Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

374 points0xbadcafebee155 comments

The movements through the world of this individual "don't amount to a hill of beans".

Is he on a plane, isn't he, will Country X extradite him, won't they, does his old girlfriend still pole dance, doesn't she, what is Wikileaks' stance on him, is he allowed to trend on Twitter, etc.

The great majority of these stories seem mainly fodder for news companies to gain revenue while people voraciously seek more information about a quickly diminishing story. The documents were released, the hearings have been held, there are some lawsuits pending.

But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim. And while we can discuss myriad elements 'til we're blue in the face, fifteen front-page stories a day aren't going to help us understand the issues any better, nor are they coverage of some important event.

Let's stop turning HN into a tabloid news service and get back to the deeply interesting stories.

"Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads.

A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.

What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be.

The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter."

View on HN

Please post more about Snowden, PRISM, NSA, GCHQ, and all the rest. I will upvote every one of them.

For those who think that "we all know essentially how this will end", think about what the world would look like if every major change had been met with this kind of pitiful attitude. Every revolution, every change for the better, has come out of people rejecting that sentiment.

It's not too late to turn away from the abyss and go back towards sanity and a better future.

Hear, hear.

This isn't a quaint distraction that's getting in the way of us discussing serious issues like gradients in web design buttons... this is a big story and deserves to consume some HN news 'cycles'.

I'd wager many of the upvotes are more in-line with "i love watching things burn" than "maybe this will help".

Also, are you sure it's not too late?

You can disagree with his statement about PRISM, and that doesn't really have much to do with his original point.

He wasn't saying don't post thoughtful op-eds about PRISM (and if he was I think he'd get no support here at all), he's saying enough with the tabloid like articles about the people at the center of controversies, which have nothing to do with the larger issue.

Let's not restrict it to people relevant to controversies. Let's stop all the tabloid articles and blogspam.

And what would be left, of the HN we already have? No idealizing the past...

One solution might be to link to a live blog or page which has the latest updates on the story, title it "Click here to get the latest on this story' and then make sure it stays in the first 10 or so stories and let people have fun in the comments with updates and what not.

OP seems to be issuing a blanket request that we slow down with any stories related to either Snowden or the NSA. If he's really only against frivolous reporting his subject line ought to have said "Please post good stories on the NSA and post them as frequently as possible" and then explained what he felt were good stories.

But even then I would object to drawing too sharp a distinction between Snowden's story and the NSA story. There's an integral relationship between the two, because how the US handles leaks and leakers has everything to do with the national debate on how the US gov handles secrecy in general.

Some reporting might boil over into frivolous details; I truly don't care what he eats and I think those details trivialize the story. But in terms of driving attention to relevant details, I think Snowden's story and the NSA surveillance story command attention symbiotically as opposed to being mutually exclusive. It's like the thesis advanced by Alex Gibney in his Wikileaks documentary We Steal Secrets: the allegations against Julian Assange and subsequent attempts at extradition probably had the effect of bringing much more attention to Wikileaks. Similarly here with Snowden.

I agree with the sentiment, minus Snowden. We should be talking about this issue. Snowden is at this point immaterial to the larger issues unless he leaks more details. Discussing himself distracts from his purposes. His movements and people's opinions about his movements (which dominated HN this weekend) are of no consequence to PRISM and the NSA.

The honest truth is we are no closer to discovering the truth about what the government does than we were on day one of the leak while entertaining ourselves with platitudes about how "America is now a place where people seek asylum from" and Bourne movie fantasies.

To me Snowden's story looks like a ‘meta-issue’, arguably even more important.

There might be more problems in addition to what he helped uncover, but whether they are voiced might depend on what happens to Snowden.

You wouldn't halt QA process until you fix a critical security issue in your production system, especially if the fix might take some time. You'd probably be paying even more attention to improving bug visibility after such an incident, to make sure other problems are noticed in time.

If we stop talking about Snowden, he'll have lost his only viable defense. If what he leaked is important and worthwhile, then he ought to be defended. The probability that he'll receive fair treatment by our government and a fair trial is directly related to his presence in a spotlight.

