Doge wants businesses to run government services 'as much as possible' | Hacker News Reader

Doge wants businesses to run government services 'as much as possible'

washingtonpost.com

33 pointsbeedeebeedee7 comments

The previous submission was flagged, despite this article being of great importance for this community. The actions that it reports are being taken by government and corporate interests will affect all industries, markets and citizens.

Agreed, there seems to be a hidden ban on HN for political content.

It's not hidden; it's the second paragraph in the guidelines.

Well don't you know that it's political and thus not engaging or thought provoking content, and doesn't generate any interesting or deeper discussions; And anyways, it's all (progressive|conservative|leftist|fascist) propaganda.

No, we need 6 articles pronto on how LLM-du-jour changed one word in their readme.md. Now that's the good stuff.

The name of this site is "Hacker News", not "let's rant about political stuff that you can literally do on a million other sites News".

FWIW, I think this particular topic is relevant to HN, and I think it's possible to get some insightful commentary. Still, I don't blame folks who flagged it previously. These articles always attract tons of flame-inducing comments. The way I like to put it is that it attracts a lot more comments from people who just want to vent than who actually want to listen. And I've certainly been guilty of that, so I'm not judging, but I am saying that I agree with other flaggers who don't want that type of discussion on HN.

There are definitely "gray area" topics like this one, and a bunch of times I could go either way with regards to whether I'd want to flag it, but I don't blame people who might be a bit quicker to flag - it's not some grand conspiracy that people sometimes imply. At the end of the day, given how I think HN has the best comment threads on the Internet largely due to its moderation, I'm OK with it being slightly over-moderated than have it slide into the cesspool of commentary that virtually all other open Internet forums suffer from.

I agree with you largely, but I think part of the problem with flagging these sorts of topics every time and so early is that the flagging in itself is coming from a political stance -- that is, instead of attempting to engage with the non-political aspects of the story, people will just automatically flag it because they themselves see it as just political content.This story for example has a lot of meat we could discuss without needing to devolve into the politics of it. I think the topic of the pros and cons of privatizing government services can lead to some interesting discussion.

My quip about the LLM stuff is me venting my frustration a bit about how HN relatively often will end up with multiple articles from different sources about the same little bit of tech news, and the comment threads will all look largely the same, with some flavour of "I like this because of XYZ" or "I don't like this because of XYZ". Plenty of comment threads on more HN-relevant topics turn into perhaps not flaming cesspools, but pits of unoriginal and uninteresting banality.

And I understand the moderation aspect of it, I've moderated on large public forums before, and I have nothing but the utmost respect and understanding for dang and HN's position on this topic, but in my experience when you have so much pressure to discuss a topic that affects so many people, even if mostly off-topic, it can be a good idea to provide some relief valve. Back when I was doing forum moderation, we sometimes ran "Unfinished Business" threads (named after the BSG episode of the same name where the crew got to basically spar against each other in a boxing ring, disregarding rank, to work out interpersonal frustrations.) We still moderated the thread for things like people posting illegal or spammy shit, or doxxing others, but otherwise allowed the discussions and tempers to run as they would for the most part.

Maybe something like a once-a-month thread that is allowed to get a little nastier to provide some avenue to discuss these topics would not be a terrible idea. One could even make it so that at the end of the day, the thread is erased along with all the comments and none of the upvotes/downvotes are retained. For me personally, I would also much rather have a 'cesspool discussion' on HN rather than on random news sites simply because I can expect that even when the discussion devolves from HN's relatively high standard, it will still exceed the quality of discussion I could be having in most other places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

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