Hacker News Reader

Comment by mannanj | Hacker News Reader

Wondering when did political discourse become so prevalent in hacker news? I have now become accustomed to it being normal, but I remember the hacker news of 10 years was not like this.

Why has this become so normal? I miss the days where this was focused on technology and, well, hacking.

Can we stop engaging this political commentary please.

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Maybe something external changed and not HN? Can’t quite put my finger on what has changed in the last decade…

You may not want to engage with politics, but politics will engage with you.

Your sort is always nagging and prodding at the public to engage with politics, failing to understand that it may motivate the public to vote against your causes. Let sleeping dogs lie.

The hacker community has always had a strong political element to it, what else is the GNU GPL but a statement of political intent? Anything which deals with the allocation of power and resources is political.

I remember the old hacker news though having more "we built xyz" posts and less any "War, news, flee from death" type of things and even AI dystopian-themed things (regardless of AI not being out then, we had more focus on building products).

edit: maybe politics isn't what I really want out of hacker news. I think what I mean is I want less non-building related posts.

The old hacker community leaned anti-authoritarian and libertarian, if anything. The modern, everything-is-political "hackers" would be horrified by them.

I'm not being funny, but anti-authoritarianism and libertarianism are literally political stances. To be anti-authoritarian you need to understand what authoritarianism is, appreciate why it is undesirable to a hacker specifically, and to have a system of reasoning which allows you to articulate these sentiments. This is doing politics in the oldest and truest sense.

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