How the government treats Snowden is a proxy for how the government may treat each one of us in the future; he's now committed to being the test case for our possible future.

I'm not stoked about discussing a random dude's travel plans either, but it would appear that the court of public opinion is more transparent than the system which would otherwise judge the man.

> If we stop talking about Snowden, he'll have lost his only viable defense.

No he won't, because in the grand scheme of things, no one cares whether HN talks about him or not.

I agree that all the short term updates don't have relevance to larger issues. However, if discovering the truth about what the government is doing does matter to you then Snowden's long term fate should be important. There are likely a few people in government agencies contemplating leaking vital information about these programs. The extent to which the US government can make the rest of Snowden's life unpleasant will determine what they do.

Snowden and his movements are not immaterial. I won't repeat why as the top comment does a good job of explaining it so I'll just link it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933175

Mass upvoting helps exactly nobody. It's slacktivism, not activism.

If you feel strongly about this cause, I would encourage you to stop mass upvoting, and get involved in the real world. Perhaps your action would merit its own post to HN, and something that would inspire others to join you in action. You might end up doing something amazing.

Shameless plug for http://restorethe4th.net, a planned mass demonstration on July 4th to restore the fourth amendment.

Why not both?

I don't know

I'd go further. Mass indiscriminate upvoting actually undermines the cause, because instead of encouraging HN members to participate in discussions on secure communications and the responsibilities of tech companies which people posting here are particularly well placed to act on, people are debating the intricacies of extradition treaties, speculating about whether there's a connection with Moodys' downgrade of Hong Kong's credit rating or upvoting false rumours about Twitter blocks.

The effect of such a deluge of trivia on many people is to intentionally avoid the whole topic. It's like ad blindness.

You think that upvoting things on HN makes a difference? This story has already dominated the front page for weeks. It has been discussed to death.

If this continues to dominate HN for much longer, there is a risk that people will just stop visiting this site and it just becomes a home for conspiracy cranks.

Are you upvoting because:

- you think people should be more aware of the issue, or

- you think that each of these links individually provide value to the readers here

If the former, then please stop. We are aware: identifying valuable contributions would be a more helpful route towards revolution.

Personally speaking, I am unlikely to click on these articles now because few of them are providing any new value.

I'm with you. As evidently most of HN :)

We can't simply shrug it off. It's in everyone's home now. And not only in the US. If we dismiss it now, we deserve every surveillance abuse that follows.

I love the sentiment, except for one thing. You say "I will upvote every one of them." Please don't. Instead, if you care so deeply about this issue, read all the submissions and then upvote only the GOOD ones. That way, those who are less interested and only see the stuff that makes the "front page" will see the good articles and their time will be better spent.

In short: if you think this is important stuff hackers will care about, vote it up, but smartly, not blindly.

As of this comment, my parent comment above has 127 points - showing that I'm far from alone in this sentiment. Thanks guys, we're fighting the good fight. Let's win.

I started reading and registered an account on HN very recently (a few weeks ago), because I thought it was about technology, Internet, start-ups, science, etc.

Little did I know, Hacker News actually seems to be about the US Government, NSA, PRISM, cyber-surveillance, secret courts, wiretapping, conspiracies, and other such topics. At least, based on the volume of stories here. Is there a way to filter them out and get back to reading about technology?

Do you honestly believe we've understood this surveillance complex enough that we can keep on with our lives? Why accept that "PRISM [won't go] away" or that "Snowden's fate is grim"?

Honestly? Is this cause not worth fighting for anymore?

Is posting hundreds of mundane "news" articles with no substance really fighting?

Is not talking about it better?

How about- and I know this is shocking- we find a balance.

A balance between nothing and tabloid.

We're dangerously close to tabloid currently. Lots of irrelevant articles, lots of speculation and opinion, and the real stories are hidden in the noise.

I still think about 80% of the Snowden articles are worse than useless -- they're actively hiding the 20% of articles that are worthwhile, that we should all be reading.

