Hacker News Reader

Comment by kornaki | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had similar experiences. These days I only visit Hacker News to read some tech-related stuff. For me, not reading the news to the point where I ask my mom to turn off the TV when I visit is important, because I want to avoid hearing anything about wars, etc. As someone who lives in Poland, I followed so much news about the war in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, and it was really bad for my well-being and my behavior. A few examples come to mind: not being proactive and creative when it comes to taking care of my house and family, not being present when playing with my son, being less productive at work, and literally feeling angry after consuming news — like the feeling after eating fast food and having bloating. But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.

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It’s unfortunate that American news slip into the HN feed, and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged. I took so much flak for saying that I already know where to hear about US politics, and don’t need it forced into every unrelated forum.

I sympathize, and the attitude may be annoying, but you've got to realize you can not bury your head in the sand about the global rise in fascism, nor the fact that what happens in America affects the entire world. Imagine if you were to transfer your comment back to WWII era, perhaps you're French and you're saying that you're tired of hearing about this little kerfuffle between Germany and Austria... well, clearly the disinterest did not pay off.

I read their comment and at no point did I get the impression they were burying their head in the sand.

They explicitly stated they knew where to read / hear about US politics and did not see the need to have that news domain echoed across every forum.

They may be aware of it, but others who frequent this particular forum may have HN as THEIR source. When someone like the above commenter tries to gatekeep areas where discussion, particularly of things like fascism or other forms of oppression, takes place, it only serves and furthers the goals of the oppressor. There is no domain of life which is not intrinsically political. When we act like there is -- such as when we pretend politics should be off the table for discussion -- we are simply ceding ground, casting away our part in the story, and abdicating our responsibility to take that part seriously.

Do you also believe you should discuss every other topic under the sun in the belief that not discussing it is "ceding ground" to a viewpoint or action of others?

It would seem that in your view, we should be discussing all things at all times due to this "oppressor" mindset.

This simply cannot be true.

You're clearly being facetious. I will simply say that the rise of Naziism/Authoritarianism in the west is a preeminent threat to all human beings on the planet, especially when the king of all nazis has access to the nuclear missiles. It obviously demands a sense of urgency that other topics don't.

If you disagree with that, be explicit about exactly what part.

There are lots of threats to all human beings on the planet. You are simply taking the view that the thing you personally see as the biggest threat is therefore the thing that everyone else should see as the biggest threat (they won't) and agree with your view (they will not), casting your view of the world as the single truth (it isn't), then further presenting it in a ultimatum-based combative manner, asserting that other people take action based on your narrow definition (they won't).

This prevents any reasonable discourse so is unlikely to be successful, no matter how dogmatically or assertively you present your case. Others will simply perceive it as unreasonable, I suspect.

This doesn't mean that you can't still believe it to be true - it just means that others will not engage with the points you mention, and you'll then end up being more isolated and frustrated.

> There is no domain of life which is not intrinsically political.

There are a great many such domains, and the insistence that everything is political is one of the chief problems with modern society. We can, and should, be able to enjoy some things together without bringing up bickering and strife. If you drag politics into a politics free zone you aren't taking responsibility for anything, you are just being a jerk.

Whatever domain you think is apolitical is political because bad politics can happen anywhere and ruin the thing you love.

Get it? Bad people in power = you don't get to do the things you love, at some point.

“global rise in fascism” implies a baseline ... when was fascism declining exactly? curious what point you're measuring this rise from

GP hinted at that if you read the rest of their comment, but it took a serious nose-dive during the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and kinda petered out with Franco.

That’s not an answer, it’s historical hand waving .. "global rise in fascism" it seems .. lol

If you are really interested in data, you might check out the Freedom House website. They have been rating countries around the world on things like free elections and civil rights since 1973, and their take is that things have been going downhill since about 2006, with countries becoming more autocratic.

Interesting. They seem to be a D.C based NGO .. but i'll check them out.

OK well, it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news, so cutting down on it probably doesn't help the nuance building. Aside from that there are a lot of Americans on HN, it's reasonable that they expect to be able to discuss what effects them.

