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Comment by _mlbt | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: Ignore me, as pointed out below I’m a hypocrite per my comment history where I have engaged in the past on political topics here against my better judgement. Sorry, I was having a bad day.

It’s a free country…post what you want and I’ll ignore what I want. :)

From the HN Guidelines...

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Can we please stop with all the political postings on here. It's really drowning out the interesting content. There are plenty of other avenues to discuss politics.

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You believe random tech posts about programming languages, frameworks, and data stores are more interesting than a previously democratic superpower slipping into an authoritarian regime and how this impacts hundreds of millions people and the world order? I’m always curious about people who want to discuss and debate shiny things while the house is on fire.

(no snark! genuinely intrigued!)

Yes, I do. I can watch coverage of the administration on any of dozens of major news outlets. There are very few places to discuss programming languages, frameworks, and data stores.

Can you not click hide on posts you’re not interested in? This enables you to enjoy the content you’re after without diminishing those interested in these interesting, pressing topics (which we don’t have to argue specifically). It’s also faster and more efficient than writing a comment.

That is what I've been doing...flagging and hiding all the political posts, but it gets tiresome when it's so rampant on here.

I think you're conflating two kinds of interest. Doing this leads to mistaken conclusions about HN.

Political interest and intellectual interest are not the same. There is overlap, of course [1], but there is also a huge amount of political and social material which is not primarily about intellectual curiosity. Most of that is off topic on HN (as the site guidelines say), even though much of it is far more important—as you say—than most anything on HN.

People who feel intensely always want us to change this, but if we changed it then HN would become a current affairs site [2] – and there are always people who feel intensely.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Valuable feedback, and I appreciate the time you took to provide it. I understand that asking "what does good look like in this regard?" is perhaps not helpful, as it seems mods are still attempting to ascertain that based on mod ops strategy and iterating on that strategy (shaping discourse through actions and weights against posts and comments) to achieve an idea of what is desired on HN wrt to intellectual curiosity. I'll look through the past comments you shared to better understand the conclusion I should be arriving at. Thanks again.

Political? This is law and crime. It's also relevant to someone, such as yourself, who occasionally comments on civil liberties.

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