Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

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I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility; and also is a sign of how much users here aren't able to emotionally regulate to have civil conversation [which is a signal of strength, of health - physical and mental health, mastery of oneself, self-control] - so much practically everything important - including the Emergency Act (war measures act aka martial law) being initiated in Canada for the first time ever by our Prime Minister who is more and more clearly acting as a fascist.

When I tried posting a technology angle to this - "Ask HN: Do we care about our captured systems?" - to point out that it's the design of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. that's allowing propaganda and ideology to easily get to the top, while easily suppressing the truth - and where on HN it's easy to suppress perfectly valid, well-written, articulate comments to prevent the majority from seeing ideas that may actually be the truth.

It's a problem.

Edit to add: Thanks for all the fish, enjoy your lazy dopamine hit.

I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility;

Presumably every single member of this community is also a member of one or more other communities, some of which have an overt intention to be "more political". Given that, no one is being denied an outlet to share their views, give input, discuss, influence, vote, etc. when it comes to political events. So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)?

Personally I come here (mainly) to hear about / discuss obscure programming libraries, new programming languages, startup strategies, new scientific breakthroughs, etc. I get enough of "general politics" and "world news" elsewhere... I'd really rather not see it here as well. But, that's just me.

> So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)?

My opinion: because here you can find arguably the highest concentration of powerful and knowledgeable minds, and this is the sort of thing that the world needs working on these hard problems.

I find the concern over serious issues that is often expressed here to be rather disingenuous, as people love to engage in bitch sessions about the bad behavior of the members of their outgroups, but the notion that we should consider rising above that level of behavior and think about trying to find actual solutions is somehow ~inappropriate, as this is a place only for "curious conversation" (except for the exceptions to that rule, of course).

Exactly.

I know HN and dang aren't going to change, they're conservative let's say, and Twitter and Reddit aren't going to change either - and so I am working towards my own solution that I think will allow for adequate moderation and discussion management. I've had 5 years of severe chronic pain, only recently had a surgery that reduced my remaining pain by 25%+ and the specialist was finally able to diagnose 2 other nerve compression syndromes I have, and after those surgeries I believe I'll be able to go full speed ahead with my plans. I'll probably only do a "Show HN" in a year from now, but if you're interested in joining it earlier/once very basic MVP is launched and giving feedback I'd appreciate it; matt@engn.com

> I know HN and dang aren't going to change, they're conservative let's say

I'm not quite sure what people "are", but that there is some sort of a fundamental (and I think unrealized problem) seems unmistakable to me. And I agree that they can't change on their own, but I don't believe that change cannot be coerced - at least, it is highly speculative.

> so I am working towards my own solution that I think will allow for adequate moderation and discussion management.

I am very interested, as I have been working on the same thing (but only conceptually so far), I will send you an email.

I've never seen an online community improved by more object-level political discussion.

Maybe this avoidance by problem solving engineers is part of the problem?

Technology is used as political tools/weapons to drive and manufacture consent, through promoting hate and creating divisiveness - and through captured mainstream media channels, and online platforms; this couldn't be any more obvious with Trudeau's behaviours and observing the mainstream landscape of what the majority of Canadians are seeing.

Politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions.

The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.

Or it may that this community is international, so you either have tech talks, or a pile of discussions about politics in every part of the world.

Not really, there's still the rule of "new phenomenon" that makes it news/discussion worthy - like Canada's quick turn towards fascism, tyranny.

And why exactly Canada's turn is more intresting than, for example, Ukraine and Russia on a brink on war? I live in country, which for the last 7 years made a sharp turn towards rather literal authoritarism, but probably due to the issue being localised to Europe, not North America no one here would be fighting for the topic to be on the front page. Also, there are thousands of places create to discuss local and global events, less to discuss obscure IT topics.

interesting new phenomenon that satisfies intellectual curiosity.

And by interesting - anything good hackers would find interesting.

It's a purposely high bar to filter out almost all mainstream news and even most tech news, and definitely most politics, which tends to satisfy emotional curiosity at the expense of intellect.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. These stories tend to brute-force their way in.

Because there may be more emotion involved doesn't negate its intellectual value - that's a scapegoat reason, and people avoiding intellectual interests that have emotion involved is avoiding learning and opportunities to learn. That's arguably quite detrimental to society, and "hackers" avoiding it who have domain expertise with technology and maybe could provide a unique perspective or brainstorm uniquely is then likely reduced. Arguably political issues, policy and information propagation are the main problems we have in society these days.

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