I haven't really noticed politics of other countries get flagged that much, does it? Other than stuff that looks like propaganda from one country against another, that seems to get quickly flagged.

Finally I don't know what makes you think that HN is an unrelated to American politics forum, given that the guidelines of what the forum is for is quite lax.

Do you think maybe people from around the world dont necessarily care? The USA is not the center of the universe. If its tech related cool, otherwise let people find it somewhere else if they want it? Personally as a brit it does impact me quite a lot, so I try to keep up to date, but expecting the world to care about US news is kind of egomaniacal.

the last bit of my post should have indicated that while tech related things do tend to have a predominant position on HN, tech is not the sole purpose of the forum.

Currently on the front page I see three stories that are not tech related, if I expand the definition of tech to include anything math or science related, there is really only one story, ironically this one that you posted in.

Often however I can find as many as 6 stories on the front page that are not tech and not any politics, as HN also handles art, history, and writing quite well.

But for some reason you seem to think it's a place for tech, and American politics should be kept out, which I find somewhat funny.

also I'm not sure why you think I expect the world to care about US news or why you would use the word egomaniacal, as it should be clear from my original post that I am not American.

It sounds like he touched a nerve but I don't think the comment to which you replied was suggesting it's everyone's duty to follow American politics, and complaining that we're egomaniacs because we discuss such topics here is akin to me whining that Panorama[1] on BBC One devotes too much time to the royals. In America, we have a common piece of advice for avoiding that problem, popularized by one of our past presidents (very different from the guy somehow in office today). It goes, "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama_(British_TV_programme

> it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news

I do not care to understand American news. I don't give a fuck. I follow your politics in the same way I watch a circus, but I do not need to "understand" it.

I thought the question was about you reading the news, not about you preventing everyone else from reading the news.

Surely the answer is, when you see news related keywords in an article title, to simply not click through. Same as when there’s so bit of technology or corporation that doesn’t interest you.

I believe that this space was created with a purpose and a set of guidelines. Some news are off-topic in that space. You can't scream in a library and tell people they should just wear earplugs if they don't like it.

I second that and I think the HN moderation (@dang) here should do a better job keeping things on topic. That is actually super important because HN will eventually just be another reddit. Quality of conversation here has been deteriorating already significantly in the past years due to more and more people with insignificant curiosity about technology and science but all the more interest for engaging in pointless political debates.

There are other platforms for discussing Trump and his shenanigans. Reddit for example.

Reddit is a shit platform for discussing politics. The users on this site have much more interesting things to say about politics from my experience.

If the last couple of weeks are anything to go by, I'd strongly argue the quality of discourse on any ICE/Trump/Tariffs-related topics have been at exactly Reddit-level, along with the most upvoted opinions mirroring those on Reddit almost to a tee.

I vaguely remember checking one of those ICE posts out the other day, and there was not a single comment going against the grain that was neither flagged nor heavily downvoted, out of over a hundred. Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.

I don't know what your definition of Reddit-like is, but that's mine.

Reddit comments would focus on the headline—essentially confirming they never read the article. And of course add a sprinkling of "Cheeto Emperor" or whatever. I've not seen that (that wasn't also then heavily "disappeared" on HN).

Regarding the past couple of weeks, I think it's rather difficult to find nuance when we all saw the videos of protesters being killed by a federal police force. Anyone trying to take the Administration's side is, I imagine, going to come across as shrill.

On the more nuanced political issues though I have been happy to see opposing viewpoints well reasoned—even when I disagreed with them. There was a time when reddit was young that you might have found the same level of discussions.

Nuanced understanding of a thing does not necessary ends up with opinion in the middle. Sometimes, understanding the nuance will make you walk away with "yep, this is bad and dangerous" conclusion.

Overwhelming majority of people concluding that shooting protesters to back or head is a bad thing does not imply lack of nuance or low quality of the discussion. Overwhelming majority of people concluding that political repressions and fear based government are bad thing does not not imply lack of nuance or low quality of the discussion either.