But hey, I guess diverting our attention to the pointless bits of the story is an effective diversion tactic /conspiracy

We complain all the time that the major news networks don't cover what is really important or that they cover them and move on like it never happened. I think it is a good think that it is kept present in our minds so we don't forget it or write it off as "There is nothing we can do about it".

Seeing the entire front page of HN covered in stories on it might be slightly annoying but it is much better than the alternative (no coverage) IMHO.

do people still post about Bradley Manning?

how about wikileaks? Julian Assange?

all those cables?

Most of these stories themselves are at best tangentially related to the larger issue.

Upvoting them or reading a story about Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie is not doing anything to fight for civil liberties, though it will give views to garbage web sites like Business Insider and its ilk.

Oh give up.

"Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie" "Kim Dotcom braids his hair!" "Julian Assange orders Cherry Coke instead of regular!" "Elon Musk buys three rare white leopards!"

Do you really like to argue by ridiculing others this much? There hasn't been a story even resembling anything like this, people have actually upvoted things they found interesting.

More links means more people are writing about it. This is good.

It does not mean more people writing about the actual issues, it means more people writing about irrelevant details of these people's lives like Edward Snowden's girlfriend's blog. That's the point.

Nobody's saying don't post thoughtful opinion pieces or details about legislation or court cases or anything else actually having to do with the issues.

You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant. That's why this post that we're commenting on exists and has gotten upvoted; the quality of those posts has been abysmal.

And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.

No, my point is that people are upvoting articles they find interesting, which might not be the same things that I find interesting, and I'm ok with this.

I find the personal stuff in a story like this quite interesting, btw.

Of course there's a lot of duplicates and posts with similar information in them, but is that such a big issue? I think people who are flagging posts because they think it's sort of the same as another article is basically abusing the system.

You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant.

Yeah, but "most" are. See how it works when you leave the sophistry out?

And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.

Are you kidding? Are you projecting?

Good lord, there was something up here this morning that talked about the pizza and fried chicken Snowden had for his birthday. Before that, it was 'his girlfriend's a pole dancer and here's the cache of her deleted blog'.

This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews, and doing whatever else he could to make the story all about him, and for some inexplicable reason y'all want to shove the knife in deeper and twist.

> This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews, and doing whatever else he could to make the story all about him

Really? Because I don't think "the goal" is to get detailed articles written up in blogs that will show up on Hacker News, I think "the goal" is to get the story out to as many people as possible and raise its profile in hopes of influencing governments.

And you have to understand the way that the press works. They've already WRITTEN a story about PRISM... so they can't write another one, because it's not "new". However, they CAN report on the daily movements of this guy, Snowden. And they can publish every interview he gives. And each time they can (will!) review just what it is that he revealed.

I think that, intentional or not, Snowden has successfully managed to bring media attention to this issue in a way that previous efforts had not.

Yeah, really. Just anecdotal, of course, but from my own conversations with (and eavesdropping on) normal people around my town, it's clear that some people know who Snowden is and are following his travels but they don't have the slightest clue what he revealed. 'Some military secret to the Chinese' is the best guess I've gotten so far.

I tend to think he knew they would find him and he preferred to be famous and hopefully talked about when they did. He wanted to control what he could of how he might be presented to the public. He probably also did not want to disappear one day with nary a word about him or spoken by him ever again. He wanted change. He risked a lot for it.

I don't think he risked it so he could do a few interviews. The fame and media attention is a tool.

> This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews

Yeah. His cause is completely dead. No one is following the spying on Americans issue now.

Nobody is talking about chicken pot pie. I don't appreciate your obvious straw man attack. The stories about a political refugee trying to escape the grasp of the United States, a country which stands for freedom and human rights, is arguably one of the most important stories of our lives.

The problem is that Snowden has become the story. It's no longer about PRISM or the legitimate surveillance and privacy concerns it's about him.

It's up to us - the people - to make the story about illegal surveillance and privacy concerns. The media sure as hell won't address those issues for us.

