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Comment by maximusprime | Hacker News Reader

flagged. Never understood HNs interest in drugs. Hardly on topic is it.

did you read the article? It's all about how a traditional market (cocaine) got disrupted by startups (meth labs). With the lovely side effects of proving the War on Drugs as useless as we thought it was.

If you play this game, you can stretch anything to be "on topic".

And what's wrong with that? "On topic" is anything that interests the group.

So if 1,000 fashion graduates join HN and start upvoting articles about what type of fabrics are in season, you'd be fine with that?

Agree. People sometimes see geeks as (dont have a good english word for it, in german we say "Fachidioten", maybe One-subject-idiots) One-Subject-Idiots.

I think its awesome that HN somethims gets into other subjects, the community holds a nice balance without to much regulation.

First of all, it's intellectually dishonest, if done the way you were doing it. It'd be more correct to simply say "no, it's about current events/politics, and that interests me".

However, there's something about that in the guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime".

Also, "anything that interests the group" is a terrible way to run a site like this, because eventually the group grows, and if you don't place limits, you'll start getting Ron Paul stories, taser stories, etc... etc...

It's a political article. It's toxic.

A political article that entirely avoids discussion of politicians and partisan politics and has only a tangential reference to public policy?

It's yet another drug article. As a bet, I'll buy you a nice bottle of wine and ship it from Italy if one of those hits the front page of the site without generating a "we should fix the problem by legalizing drugs" discussion.

It's true that drug war articles are fairly off-topic for HN. I'd rather see more mathematics and CS content.

However, I think it's pretty apparent that ending the drug war would benefit more people in much more profound ways than all of the software everyone on HN has ever written. In fact, I'd say only the computer revolution as a whole has benefited humanity more than ending the drug war would.

If you can't think of a list of 10 things in short order that matter a lot more to the world than software and web startups, you're not trying very hard.

But that doesn't mean HN should be dedicated to those things.

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