The both sides and truth in the middle knee jerk is does not represent nuance or meaningful discussion. It frequently muddles nuances, creates false equivalences and makes the discussion loose the substance.

Agreed. HN has proven time and time again that it is incapable of having a good discussion on politics, or at least American politics. The threads are always chock full of flamebait, outgroup-bashing, and unwillingness to consider other points of view. I flag every single post I see about American politics at this point because they are always, without fail, extremely low quality threads.

> Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.

Not all topics are nuanced when discussed by an educated, well-intended audience. Is the world flat? Does evolution lead to speciation? Dissent is for the sake of dissent, and nothing else.

I've largely stopped commenting here because I feel the community is broken. There's definitely truth to what you say, that an educated audience can have a consensus. But one thing makes the HN community (and many Reddit communities) particularly bad: A lot of these threads have repetitive comments with insults or silly name calling get upvoted. Even if consensus is around the earth being round, there's no need to pettily insult flat earthers. We just ignore them and move on leaving their content to languish at the bottom. On the other hand these threads bring a lot of childish insults that get upvoted just because they hit the right buttons.

This to me is one (of many) sign that the community here cannot healthily discuss these topics. IMO the community here isn't healthy at all. That's why I don't post here much anymore. It's a sign to me that too many discussions in this community are about seeking emotional catharsis. And I'm sorry but for my own mental health, I'm not going to listen to someone else's panic attack resulting from political uncertainty.

I feel for dang and tomhow. It seems that most of their work is doing emotional labor. And emotional labor can grind a person down quickly.

Some topics can't be ignored. Vaccine effectiveness, for example, require a consensus from a large fraction of the population. That larger societal consensus begins with discussion in smaller subsets, of which HN is one.

On reddit they used to say "the down vote is not a disagree button" but that's not the case here. I've been specifically corrected when I assumed that.

So if the prevailing opinion is that ice is committing murder, it makes sense a contrary comment would be heavily down voted.

I agree that hn is heavily liberal and holds a lot of the toxic leftist anti-thought patterns that are prevalent on reddit. But I think it's more of a symptom of the country and perhaps the West being wound-up over "things".

This comment is specifically called out as a “do not” in the HN guidelines.

It’s the very last line:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

FWIW, dang et al do a great job and don’t deserve this slander.

PS: you were the first person I saw mention that politician’s name in this thread

> and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged

It's not exclusively (or mostly) U.S.A. residents who complain about contemporary politics topics getting flagged. We see plenty of complaints from Europe and elsewhere.

We've long accepted that there is a large overlap between politics and technology. The Snowden leaks in 2013 were huge on HN, as were several other Wikileaks releases well before that.

HN has never been a politics-free zone. It’s just subject to the same standard as everything else on HN: there has to be some “significant new information” to the story.

I think that the current guidelines are very reasonable. Some news are relevant to hackers and foster the sort of discussions that make this website so great.

Others are just regular politics.

Front page consists of 30 links. If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.

Right now I see two posts about Rust (don't program in it, don't care), Kyber is hiring (retired, not interested in a job), etc. That's fine though, I just don't visit those links/comments.

> If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.

I think it's a fair issue for people trying to avoid triggering news topics. Sometimes the headlines can be really inflammatory. Avoiding them might be feasible for you and me but may be tougher for others. For example, the top post right now is titled, "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants", which is tricky because it is tech related and straddles the line of politics and tech. But I can see how someone might get triggered by reading that. Telling someone, "Just don't click on it", may be akin to telling an alcoholic, "Just don't drink that poured beer" in this case.

It would be nice if you could unsubscribe from certain tags like you can on Tildes. That way, you would have slight control over what you see while allowing others to keep what they want to see.

I like the idea of tags and filtering.

This might be an open door, but I use the amazing HN-reader app called Hack which offers a filter that hides posts via a list of keywords you can manage. Of course some false negatives happen this way, but I don't mind about that.

As a Canadian I have a different perspective.

I am upset when stories that are critical of the country that has threatened to annex my country are spiked by people who don’t want us to pay attention to the actions of the American government that is aided by American tech corporations and the people who work for them.

