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Comment by actualwitch | Hacker News Reader

Habr has been utter garbage, for a long time. For people who are interested in it, I highly recommend to switch to russian content in the top right button and use google translate to see what are some of the opinions average user there exhibits. Forming that kind of obnoxious audience was a long process, first "woke" people were massively downvoted and banned, then people who thought women deserve same rights as men, then anyone who criticized government. At some point into that everyone who previously wrote any interesting piece of content just... left. The current state of the platform is what happens when you go the "no politics please" route.

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>"woke" people were massively downvoted and banned, then people who thought women deserve same rights as men, then anyone who criticized government

Interesting, the poster below has the opposite view:

>Owners and moderators of Habr despise Russia

>they always optimized the karma system to stimulate the authors not for posting original interesting content but to stimulate those who hate Russia and downvote those who love their country

My take would be that Habr is OK with the both views and people only notice the bans/downvotes when posts which align with their political views are banned/downvoted.

I mean, to know who is right the only way is to go back and look for yourself, correct?

https://habr-com.translate.goog/ru/companies/habr/articles/6...

Looks pretty generically neutral to me. What do you find objectionable here?

Edit: I guess the comments are loading for me in goog translate. Is that what I should be looking at?

That post was a reaction to the war and a lot of people trying to talk about it and getting banned for it. It was one of the major exodus triggers after which the site was practically empty of engagement for months. Here's a link to comments, the gist is a bunch of people are mad that admins are choosing the "no politics" route:

https://habr-com.translate.goog/ru/companies/habr/articles/6...

People who like to talk politics absolutely everywhere have ruined every single social network I know. "No politics" is probably the most intelligent way to go.

You'd fit right in on habr, in a society specifically built to not discuss politics. Complimentary tumbleweed in comments included!

The problem is that what is considered “politics” has vastly expanded over the past decade or so. Most controversial topics today wouldn’t have been considered “politics” in the past.

>Habr is a Russian collaborative blog about IT, computer science and anything related to the Internet, owned by TechMedia.

In this context, demanding the staff makes public where they stand in the conflict in Ukraine is toxic.

In context of habr, even asking "why'd my internet/corporate vpn stopped working?" or "why did I suddenly get summoned for a medical checkup to enlistment office?" are politics.

No politics is only feasible if your life or your existence isn't considered political in itself, or maybe if you can hide how you challenge the status quo without harming yourself.

I don't see how that changes anything. Even if you feel that way, a forum about computing is not the place to spread your political ideas.

Keep Your Identity Small - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

Which begins with...

> I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.

> As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?

> What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.

> Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

I don't want to hear about your "no politics" politics ;-)

You're on HN. It has a similar rule:

  Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

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

This rule doesn’t mean “no political topics”.

However, it •effectively• does…

Intent of rule v. rule in practice…

No, it doesn’t. HN does have political discussions in line with the rules, that is, approved by dang. One recent example being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043.

Habr IMHO has become shit because lots of Russian IT, the very best ones, have left Russia since 2022.

Maybe our company is not representative, but the only engineers I know of who left Russia (about 5 people out of ~150) - I wouldn't say they were the best engineers at the company. They only left after the mobilization started (feared of being drafted) and they already were a minority group of vocal Putin critics before. So to say that the best engineers left Russia is not true, from my perspective: it looks like it better aligns with people's political views, not their expertise. Maybe it's different in Moscow, which is less conservative (we aren't Moscow-based).

I live in Central Asia, and we have huge influx of Russian engineers here. I did not ask which city they are from, but they all are good. Better than average I think.

emigrants probably have above average motivation

Please take your activism elsewhere...

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