mark".

It's loaded because it sets up and destroys a straw man. The great-great-great-grandparent never argued that the community doesn't want this, only that it's not supposed to.

You're right that according to the site's guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) political stories are usually off-topic.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

However, there is an exception given for "interesting new phenomenon". I would say revolutions of a scale not seen in a region for thousands of years would qualify.

Turkey? Iran?

Seems like Iran gave that a try before but without much success. Depending on how you measure success of course...

What about Turkey? He is going through an era of political and economical stability unseen since his inception 80 years ago.

What is most compelling about this is first it was Tunisia, then Egypt. Who is next?

If it continues it will probably be world-changing no matter what the outcome.

I'd guess either Jordan or Syria.

Though I'd expect autocrats around the world will not be pleased.

What's interesting is that several of the potential countries have been taking pre-emptive steps to avoid exactly this situation. Yemen's dictator said he won't try to get his term extended to life, Jordan's king sacked his entire government, Algeria's dictator pulled back the country's two decades of emergency law, and Syria cracked down on protesters with police beatings...

It is completely off-topic.†

People will want meat to dig into for a meta-argument about global politics and I'm not going to offer it up, but let it just be said: it's very bad for HN that this stuff is being covered so prominently on the site. It absolutely, positively a slippery slope.

The site is clearly tacking away from serving entrepreneurial hackers and towards serving smart people who want a place to talk about everything they care deeply about.

I'm not writing my goodbye note or anything, but I'm having more and more of my best conversations in private cliques and off HN because HN is becoming less and less hospitable to those kinds of conversations.

† Need evidence? Graham appears to have manually weighted it off the front page; just a little while ago, a Mubarak story was parked there with 237 votes.

I have to disagree that the site is tacking away from serving entrepreneurial hackers. PG just recently posted that the site, even with all of its growth, seems to have kept fairly well the integrity of the homepage and quality of discussion. I can understand a fear that non-hackerish topics can threaten to steer a site more into the mainstream, but I don't think that's a worry with something like this because these kinds of events are not to be expected to occur all the time.

Then Graham is wrong. I appreciate the effort he puts in and that his heart is in the right place, but the metrics I've seen from him aren't compelling (for instance, /classic, compared to just comparing front pages with archive.org and --- particularly --- which threads generate the most heat).

And, sorry, but I've been watching conversations like this one for something like 3.5 years now, and this is a real issue.

Perhaps the problem is that there isn't really anywhere that serves that niche.

Not that I'm offering to try and fill it - but perhaps somebody else on here might want to give it a go?

> Perhaps the problem is that there isn't really anywhere that serves that niche.

The problem is that politics is poisonous for most sites. It really quickly degrades into the same rehashed arguments and name calling and other garbage.

Eh, I don't see it as any worse than any of the other miscellaneous distractions that've cropped up over the year I've been posting here (admittedly I don't know much of what it was like before then). Sometimes they're the top thing for a day or two, but not that big a proportion overall. We had 2 or 3 weeks where for some reason fitness/exercise/weightlifting was a big thing here ("hacking your body"), then there was a flurry of articles on dating and pick-up artists ("hacking dating"), etc. And generic politics/economics threads date back a few years, from what I can tell in the archives (a million rounds of libertarians v. social-democrats).

edit: As just one example, here's a 2007 HN debate on unions, with a mixture of good discussion and political acrimony, and a side thread where people debate whether this kind of debate belongs on HN, or should stay on reddit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249

This is just "hacking politics" :)

People tend to have much stronger opinions/prejudice on politics than on fitness.

It's interesting to read non-hacking discussions in HN when they are from a perceptive (vs. judgmental) standpoint. As it is now, there isn't really much difference between Egypt threads here and in Reddit (yeah, I know we're not supposed to compare. HN isn't Reddit yet, but HN geo-political discussions are)

A lot of HN users are also Redditors, and personally I think Reddit (perhaps r/worldnews or r/worldpolitics) would be a more appropriate forum for this type of thing.

