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Comment by georgeburdell | Hacker News Reader

@dang are you making an exception for these posts given the current situation? Although important, I do not see anything of technological interest. Any post about the protests are going to incite flame wars and make HN indistinguishable from any other social website right now.

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Though I agree the discussion might turn into flame war. I think this too much of an important flame war to just remove or deprioritise from the homepage ... Just my two cents.

Technology has been extremely relevant in this whole ordeal. The fact that we can now create and share videos online that document these human right violations en masse is a thing that technology has allowed us to do.

OTOH We as the 'tech world' play a huge role in both how the narrative of "the media is the enemy" came to fruition and how people are radicalised online to actually believe this.

It is extremely important to recognise what tech's place is in all this

The poster you are responding to is not making his argument in good faith. He is more than fine posting inflammatory political statements on HN:

>The benefits of diversity is the Left’s pseudoscience...I want climate deniers and diversity sycophants alike purged from the scientific apparatus.[1]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19912265

>make HN indistinguishable from any other social website right now

This is incredibly uncharitable to HN. Yes, the discussion on average is far from ultra-rationalistic, but it's also far, far, far from "any other social website right now".

There are several things posted daily that are not "of technological interest" and land on the front page. Sometimes those things are even tangentially political. Unfortunately, I think this topic makes plenty of people very uncomfortable to talk about. Whether that's because of privilege or ignorance or something else altogether, I don't know. However, I think the ramifications and scale of this situation merits paying attention regardless of how uncomfortable it makes someone feel to encounter it. The rest of the world certainly is.

Personally speaking only, but I am a tech worker in the larger media sphere—mainly publishing with some titles over a century old.

These matters strike very close to home.

edit: I wanted to add that I have a lot of respect for most of the people in this community and the diversity of perspectives it provides. I'm very interested in hearing what people have to say here.

These discussions are incredibly important - I'd be disappointed if dang removes them.

They get flagged quickly off the front page.

i am curious about that too

it is the justification given for shutting down anti ccp discussions and articles

what makes this situation different? surely not the scale of human atrocity? ccp still has the us gov beat, hands down. maybe us lives just matter more?

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