So go out and fight. Upvoting these kind of smap on HN could hardly be called "fighting".

It's pathetic the defeatist attitude the majority of americans have. We finally get a week or so of pushing these sort of stories to the front page and now people are complaining.

Ironically if you look at a list of recent submissions by this "peterwwillis", you will see a list of boring nothing-to-see-here content that should also be downvoted due to a lack of originality and new content.

Anchoring (wikipedia.org) - yep he linked to a random wikipedia article. I'm so glad we have people like peter to lead hn to a new promise land of link filled content to wikipedia.

Graph of BitCoin market price (USD) (blockchain.info) - Yes because what hn readers need is a link to blockchain.info as we were too incompetent to find it alone.

Ironic a poster crying about content submits such boring, shallow and useless posts.

But something that is actually relevant to current affairs should be flagged and downvoted? The guy who started this thread is a joke.

To all the foreigners claiming this is "american politics" and should be ignored, do you all really have such short sightedness you can't see this effects everybody in the world, not just americans?

Please dont make this a personal issue about just OP. Hundreds of upvotes on this -- he's clearly not alone.

I don't mean to make this personal, but someone who submits a wikipedia entry as a submission should not decry posts that are about current affairs directly relating to software development and the tech industry.

> But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim.

That's a very defeatist attitude. I'm sure that there are better arguments for upvoting or not upvoting these articles than saying "this story is not worth paying attention to because we are completely helpless, let's go back to talking about app store metrics".

Well, I frequently feel very very helpless indeed. I am not a brave person.

Agree. Maybe his fate won't be as "grim" if the world continues to pay attention and understand what is happening to him.

It's also fatalistic, I might add.

>The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

Paul Graham, What you can't say. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Please don't go and use words designed to shot down the debate.

eh? From your own quote: >>The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now.

"Defeatist" has nothing to do with no one 'getting to ask' a question.

This is a story that people are upvoting because they find it interesting. It is also a very active one, where new interesting information is coming up all the time.

And "Edward Snowden's fate is grim" so we should stop caring about him? I'm glad to not see this story go away, and I am actually understanding the issues better because of the articles about it here.

Let the community decide what should be on here.

And how can community decide on highly controversial topic if only upvotes are counted?

Which is REALLY GOOD.

We end up with divisive topics that only half of us is interested in on the first page. The other half might completely hate it, even!

It isn't the quantity of Snowden stories that are the problem. It is the tenuous relationship with reality of many of the "stories" that have been posted that is the problem. This morning we had a story at #1 for quite a while that claimed Twitter was censoring #Snowden from trending in the United States. Instead of actually going to Twitter and seeing that this was a ridiculous claim, people just kept upvoting it because it sounded like something they should upvote. This is a phenomenon that all sites with voting systems on submissions have. People tend to go and satisfy their slacktivism itch by upvoting headlines that they agree with without actually reading the articles or really thinking about them.

To the moderators' credit, they deleted the Twitter "censorship" submission. I know they have deleted some other very low quality Snowden/NSA related articles as well.

Agreed. At some point I flagged every snowden/NSA story on the front page (I believe it was 28 out of 30).

I don't seem to be able to flag any more so I guess that was picked up as abuse, so unfortunately I can't flag any more of these stories.

I wouldn't mind seeing stories on all of this, as long as they are only posted when something interesting has actually happened, as opposed to just because there hasn't been a story on it for 5 minutes

Why not let the others here decide what they think is interesting instead of flagging posts?

Things people like gets upvoted and rise to the top. You did abuse the system, because you used the flagging as a downvote button. This is not Reddit.

> Why not let the others here decide what they think is interesting

Weird that you cannot spot the contradiction here.

Why not let others here decide what they think shouldn't be here instead of upvoting crap posts? Other people are abusing the upvote button by voting for content that should not be here.

> This is not Reddit.

The quality over the past week has been lousy.

Sorry, English is not my first language.

We do not have a downvote button. Major news is allowed here.

