Show HN: Hide all Snowden-related HN links with a Greasemonkey script | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hide all Snowden-related HN links with a Greasemonkey script

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36 pointsbpodgursky37 comments

Hacker News is the one place I've consistently found good information related to this extremely important case (that and Greenwald's twitter account itself). It's important to the HN community because we're typically technology-minded and libertarian-leaning, and these topics strike at the core of the privacy debate and "big data" issues. Therefore it seems to me to be a great place for Snowden-related news.

Of course if you want to use this plugin go right ahead. But don't start grandstanding with philosophical statements about how "HN is only for startups" and "this site must stay away from politics" because 1) that's false and 2) you're probably not a moderator.

I'm not trying to make any philosophical statements. My problem is the HN coverage right now is not insightful, it's a paparazzi-level tracking of everything he says and does. In a couple months when the details have been filtered from the blogspam, maybe we can have an insightful discussion. Right now it is nothing of the sort.

I can't wait until the NSA releases all the details on it. I'm curios to see if they discover they themselves did anything wrong.

I took this screenshot earlier (posted it earlier, apologies to anyone that's seen it before):

http://i.imgur.com/sjNd5Z7.png

Out of 24 stories, only two are about something other than Snowden and/or the NSA.

I absolutely do think that Snowden coverage should be on HN. But that much? At a certain level you're just duplicating the same information, and repeating all the same talking points in different threads. If we could just stick to one or two articles at once it would be fine.

Respectfully, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. The people who are saying that HN "isn't for politics" aren't making that up; it's right there in the site guidelines.

The cognitive dissonance you have here comes from three things, I think:

* The moderators on HN take an extremely light touch with moderation; most of the stories that get "dead'd" on HN are killed by user flags, not directly by moderators. I think this is even more the case now that the "flamewar detector" is in place; stories that might have earned a moderator intervention 3 years ago are now left to be auto-buried by the flamewar detector. Buried != dead.

* The "no politics" guideline on HN takes a back seat to the politics of the people who run HN. All signs point to Paul Graham being on your side of the Snowden and Manning cases; for instance, if you follow him on Twitter, he has posted supportive links. Similarly, Graham chimed in on a gun control thread in (IIRC) favor of gun control.

* Many of the NSA stories that have appeared in the last few weeks have also been highly technical. There's a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that gets played to try to connect the dots from any political story to hacking and startups, such that Ron Paul supporters have ready arguments for why their stories are germane to HN, but those stories tend to get flagged off anyways. Here, we're talking in large part about the internal retention policies of Google, and it's hard to make an argument that those stories aren't at least somewhat germane to HN.

I've given up on the idea of flagging political NSA stories, but I would have a big problem with anyone drawing the conclusion that HN now encourages political stories. It doesn't, and it shouldn't, and it won't if it expects to maintain a civil community. Political discussions on HN spark enmity; people who could discuss eloquently and at length the details of programming languages or linguistics or literature instead follow each other around from threat to thread downvoting out of spite.

I agree with your sentiment for the most part, except to nit-pick and say that the guidelines prohibit "Most stories about politics," but, like you said and what I think I stated pretty well in my post is that this topic is particularly important to the HN crowd. In fact, I would even go so far as to say the whole thing is NOT political, insofar as the whole democrats-vs-republicans dichotomy is irrelevant to the discussion.

I mostly agree and I think your last paragraph is the best thermometer: the "political" discussions involving the NSA scandals mostly have not sparked enmity, and since most people agree on the political stance towards these, the discussion can healthily lean towards the implications of it for information freedom and technology and how we can fight these advances to our privacy through our tech and internet savvy. So I deem (most) of the posts a good thing, except where it gets repetitive with similar stories in frontpage spots across days or even at the same time, and have not once thought about flagging one.

Ehh, I wouldn't go that far. We mostly agree on these stories political, but some of us don't agree "enough". There has definitely been enmity on some of the NSA threads.

I disagree. I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting the site guidelines.

This: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

It does not say HN isn't for any politics. It says "most stories about politics" but does not say all or any. It has a further clause which I would argue absolutely pertains to the relatively new phenomenon of PRISM and its cousin programs.

Clearly Snowden / PRISM / etc and other stories like those about Aaron Schwartz fit in perfectly with Hacker News.

All that said without implying that HN should be all about politics. I think there is room on HN for specific political issues that are of interest to hackers.

I think you and I said the same thing with different words (though I'm not sure how "perfect" the fit on these topics is; I'd rather there was 1/10th the amount of NSA coverage, for instance, and even less about Snowden himself).

It's "Swartz", by the way.

I read a lot of political commentary on the web, from all sides. Most of it consists of long arguments about why party A is good, and/or why party B is bad. At times these articles can be spun as personality pieces, analysis, or commentary on current events. You'll start reading a story on pig farming and suddenly end up inside a "Candidate X!" commercial.

I'm not seeing that here. Yes, I am seeing quite a bit of annoying hero worship, pouring over each little detail of Snowden's journey as it creeps along. But I'm not seeing calls to perform some kind of political action. (Admittedly there was a petition drive. But AFAIK it was non-partisan) Nor am I seeing emotional content structured to make one party look good and the other bad.

I want to be respectful as well, because nobody wants another reddit. Startups and news of interest to hackers is why I'm here. I can get politics anywhere. If I wanted a political rally, I'd go elsewhere.

