Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyk2 | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or are there more off-topic political posts on HN lately?

It's probably sample bias. This perception goes back at least a decade. There's a bunch of links here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

Disturbing observation: 5 years ago, the trends that seemed most important to me were all technical - I really paid no attention to politics. Today, they are mostly geo-political.

Let me guess, 5yr ago you had an order of magnitude (or two) less money tied up in markets and illiquid investments.

Could it be an ennui about tech news, resulting from the Tower of Babel of great projects and great ideas, that haven't reliably improved our IT or development experiences?

geopolitical topics != politics

impact of nation-state relations have a very real impact on the world commerce

Didn't know we are are Commerce News.

I think the COVID slowed down the open source development scene. For example, we didn't see many JavaScript frameworks these last two years.

I hope it slows down. I never understood why web devs feel the need to reinvent their entire stack annually

I think people were genuinely looking for good patterns, and still are in a way.

I think that requires replacing javascript itself

That's what people are trying to do with WASM. There's a project currently on the front page or not far about a frontend framework in Rust, and it's one of many. There's also TypeScript, and other alternatives. User interfaces are far from being a solved problem.

Hey now, lots of startup hackers are interested in geopolitics

Same feeling and concern. And the politization results in many replys or whole subthreads getting greyed out into oblivion. That shading reflects the virulence of posters. It looks bad.

Unfortunately... I found lobste.rs to be a good source of purely technical articles, but those made up only ~half of "the good stuff" on HN. The other half is startup/entrepreneur related posts.

For those, HN is still the best, but the signal-to-noise ratio is getting poorer with all those off-topic posts.

No downvote on posts, I wish this were implemented but I also know the implications are many

You can flag posts, even if you can't downvote them.

Dang would have to respond, politics are allowed according to the rules, but I think the rules need to be reconsidered. Too many flame wars and not enough on software and hardware.

I'm not sure about that. I think if enough people flag a post, it automatically... well, it doesn't remove a post, exactly, but it marks the post as "flagged", which also means that people can't add comments to it any longer.

I've been busy today, didn't see if the daily yellow peril story hit the front page (China's about to invade Taiwan, China should respect British sovereignty in Hong Kong, China should treat Uighur terrorists nice like the US did in next door in Afghanistan etc.)

You can argue perhaps the central concern of all of this is, "What happens to TSMC?"...everything else follows...

TSMC is geopolitically irrelevant.

Politics is a human system. Systems analysis and nudging systems is of interest to hackers, no?

Humans are the infrastructure on top of which technology runs.

This trend started years ago. My opinion is that politics should be off topic on HN but the "everything is political" crowd doesn't seem to agree.

It's not just you. That's all it is these days. I was thinking of making an app that would take HN posts, and apply a categorization layer that would filter out political posts. Too much excitement around what regulators are doing. I really don't care.

It seems that the user base here has been deteriorating and the focus has been drifting away from the SV startup scene. I've also been noticing a growing political atmosphere that is in opposition to SV norms. A sign of the times probably, but I also suspect that HN's usefulness to Ycombinator is fading.

Massive technical military contracts seems extremely SV to me? Isn't that where it all started?

Presumably "SV norms" here refers to the expectation that one does not ever explicitly acknowledge this element in Silicon Valley's history, lest it undermine the "plucky dudes in a garage" mystique.

This is all geopolitics. nothing about technology or specifics on anything interesting.

> nothing about technology

Well the whole point is that they've switched technology from diesel to nuclear, based on changing user requirements. Agile, if you like!

The word you're looking for is "pivot."

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You know what else is as old as the hills? Those guidelines.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...

It might have been an illusion before but I personally think HN feels more like Reddit nowadays compared to then.

Society is becoming Reddit and it seems HN is following suit. The next logical step is for society to become 4chan, and we are off to a smashing start here, no?

Do you think the mod(s) here are aware? I know they're working hard, and I have no idea how dang has done this job for so long. I don't always agree with him, but I recognize the incredible (and incredibly difficult) job he does.

Still, I sometimes wonder if there is some internal denial around the chang(ing/ed) culture of HN.

>You know what else is as old as the hills? Those guidelines.

Funny part is the guidelines link to old posts that show how long people have been complaining that HN is becoming Reddit, as if this is proof it can't possibly be true. But, what it really shows is how much time has passed since they've declared that HN isn't becoming Reddit. Is it impossible for something to have changed in those ~15 years?

It also states that this is just a noob misperception. Fair enough. So, what does it say when long time HN users--who previously did not make this comparison--start to do so?

I think after 14 years here we're allowed a moment of self-reflection.

> I've also been noticing a growing political atmosphere that is in opposition to SV norms

Genuinly curious, what are "SV norms"? I think most of the people here don't come from SV, and I think this has been the case for a large part of HN existance, but I have nothing to prove it.

There's always been a heavy SV startup scene slant to the user base here, especially around YC incubated companies. The politics have historically been a sort of hybrid Cyber Libertarian/California Progressivism. I sense the SV bias is fading away and also that the politics (tech focused and otherwise) have very much evolved from where they were in 2007. For example, I detect a conservative element here that Reddit has actively been trying to expunge. I think it's mainly a result of the moderation probably taking a more permissive approach and the US political climate getting ever more divisive. Plus, there just seems like there's less to talk about in the startup scene these days, mobile is now long in the tooth and much of the focus has shifted to maturing regulation.

I wonder if part of it is also due to people getting older.

Totally agree, if you want proof of the paradox of tolerance look around HN. In the sake of being tolerant to misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and transphobic posts and comments it has chased away many people leaving more and more the ugliness behind.

Most women, and trans people I know despise and avoid the site at this point. All you have to do is look at the comments any time something even tangentially related to women’s experiences in tech or when tech impacts women to see it.

You are getting downvoted, but I think you hit the nail on the head there. There is an increasingly strong "disaffected male" contingent here. It's allowed because we're extra adult here and can handle some divergent opinions, at least so the theory goes. Unfortunately it's starting to feel downright gross at times and I can absolutely understand why a woman would not feel welcome here. These are the hard to swallow pills, but it's happening all the same.

I would say politics is germane to everything tech; just tech folks don't like to think of it this way. But it can't be ignored since Big Tech, social media, miniaturization of computers, etc, have arguably played an integral role in every major political event in the past half decade or so - in particular, 2016 election, social media and police brutality, occupy protests, hollowing out of old industry/labor in favor of new industry/labor, Amazon and labor, Tesla and climate change/petrochemical policy, China and everything, especially labor, semiconductors, etc, 2020 election, Jan 6, Republican party thought control...

Defense uses a lot of tech

And besides, I think HN tech community tends to be intellectually curious anyway

This isn't off-topic for HN. We've always had 1) submarine posts (aha, I mean both meanings here haha), 2) military strategy posts, 3) $40B deal-falling-apart posts, and even 4) war escalation posts. There's even a prized technical angle about the development of high-tech nuclear submarines.

On-topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com