This is an active story that a lot of people is interested in, and this means that a lot of posts about it is upvoted.

Shouldn't the flag button only be about things that are not allowed? Not as a way to remove things you find not interesting?

The issue here is that the upvoting is democratic. One person flagging posts based on his opinions (and as you can see in this thread, your opinions are not the same as others, imagine that!) and them getting completely removed because of it is not democratic.

If you don't like things, don't upvote them. They get upvoted because others like them. How can this be so hard to understand?

Your opinion of the quality of the posts here is not what should decide what posts others read!

You can only moderate other upvotes by flagging the submissions they upvoted.

Moderation is for removing submissions that are not appropriate, not for removing the things you don't find very interesting.

There's a clear distinction between the two.

> I don't seem to be able to flag anymore so I guess that was picked up as abuse, so unfortunately I can't flag anymore of these stories.

Same here, though I believe I lost my flagging ability after 2 or 3 Snowden stories. Definitely a heads up for anyone else who might think these types of stories hit the "Off-topic: Most stories about politics" part of the post guidelines.

As a non-US HN'er, I totally agree with this. I come here for tech news, not US politics.

Some HNer has set up a nice filter:

It filters away all stories containing keywords nsa, prism, etc.

And even if I were from the US. When I started visiting hackernews, nearly all stories were about tech, startups, or research results (like whether there is a correlation between years of experience and code quality, such things). In the last few weeks it's all about privacy and, worse, politics.

I'm a huge privacy fan, really. But after months of news about it, I'm quite through with it. We all know Gmail gets wiretapped, we all know how to encrypt data, and whether you do something about it is up to you. End of story if you ask me.

Politics too to an extent. It's important to know what's going on in the world. But I don't find it important to know where Snowden is going by the minute.

Honest question: how are privacy-related topics not tech news? If Google, Apple, FB, and other big techs are being required to give up data to the US government, isn't that something that should concern our community worldwide?

This is a very naive point of view.

I too am not from the US, but this impacts me directly. Perhaps, even more so than US citizens, as they have rights (for the moment, at least).

It wouldn't be much of an issue if I didn't use Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, heck, even Oracle products. Not to mention that traceroute shows that most internet routes pass through the US, even if the destination is not there. After all, the fattest pipes are to the US.

I, and most posters here, have done nothing wrong. But the Stasi, if it still existed, might think otherwise. The US seems to be ok right now and focused on "terrorists" (real or imaginary), but we don't now who is going to eventually replace Obama.

I have faith that the american people will eventually put an end to the madness, before it is too late. But, in the meantime, please keep the NSA and Snowden news coming.

If it bothers you, take the bigrss feed here and put it through an rss filter to remove the articles you do not like?

I did that for Steve Jobs. I personally want to read every new element about the Snowden effect but I realize not everyone else does.

If it bothers you, take the bigrss feed here and put it through an rss filter to remove the articles you do not like?

This doesn't solve the bigger problem, namely, that posting countless stories on Snowden is really killing HN. Seriously, we're one step away from having stories on what Snowden had for lunch on his flight to Moscow on the front page. I don't buy the "Let the community decide what should be on the front page" argument either. Communities tend to follow the same laws of entropy like anything else in this universe. Without a certain number of people putting in considerable effort to keep up the quality of submitted articles and discussions, they tend to devolve into places with a bunch of articles that bring nothing new to the table, and with discussions that are nothing more than long, tiresome rants or flame wars that have no real value.

Wait he's flying to Moscow?

Joking aside if there is a story about his lunch on his way to Moscow, which also means he is flying to Moscow. That's important.

I'm indifferent about the situation because I don't live in US. But it still matters, you're just not interested in it. So you should do what he says and mentally filter it out. If this was 9/11 or something you felt more connected with (I'm not saying 9/11 is it, but I'm assuming your American and probably feel something for that date), you would not be saying this to begin with.

What this thread shows is exactly how many over exaggerating drama queens inhabit the HN comment system.

