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Comment by dfranke | Hacker News Reader

On Twitter, tptacek specifically suggested a hard ban on politics as an example of more restrictive guideslines. What makes me uneasy about this is that there's a huge gray area surrounding what qualifies as politics. For example, I don't regard tptacek's recent comments about the market for talent as politics, but a lot of people probably would. If we ban politics, then petty squabling over politics will be replaced by petty squabbling over censorship each time the mods kill a thread which is only borderline political.

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I can't decide on my opinion of the politics (especially economic policy) submissions. I appreciate some of them, but I can't help but feel most of them are the same regurgitated crap that just happens to get a lot of votes. Presumably these (votes and submissions) are from people who agree with the article, not necessarily because they think it's a valuable new contribution. The best I can think of is to tag them as such and weight them differently. How? I don't know. We don't really have enough information about who votes for what to make guesses like that. (And I'm fully aware that weighting some votes higher than others could easily be seen as elitism)

I like the current guidelines which I'll summarize as "interesting things of interest to hackers."

I agree that "7 degrees of reddit" or whatever is bending the rules too much.

Something like a hard ban on politics might lose things that are of interest. For example, what role are technical tools playing in the arabic revolutions right now? Obviously Wikileaks, reddit, youtube, twitter and facebook are playing major roles. And what role are hackers playing? Assange, Anonymous, and the Egyptian Google guy are all using technical skills to create worldwide revolution. That's pretty exciting, using technology to make political change. But should discussing it be banned? Is it necessary to ban that to get rid of the various latest cop shooting incidents reposted from reddit where technology is at most a minor role.

Not only do I think a lot of the "how technology is changing the Middle East" comments shouldn't be on the front page, but so does Paul Graham; he manually buried a bunch of them last week, despite hugely high ratings.

Do you remember which stories?

BTW, tagging a story as political doesn't cause it to disappear; it just ranks lower, but would probably still be on the frontpage if it had a lot of points.

The "Mubarak resigns" one is the one I remember.

Is tagging an explicit feature of the site? Since I have not seen it, I assume there's a karma threshold for it?

None of us can "tag" things except Graham and his minions.

How do you know that he manually buried them?

(a) Because he did it before with TSA stories.

(b) Because one minute there was a 200+ story at the top of the page less than a day old, and the next minute there was no such story at the top of the new page, and yet the story hadn't been flagged.

According to this comment, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1936734, any admin can "kill [an article], mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing". That implies that pg may not have buried it, and that he didn't make some special exception for that one topic.

All the Egypt stories vanished from the front page at the same time, but I'm not an admin and concede that I could be incorrect about this. He said specifically he was burying TSA stories a few months ago.

Now THAT'S politics.

That's a semantic game. We all know what the word "politics" in the site guidelines means.

So the articles are interesting and have huge ratings so they are of interest to hackers and they are about technology, but one person with power decides he doesn't want to see the topic discussed, so he squashes all discussion with the thumb of a dictator who must not be questioned.

How is this not politics.

Just so everyone's clear, the mighty-thumbed dictator we're talking about here is Paul Graham.

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