That said, this particular ongoing incident is really really big. Like Tiananmen Square or Berlin Wall big. Once in a while something is important and far reaching enough for us all to shift focus for a moment.

Everybody thinks the things they are passionate about are important enough "for us all to shift focus for a moment".

True, however I think we can all recognize this as an event that could shift the political and power structure of the entire Middle East (should those dominoes start to fall). Even if politics bores you, this is of major significance regardless of personal opinions.

> "serving entrepreneurial hackers "

well, one can make an argument how revolution is a social hack, and vice versa - hacking in software industry has frequently been a particular manifestation of general phenomena of people not wanting to just go with the flow of the established system, and wanting to change it instead. Open source movement ~20 years ago or WikiLeaks today seems to be very illustrations of it.

And also for the fact that social networks have played such a large role.

Evidence? Yes, some of the protesters have been using Facebook and Twitter, but were they a large proportion of the total, and how could this have been significant when the Internet itself was shut down over there? Don't confuse the fact that you found out a lot about the protests on social media, with the social media having a lot of influence upon the Egyptian events.

It is very much off topic. However, my interest in what this community has to say about it is of abiding interest.

I agree that it's not exactly "on topic" in the traditional sense, but it's important enough in the general sense, that a lot of hackers actually are interested. At the end of the day, what's on-topic or not reduces to what people vote up and/or don't vote up. People want to discuss this, so it's on topic unless pg or an editor decide they don't like it for some reason, and manually axe it.

agreed. it's also widely considered to be a technology-inspired revolution.

I have no sympathy for Mubarak, but the way the mass-media has been covering this has been totally one-sided. There are a few interesting technical sides of the story (Internet getting shut down), but overall the whole thing smacks too much of propaganda. So I agree that the general story has no place on HN.

Does every story have an "other side" like you seem to expect? What if Mubarak really is just another kleptocratic authoritarian now showing possible signs of mental instability with his "I'll leave/I'm staying" schtick? Is it the media's job to make that seem sympathetic?

In fact, I'll go further with this: One of the big things I hate about (American) mainstream media is that it tries too hard to give "both sides" of a one-sided issue. A case in point is the whole thing about whether vaccines cause autism: Informed people knew from pretty much day one that they don't, and that the whole supposed 'debate' was completely manufactured by a combination of cynical lawsuit-mongers and abysmally ignorant celebrities. Yet you'd have never known that from how respectfully those trolls were treated and how seriously the 'debates' were handled in the mainstream media.

That's actually a somewhat common critique of the media; I'm bringing it up now because what you said happened to clang on it to some extent. I'm not trying to attack you with it.

For what it is worth, Mubarak has been a peacemaker in the Middle East, and largely a protector of Egyptian minorities.

As years go by, we discover that even Nicholas II had his good sides, and his regime was certainly better than its replacement. And the last czar was much more of an autocrat than Mubarak ever hoped for.

In any case, what I'm taking issue with is that the media show huge bias by immediately jumping on any rumors of Mubarak's resignation (self fulfilling prophecies, anyone?), that all anti-government protesters are portrayed as noble heroes (even though a significant proportion are certainly West-hating Islamic radicals), that all of Mubarak's supporters are paid thugs etc. This is a huge political morass and something that doesn't belong on HN.

You're right. Let's discuss why we're discussing it, instead.

Because it's an interesting phenomenon as previosly stated, and because we're talking about a politician that managed to cut off an entire country from the Internet.

I'd say a developing grass-roots democratic revolution in the middle east is of supreme interest to most people here, as is evidenced by the stories being atop the front page.

Don't worry, we're not turning into reddit. This is just some momentous shit (pardon my french), and it would be pretty silly not to have breaking developments up here.

I agree, how does this qualify as hacker news ? There are other websites where this has its place.

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