From my perspective we’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about an existential threat and we shouldn’t be letting these people’s inability to talk about these current events constructively be the reason why we can’t talk about them at all.

We should continue to talk about things like open source, self hosted software, digital sovereignty, defeating DRM, surveillance, and sousveillance and the real world reasons why these things matter.

We shouldn’t let people with brainrot stop us from talking about these very important things.

I'm Canadian too. You can tapk about these things everywhere else. There are political discussions that fit this website - as the ones you listed - but regular US news belong elsewhere.

> But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.

This is a completely human response to the horrible things happening the world both domestic and abroad.

It’s also history repeating itself: doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen.

Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.

Sure you could just focus on tech. You alone can’t stop Donald Trump or Stephen Miller from their racist move toward autocracy usurping norms and the world order … but you can join in with others who are trying to make a difference.

Apathy is a human emotion to such dire things. But we are better than that.

With the news being so biased it could very well make you less able to participate in democracy effectively.

Maybe the villages around concentration camps did nothing because they were consuming nazi propaganda.

Contrasted to that they had the smell of the furnaces. And we have first hand video of citizens being shot by DHS.

"doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen…"

Sounds familiar. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Attribution appears to be a matter of debate.)

> Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.

If you mean extermination camps, they knew. They were also part of occupied, conquered and heavily terrorized lands. They occasionally did something, terrorist attack against Germans here and there, usually retaliated against by killing a lot of random citizens. Usually motivated by plight of own people.

Extermination camps were located in Poland - German plans involved moving away and killing all Polish, so that they can be replaced by Germans. Germans seen Jews as primary danger to be exterminated fast, Slavic as secondary lower value being to be exterminated slowly in time. Polish army lost the war. And random villagers were not in position to do anything about the highly violent occupying army.

(And yes, Jews were at danger of being denounced by anti semitic locals too. Turned out one could be subject of racial oppression and being oppressor himself).

That’s what I meant yes. Then we are weaker and less brave than they. DHS is kicking in doors and jailing children and people are being killed in the streets and there’s not mass rioting in the streets or anything.

Anyone downvoting this is either ostrich or a fan of Trump.

When the world is on fire and people are suffering, we have a moral obligation to be aware of it and take part in the healing. To turn off your access to the media is a temporary solution that may well be justified in the short term, but you do not have the luxury of forgoing your part in this world, because if you do, it will burn all the way to your doorstep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXgWZyb_HgE

You can still be a proponent of change and discuss these changes with local politicians and what not without being on a 24 hour news IV.

However, looking at the current political climate in my own country, I too have lost faith in them solving local and global issues. When the people I can vote for don't actually solve pressing societal problems, then what's the point? Now factor in the influence of people in large countries that are in power that I can't even vote for...

There is a glimmer of hope that the EU now seems to have finally found some balls somewhere though, with their response to the Greenland situation. Maybe they've finally learned that a strategy of appeasement does not work for strongmen in power (hey, that sounds familiar...)

If you already have a prepared list then fair enough, but what are you personally doing to take part in the healing of society that consuming mainstream news media helps with? The person you're replying to hasn't said they live as a hermit and don't engage in any part of their local society.

I fully agree that it all seems fucked and there is no point in following anything other than specific tech stuff I'm interested in. Anything else actually important someone else in my life will probably mention it to me. Or the explosion will vaporise me and knowing it's coming won't have helped much.

I'm not necessarily advocating for "consuming mainstream news," more for "not unplugging from discourse." Those can go together, but they don't have to. We still have a responsibility to know what's going on in the world even if we reject certain means of receiving that information.

> When the world is on fire and people are suffering

The problem is that the world is always on fire and people are always suffering.

Especially so because now we hear about the whole world’s problems, and no matter how peaceful a state the world is in there’s always a war or something happening somewhere. It’s been like that for all of human history and I don’t expect it to change any time soon.

I don’t think it’s healthy to live your whole live hearing about these problems that you have no ability to affect at all. In my experience it only has negative effects on your life and whether you’re tapped into the real time news feed or not, it doesn’t actually change these events in any way.

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