This is a story of a hacker, a sysadmin, one of us, who made a choice that could very well cost him his life. He is now being pursued all over the globe by the world's largest super-power, which has yet to catch him. His story directly addresses the role of technology in anonymity and privacy, and the details of his story are full of lots of fun technical details. In addition, he's carrying notebooks that have even more stories about technology, spying, privacy, and such.

Yeah, sure, I don't care what he had for lunch or whether he's sitting in the aisle or window seat, but as far as getting attention on HN? What else would you expect?

> but as far as getting attention on HN? What else would you expect?

No-one is calling for zero Snowden articles.

What people are asking for is for a reduction in the flood of Snowden trivia.

"Snowden Does X" will be reported by the twelve different news sources, and each of these will be posted to HN. Some of these will have blogpost reactions, which also get posted. An hour later some politician will respond to "Snowden Does X", which will be reported by 12 different sources, and blogged about, and etc etc.

The submissions are tedious and very repetitive.

But, worse, so are the comments. It's pretty much "The NSA is bad, and what they did is bad"; "Snowden is a traitor" or "snowden isn't a traitor".

Some of it was mildly interesting but now there's very little new "deeply interesting" commentary.

Snowden stories are, now, a good example of "intensely but shallowly interesting".

Front page stories on HN right now that mention Snowden:

"Edward Snowden is not on the flight from Moscow to Cuba"

and

"Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?"

I'm not sure what you're complaining about. Has there been a bunch of noise/trivial stories about Snowden? No doubt. But I already said that.

Looks like the voting system is working as it should.

One of fellow geeks had chosen to risk everything which he had - whether it was recklessness or courage is a different thing - and publish classified information, shedding some light on the topic of people being monitored by the government.

As much as you might be irritated by the amount of information related to him which is being published here, personally, I'm curious how the story will unfold. I presume that there are others who are curious and others who are irritated as well.

In most of the cases you are right - hn is not the place for gossip about famous people. The thing here is that we are not discussing what did Kardashian ate for dinner and why it's bad for her cellulite, but following a story of somebody who is not giving a shit and trying to if not defend, then at least shed some light on our privacy, as it's being taken from us.

Please don't get me wrong, but I'd strongly advise using some filtering tools (there are dozens) for hn in this specific case.

I'm not normally in favour of "political" stories on HN but this one is an exception for three reasons.

Firstly, mass surveillance and the end-run around the Constitution is a technological as well as social and political issue that also touches on the hot button issue of privacy and how the legal system is increasingly at odds with the Internet (eg distinguishing between "US persons" and "foreign persons" is increasingly difficult and makes less and less sense in a connected world).

Secondly, most of these stories have been surprisingly informative if you read between the lines.

- Hong Kong (as a plausible deniability front for the PRC basically) stalled on the arrest warrant and essentially ignored the cancelled passport. When prompted by the US AG they further stalled by requesting more information. Basically they took the approach of "who is this Snowden guy?" and threw up their hands saying "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas; we're confused!" Make no mistake: this is the PRC making a stand against US policy;

- Russia likewise (it is reported today) claims it has no "legal authority" to detain Snowden and don't know where he is (despite him being contained to the airport as he has no valid Russian visa as far as anyone knows). This, too, is Russia taking a stance against US policy.

- Ecuador too of all countries is taking an anti-US stance. It's a strange country to claim to be supporting human rights (given its record and persecution of journalists who criticize the president). In a news article today it was mentioned that the US refused to extradite bankers to Ecuador. Are we seeing the true tit-for-tat motives here?

- Whether the US will interfere with a Russian commercial airliner that travels in or near US airspace (being the flight from Moscow to Cuba) is an open and noteworthy question. It seems unlikely but the very fact that we even need to ask that question says a lot.

- Obama's war on whistleblowers exceeds that of all presidents that came before him. "Justice" is not the only goal here. Making an example of these "traitors" is. That can be the only explanation for the disgusting behaviour (arguably torture) that applied to, say, the detention and solitary confinement of Bradley Manning (ostensibly under the guise of "suicide watch").

