Ask HN: Is Hacker News avoiding criticism of Trump? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Hacker News avoiding criticism of Trump?

49 pointshoerzu25 comments

Do you think Hacker News is failing to uphold its intellectual standards by not actively challenging Trump's statements and actions?

I know this aligns with HN's rules against political discussion, but isn't avoiding critical debate on Trump contributing to cowardice within big tech?

View on HN

In the past week there have been:

7 submissions with "Trump" in the title, and over 100 comments in the thread:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

9 submissions with "Tariff" in the title, and over 100 comments in the thread:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

Apart from perhaps LLMs, no other topic has had anywhere near as much discussion, and the stories and comment threads are full of criticism.

You may not be seeing them because because they often get pushed down the rankings due to the flamewar detector, user flags and software penalties that are applied to submissions about politics and mainstream news.

If those mechanisms weren't in place, the front page would be dominated by flame wars about U.S. politics every day, which is not what the majority of the HN audience wants.

The intention of HN is to be a place to discover and discuss different topics that engage intellectual curiosity.

But the stories, discussions and criticisms are definitely there, and are getting plenty of exposure on the front page.

This thread was dead BTW, I had to "vouch" for it in order to comment. Yes, posts critical of the current US regime are being flagged. I already emailed admins about it, who said they "don't think it's a coordinated campaign". This was back in February, the behavior has continued.

I hear people complain about this all the time, but all of the political content I see on HN is very critical of Trump.

no:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

In my experience in the last few months political stories come up regularly. Most are flagged, but the ones that aren't tend to get many hundreds of votes and many hundreds of comments. So the flagging tends to act as consolidation into a small number of stories.

For instance, this one is currently on front: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43610246

If you're looking for the political comment on the smaller stories, use an alternate interface like hckrnews.com -- the discussion happens long after they've been flagged off the front page.

There's too much overtly political content on HN, and it trends towards liberal, anti-Trump, etc. I agree with it about half the time. But the other half of the time it's like some mainstream leftist media stream got randomly interspersed into HN. I have a ton of places to go to find out how awful the regime is, no matter if it's 2020 or 2024 or whatever. They're all equally awful. Please get them all out of HN!

> Do you think Hacker News is failing to uphold its intellectual standards

What standards are these?

No data but just anecdotally I don't think HN folks are avoiding criticizing Trump more than they did avoid Biden or other world political figures.

I think there's an tendency to avoid discussing politics of any kind. I have seen a few political discussions get flagged or penalized off the front page.

Not that I don’t like to dunk on Trump when given the opportunity, but just honestly Trump doesn’t lead in a manner that leads to deep HN style discussions. If there were a few policy wonks on his team that released 100 pages of explanation on trade, we could discuss that, but as it stands, Trumps leadership aligns with sort of the “bad” side of politics, in that it’s mostly emotional/intuitive and there’s not a lot to discuss. He put out, what 1 page on his tariff decisions? There’s a pretty global consensus they don’t make sense, what’s to deeply discuss?

Yes.

I tend to see a lot of criticism of the Trump administration when such topics come up. One "standard" HN tends to uphold is not following every single turn of the news cycle. This is why political discussion isn't as active here as it is on, say, political communities on reddit.

The HN guidelines:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

It's not avoiding criticising Trump as much as avoiding politics in general. And there's a good amount of Trump criticism that gets through.

As you said, it’s not Trump related, it’s against the rules to have political discussions which is great. Please don’t convert HN to another Facebook or twitter.

It's not just political news being flagged. It's also highly relevant tech and world intersecting news which is highly relevant.

The army of somebodies who don't want Trump or Tesla discussed veto upvotes, so on the surface yes. But turns out Hacker News is also siloed. Use https://news.ycombinator.com/active as your front page or an alternate like https://hn.algolia.com/ or https://hckrnews.com and you get the uncensored experience, with flagged articles clearly labeled but perfectly functional.

At its core, this website is strictly about making money. We're not here to criticize the decisions, terrible as they may be; we're here to see if we can capitalize them. From what I understand, Reddit was spun off from this site back in the day for such discussions.

Reddit launched 2005, HN 2007.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com