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Comment by jeromec | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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