Ask HN: Can we stop with the political posts?

As you say and as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), most political stories are off topic. But most != all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 (Dec 2012)

The question is where to draw the line, but it's clear the line can't be "no political stories at all". We tried that as an experiment once and what we learned is that (1) nobody can agree about what counts as a 'political' story; (2) introducing that question just leads to even more politicization of the site; and (3) there exist stories that are clearly on topic for HN and yet have political overlap.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 (Dec 2016)

So what we settled on was a slightly-better-articulated version of the status quo ante, which is: some (but not most) stories with political overlap are ok on HN; the question "which ones specifically are ok?" is generally answered by: the ones that have some intellectual interest that isn't just partisan, plus significant-enough new information so that the discussion doesn't automatically turn completely repetitive.

Here's a link to many past explanations of this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) read some of those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Finally, people should understand that this question hasn't just come up recently—it goes back as far as the site itself. Lots of examples here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018)

I get it. But also HN's comment guidelines are so good that they encourage some of the most interesting comments I find on any given news article. So while I agree that anytime Musk tweets something it's not particularly relevant to tech - on the other hand I found some of the discussion about Trudeau's resignation very enlightening and one of the more civil threads anywhere on the internet.

Proposal for HN: have a tab for discussion of major world news, and instead of allowing retread posts for the same news again and again every time there's a new source, limit it to something canonical like the Current Events portal on Wikipedia.

It's either this, or a post about the 2589th revolutionary AI service that will summarize your meetings and pimp your CV. Year 2024-5 is like that. Pick your poison.

"Just" don't engage with them. A more technical solution is to make a custom feed that filters out what you don't like.

I have a script that generates an html file, sorting posts to tiers based on domain or keywords. Just as an example the shitty tier posts are now: bbc, wsj, vox, arstechnica; the top tier: itch.io, twitter, arxiv, github. Any posts from rare domains get into top tier, posts from frequent domains to middle tier. So it's mostly sorted to my preferences.

If you mean stop submitting articles that are purely political, I fully agree.

But these days in the US, all science articles will spawn political comments. That is because in the US, there are many politicians refuting proven scientific facts. Especially in regards to Climate Change.

So here we are.

Literally everything is political.

I find HN is generally very thoughtful about what political content is relevant, and what is appropriate to coment on that content. However... I've very tired of the Musk content. He's become a highly poltitical highly divisive figure who doesnt need the airtime.

Rules only apply to the things that are disliked. It's the usual selective enforcement so prevalent with jurisdiction as well.

Everything is political, should we stop posting altogether ?

>As a reminder, most political posts are considered off-topic.

So are meta posts like this.

If you don't like a post, you can simply not participate in the discussion, or flag it if you think it's off topic. But asking everyone else to change their behavior to suit your liking is a pointless waste of time.

Everything is political