Having said that, we're in a bit of an odd spot with these latest stories. We're like a bunch of guys who make ceremonial swords, gushing over the details of how to construct a hilt, how to hone a blade, and so forth. People are now bringing us stories of these swords being used to behead people. Many of us are adamantly refusing to admit any connection between what we do and what is going on in the world.

For a long time, I was happy enough with the bit about "That's all politics. We don't do that." But at some point, you have to realize these stories are about us -- about other hackers. Snowden, for whatever else he is, is a hacker. Wouldn't surprise me if he didn't spend a bit of time here. As was Aaron Swartz. These aren't stories about what kind of politics we should choose for ourselves, these are stories about how the technology we create and the jobs we have are actively affecting (and in many cases doing great harm to) other people in the world.

So I'm not so sure the lines are as clear cut as some would like. For instance, out of the current front page, I see one Snowden-only post, one post about Google handing over chat records, one post about Chomsky prattling on about something or another, and 2-3 posts about how secrecy works in general in the U.S. That doesn't look like "Six Degrees of Separation" That looks like stuff hackers would be interested in. But, of course, others may disagree.

More in-depth argument here: http://freedom-or-safety.com/blog/techologists-role-in-oppre...

A thousand different "hackers", a thousand different political issues that impact the lives of those "hackers". Pretty soon, we're discussing Ron Paul again, making fake users with the usernames of people who we don't agree with, following people from thread to thread downvoting them.

That's what makes this userscript a great contribution. People who are tired of the Snowden coverage can now ignore it, instead of HN attempting to moderate the content.

They could ignore it anyway.

"Edward Snowden has landed in Russia" should not be important enough to the HN community to warrant first-page placement for the better part of 12 hours. If there's meaningful debate as to the ramifications of the NSA and big data, sure, but most of the content hasn't been political or insightful so much as breaking.

Thanks for telling us what should be important to us.

Most of the HN discussion I've seen on this has been a showcase for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

No, no, other people have the D-K effect. Not us. We are smrt.

Hacker News is the one place I've consistently found good information related to this extremely important case (that and Greenwald's twitter account itself).

I think this advice will more likely than not fall on deaf ears but I would caution anyone getting all or most of their news on this subject from just HN and/or Greenwald. I've found that most of the coverage on HN has been extremely one-sided, and of course it is the most sensationalist articles (like when the NSA supposedly admitted in a Congressional hearing that any analyst could start listening to any US Person's phone calls) that get the most upvoted, and the articles either refuting or casting serious doubts on those initial stories (Rep Nadler: "nope that wasn't what was said") get a fraction of the votes.

There are more sides to this story than just what is receiving the most upvotes and I think a lot of people are allowing the story to confirm whatever prior beliefs they had (which for most is that the US is a police state).

When you think about it, this story is still only a few weeks and old and it's way too early to think we even know enough to draw any concrete conclusions, yet alone get drawn into the "hero vs traitor" waste of time.

I'd like to point out there are just 3 stories on the front page that this will remove - this being one of them.

Yeah.. sadly I had to temporarily turn turn off the script to read the comments.

I'm sick of seeing nothing else on the front page. I'll go to reddit/r/politics when I want constant updates on his flight itinerary.

I understand if Steve Jobs dominates the front page when he dies, because he's Steve Jobs. But Edward Snowden has dominated the front page for a week, and little else slips through? I only hope enough people use a script like this that non-Snowden stories can gain traction.

Are you joking? The death of a man who has contributed as much or more negatively to our industry as he did positively (on different spheres), and who gets the full frontpage only because he attracted a legion of irreparably clueless people, is more important than a case of the world's privacy in danger? (of course, it has been going for years, but it's great to finally hit the spotlight)

Sorry if I'm offending someone, but I find the comparison really offensive myself.

Was this removed from the front page? It was in the top ten maybe 30 minutes ago, and now I can't find it in the first 4 pages...

Thread got hellbanned I guess. Hopefully it didn't ban my account as well.

Well I appreciated your post!

I see your comment without showdead so I think you're good.

fwiw, this seems to have been removed from the main feed (i don't see it in the first 200 or so entries) and "ask". you've got what appears to be a hellbanned thread.

oh the irony:

1 - hiding a thread "in support" of posts arguing for less secrecy;

2 - the people who would be most annoyed by this are the ones your script gives the bird to.

Day 1: Hooray for Edward Snowden. Day 2: No get the hell out of here. We've enough of you. You're boring us.

Why talk about Snowden when we can all discuss flavor-of-the-week javascript and rails crap that few people in the real world actually care about?

Why? :s

Because HN isn't a politics site. In fact it's not even a tech news site. That's what the likes of mashable are for.

Technology is a tool, how you use that tool is an expression of politics, whether or not you consciously think it is.

It is inevitable that on a technology site, politics relating to technology will come in.

Do they need to be ~80% of the front page though?

yes. Especially when it is of this importance. Even IF it was 80%, which of course it is not.

It isn't 80% right now thankfully, but it has been at many points over the last few weeks. I don't see what purpose it solves apart from making people avoid HN.

Because this is a site dedicated to programming and programmers' news. I can understand the NSA spying on its citizens being a relevant topic for this site, but now that the only thing keeping the news 'breaking' is his flight path, this story is no longer relevant. Important, sure. But not relevant to this website.

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