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freeli

Take what you dislike about the US and then compare it against:

- migrants in the UK and EU;

- slave labor in the Far East;

- documented genocide in Africa;

- military conscription in Russia;

- press freedom in Central Asia;

- crime and drugs in Latin America

This is not to say that the US shouldn't be criticized. Let's have that discussion. But why on HN? And why do these other topics never result in substantive engagement? My earlier statement that the US is a punching bag meant that relative to all other injustices in the world, the US appears to be facing the most criticism on HN.

On one hand, maybe it's because the expectations for the US are so much higher than other countries. On another, maybe it's because it's fashionable to criticize the hegemon. I don't know. But my experience here is that almost all "government does something bad" posts are about the US. This is, to me, evidence of a bias.

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Not sure what is your point: all of these are also strongly discussed.

Interestingly, "migrants in the UK and EU" seems to even be one of the favorite subject of conversation of americans (especially conservatives), totally blown out of proportion with respect to the reality of the crisis.

But importantly, people react to the conversation that is already on the table. When you see people on HN criticizing the US government, it is in the large majority of the case when the US government is a relevant subject of the conversation while crime and drugs in Latin America is not. If HN was talking more about Latin America, maybe there would be more negative reactions about their crisis around crime and drugs. In the meanwhile, the US government actions that are discussed outside of US are in the large majority actions that has a direct impact on the people discussing. Tariff and petrol cost have way more impact on European countries than drug cartel in Latin America (and often way more than even migrants in these countries).

> But my experience here is that almost all "government does something bad" posts are about the US. This is, to me, evidence of a bias.

What about an evidence that the US government is exceptionally bad while also having a lot of impact on other people's lives?

In think you are missing the point with regard to immigration in Europe. American liberals have long talked about Trumps immigration policies and rhetoric as uniquely bad. They do not seem to known EU countries have border walls, or that the UK will separate families. Very few countries have birthright citizenship as broad as that of the US. This may have changed with the powers given to ICE but it was not true in Trumps first term.

Of course the right in the US talk utter nonsense about the British cities being dangerous etc.

I don't think it can be the point, as the point was "bad things happen in other places and yet people don't care about it, they criticize US because it's the current trend".

One of my reaction was that one of their examples (immigration in UK/EU) seems to be an exact counter-examples where US people are overestimating crises that are outside of US and point the fingers.

As for the situation in UK/EU, a real reaction that happened in UK/EU is that if something like ICE was to happen in UK/EU, the population will never accept that (they may be wrong, but they are right that there is something there). Not because immigration laws are less unfair or less cruel in UK/EU, but because in US, there was not even the decency of pretending a due-process was needed. You can deport in UK/EU, but it is done by people who follow the rules and who are not particularly "against" people they deport. With ICE, it looks like cowboys who openly don't care about due-process. In UK/EU, the machine can be cruel. In US, there is no machine at all, just people openly showing they don't care.

> And why do these other topics never result in substantive engagement?

US politics has become so polarized, so trench-warfare-without-ever-giving-a-single-INCH-of-ground, that few people will actually listen to a point by the other side, no matter how valid. They will instead argue to the ends of the earth that the other side does not actually have a point, they have never had a point, on any subject, ever.

This leads to lousy conversations - both sides shouting at each other, and nobody listening.

Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic. I think that's made HN more political, more shouty, less having actual conversations. And I think it has hurt the character of the site, and the community around it.

I think you're 100% correct here. Thank you for expressing this point of view so succinctly.

> Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic.

That is inaccurate. The standard has remained the same ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and its focus to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. You can see there the original language: most stories about politics are off topic (note that the word is "most", not "all"), which is still in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Arguments about HN having gotten-too-political go back many years, long before the time you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that there are swings and fluctuations, some of which last for quite a while and give the misimpression that the site has permanently changed. Such swings are inevitable—they are caused by macro trends, which HN is not immune to: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

The other is that when people see a series of threads they don't like, or even a single thread they don't like—for example because it offends them politically—they rush to overgeneralize. This applies to all of us and has to do with how our emotions affect our perceptions and thinking.

The one exception to all this was when we tried a "no-politics week" as an experiment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. That experiment failed quickly—its actual effect was to make HN more politicized, so we canceled it after a couple days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), and reverted to the original tried-and-true (albeit unsatisfactory, in the sense that no one is really satisfied by it—there's something for everyone to dislike) standard.

At first I thought this experiment was what you were referencing, since to this day there are people who occasionally get confused by the fact that we briefly tried it. But when I read more closely I see that you were talking about 8 years later!

I seem to recall, at the time of the start of Trump's second term, some posts that were purely politics, and people flagging them as off topic, and you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics.

Now that you mention it, I remember the "no politics" week, and it's possible that I'm conflating the end of that experiment and "allowing more politics" and getting the time messed up. But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?

> But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?

Yes in the sense that we didn't change HN's standard or moderate differently. But of course there was a surge of that sort of content - this is what I mean by "macro trends" above.

> you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics

I don't think so! but if you can track down any post that sounded like that, it would be interesting to take a look.

Also, was it the case during Obama? If not, why? Right now, in other countries, they have negative impacts from tariffs, wars, economical crises, ... that seem all be linked to bad management from the US government.

So, yes, in HN, when talking about some subject, for example Grok, then, yes, the fact that Grok is instrumentalised in the culture war is _on topic_ and people will discuss it. This is not the result of a conspiracy against US. This is just the result of the fact that US is really shit right now.

> but why on HN?

It makes sense to discuss it here since YC is largely US-based and the US has been such a large center of tech, VC-funding, etc. That impact obviously extends globally but I’m fascinated by the attempt to be “apolitical” on HN when those in charge of YC and nearly all of those in YC’s orbit are anything but.

I understand wanting to keep discussion curious and meaningful, but the influence of tech and these companies cannot be separated from either red v blue, capital-P Politics nor from small-p policy and politics on any level. It cannot, in my opinion be “apolitical” in the sense of “absence of politics”.

Either way, there clearly seem to be bubbles on HN. I’ve almost never seen pro-union sentiments here but other commenters indicate that the prevail view here is left of Marx. Evidence of bias either way is impossible with anec-data. I find the arguments about the actions and views of those in charge more meaningful than complaining about post and comment removal personally, but the discussion here is multi-faceted and prone to folks talking past each other.

>This is not to say that the US shouldn't be criticized. Let's have that discussion. But why on HN?

This is foremost a tech focused website, and currently the US is basically tech-Hitler for lack of a better term. So it makes sense we would come up in discussion as the current thread of techno-fascism works its way through all portions of American existence.

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