But now, it seems to me that the number of surviving politics articles seems to be rapidly increasing, and the number of [dead]-ed ones rapidly decreasing. Is it just my imagination?
And, there's a tier of "newcomer", 100-200 days old, that has started vociferously defending political stories by creating tenuous connections to technology or entrepreneurship. "What? No stories about the TSA? Well: business travel! So there!".
The trend is towards more political stuff on HN. It's going to amplify and not attenuate unless some concrete intervention is made to deal with it.
The sad thing is, I really think the only thing that needs to happen here is for 'pg to firm up the guideline. He could rewrite one sentence and we'd have an easier time stamping these pointless threads out. Instead, we're obsessing about flag weights and sub-HNs and whatever other geeky solutions we can think of.
Unfortunately, I think this is how it all started on reddit. I think somewhere in late 2007 - early 2008 the front page of reddit started to get filled up with political stories. At first I ignored them, I was just down-voting them hoping that the usual "Lisp is great! | No is not" stories would make it to the front page again. They didn't. Then, it only got worse, with all the LOL Cats stories, then the memes, the IamA posts, and again cats, after which I lost count.
If that's true, then when the number of political stories reaches a certain critical mass, everyone who flags all political stories will have their flags ignored.
The only politics that interests me in terms of arguable relevance to HNN is anything related to the patent system, or other direct litigation/legislation of technology.
† I mean this in the most neutral way possible, in the same sense as I am ignorant of linear algebra.
The sad thing is, I really think the only thing that needs to happen is for pg to make it explicit that these stories are within scope. It would revitalize HN and make it much more appealing internationally. I'm not holding my breath, though.
There are some political articles that are worth discussing here on HN, and there are others which simply encourage malicious trolling. Personally, I think we should avoid the common pitfalls: religion, politics, and money.
That said, we have to talk money to talk startups with any level of candidness. We skirt religion every so often, and we see the zealots on either side wave their flags, but it tends to stay scientific and healthy. The problem with that is it becomes the norm, and eventually, it will devolve. Politics, however, is a tricky one. The increased legislation in the cyber-domain* means we're going to be talking about politics more and more. However, articles leaning either way, personally, do not belong here or in the media period. There was a time when journalists prided themselves on being objective and balanced; that day is long gone.
* Yes, I used the word cyber, sorry, that's what the military calls it.
Right now there are only two items on the front page that could be classified as political, and they both seem reasonably on topic. (Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?, North Carolina governor refuses to block anti-muni broadband law). Much rather those than another article about Bitcoin or a pretentious blog post about "disruption".
The problem with these topics is they can't be debated rationally since their underlying issues are ones of judgment (In the case of the TSA the judgment is how much a person is willing to be violated for the possibility of being safer and in the case of Gay Marriage it's what level of equality people are entitled to).
So these discussions will inevitably devolve into emotive bickering which is unproductive and adds a level of unpleasantness to the enviornment
What I am personally tired of seeing are The Atlantic articles about the "super rich" and whatnot, and other "outrage articles" that should only be on very left-leaning discussion communities.
So I don't see how anything can be done about it. I keep flagging away at articles, but I don't know how those are used for moderation. I have said it once, and I'll say it again: problems like these require a strong moderator presence and consistent moderation to be fixed - if they are deemed problems by the moderators at all.
Does Paul Graham really believe Robert Reich editorials are within HN's scope? Organized-labor appreciatin' liberal Democrat speakin': of course they aren't.
* A unequivocal angry response,
* Leaving the community entirely.
This is because on certain topics there are loud elements of the "hacker" community whom I disagree with so fundamentally that I simply cannot tolerate their viewpoints going unchallenged.
I've been able to mostly unlearn this reaction when it comes to actual politics, but on race or (much more frequently, here) gender issues it remains fully in effect.
To a certain extent, I'm at wits' end: I get a lot of value out of HN but when a topic like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571874 comes up it absolutely destroys my mood and my productivity.
And there's no good answer -- stories like that absolutely should be discussed; it's just that the discussion so often disgusts me...
(Edit: all of that rambling is to say that politics stories naturally have the same siren call of some sort of 'moral' obligation to speak up for one's point of view.)
But I know the feeling; I'm the same way on the piracy threads, and I know from private conversations with other "well respected" HN people that I'm not the only person that gets exasperated by some of the most popular ethics on HN.
The comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2574877
Of course that's interesting to programmers! In the same sense as Eric S. Raymond's statement that real programmers are all cap-L libertarians who believe in concealed carry laws.
I'm a security professional and friends of multiple friends of Byron Sonne, for whom this was an important story. Heck, I think it's an important story. What I think is important for us to understand is that not every important story needs to be covered here. There is nothing HN can do about this story other than kvetch and speculate about Sonne's ex-wife. (No, really, go look.)
Here's an acid test for "law and limits of freedom" stories: is anyone going to disagree about them in good faith? And, in good faith, is anyone going to make a business or technology decision differently in light of that story? No? Then it doesn't need to be here.
So these stories get posted, nobody can post in the comments that the story isn't proper, and the submitter never finds out that he's doing wrong. Especially when people start upvoting stories that break the rules. (Again, because they don't know the rules.)
Most people don't read the rules for a site before they start posting stories and comments. Even if you try to force them to. That's human nature and should be taken into account when designing a site like this.
1) Increasing numbers of political stories are tightly integrated with startup life and technology -- so Fred Wilson et. al. are weighing in, and that leads to followon discussion
2) Many people on HN are interested in talking about these issues. So, while Paul and the old-timers would rather not (and change the rules when necessary), there are always plenty of politically-related stories that do meet the HN guidelines.
There is a place for people, including people who share the mindset of hacker startup founders, to share cat pictures and civil liberties discussions. It's called Reddit.
We don't need two Reddits.
We do need at least one HN.
S.P.: feel free to start political threads in http://textchannels.com/Politics