- the administration's adoption of the "Insider Threat Program" basically turns all Federal employees into informants on each other where you can be punished for not informing. This is straight out of the Stasi playbook and happening in the US in 2013. Not only that but different departments and agencies have leeway on defining what "sensitive" information is, which goes beyond "classified".

Third, nothing changes and nothing works... until it does. To take the fatalistic and cynical position that there's no point in trying is just... sad.

This issue matters and it's germane to HN on several fronts. If you don't feel the same, just don't click on the links.

Agreed. Although I have seen some tabloid-esque articles get upvoted, it's important that the issue of NSA wiretapping (not necessarily the whereabouts of Snowden) do not fade from our mind. It's important here on HN especially, because as technologists we understand far better than others, politicians in particular, the gravity of collecting even the most trivial data. (See the great article "Using Metadata to find Paul Revere")

> This issue matters and it's germane to HN on several fronts. If you don't feel the same, just don't click on the links.

I agree that it matters, and it's important, and so on. I also feel that it's something of a watershed in the site's history in that there are a lot more unrelated political articles appearing in its wake, with negative consequences for the quality of discourse and content here. I feel that, long term, if not checked, this will lead to a decline in the quality of the site. Actually... I'm a bit pessimistic in any case. This latest go round seems to have attracted/brought out people mainly interested in politics, so I'm not really sure there's much that can be done in any event.

HN is one of the leading tech news sites. The recent events clearly demonstrate that citizens need to be more involved in the political process, or at least less blasé. As leaders of the tech community, do we not have an obligation to act responsibly, to be informed? I don't believe a shift in HN to be more political would be a shift toward lower quality content, but instead a shift for the better, onto more important things.

So, if articles do not appear here and get lots of upvotes, we are not informed or involved?

Do you think there would be any space left on the front page for startups & tech if the site focused on politics? Many political issues (and there are a lot of them) are objectively far more important than tech & startups, so it would be logical for them to crowd out the former content.

Thanks for writing this post so I didn't have to. The readers of HN for the most part belong to a sort of protected class and do, in fact, have some political power. It's the time to beat this drum as hard as we can. I think it's time for this issue to stay at the very top of our consciousnesses.

Obama's twitter account is blithely tweeting about climate change (also important) when the blatant end run around the bill of rights should be one of the most important issues of our lives. If this kind of practice becomes the norm, then the 4th amendment is a hollowed out shell that once meant something, and future generations will never even know what it was like to be protected from unwarranted search and seizure.

Beating the drum in the echo chamber will accomplish two things:

* Jack.

* Shit.

As Steve Blank is wont to say, if anything is to happen, you need to "get out of the building". That means interacting with real life politics, not upvoting stories on a niche news site. Unlike upvoting stories, this is actually hard work.

What's the point of visibility for a story anyway? The point is to actual do something that improves the situation. Voting things up seems like "gee, I wish someone would do something about this, maybe if they happen to see it it will happen".

You're presenting two options, of which you imply only one can be chosen:

* "Getting out of the building" and engaging others with an important issue

* Continuing to discuss the development of that important issue and organizing action with a community that is already mostly sympathetic

But the truth is that these options are not mutually exclusive. One can do both quite easily. As you said, the hard work is interacting with real life politics. I imagine many who post here are doing that. But doing the hard work doesn't preclude also keeping the issue fresh in the minds of one's mostly-sympathetic peers who are at the forefront of calling for (and hopefully making) change.

If you crowd out the tech and the startups with politics, you'll be left without much of anything.

I absolutely agree with you but I think keeping it important here is a part of keeping it in the consciousness of people here who have the power to take action. This is an absolutely red alert level problem where even the insane powers provided by the USA PATRIOT ACT are being superceded. A million conspiracy theorists were 100% correct about domestic spying and people who didn't want to believe that the 4th amendment could be so sidestepped were wrong.

At the very least people can join and support the EFF, ACLU, and other orgs making real movement. The US government is hoping this will die down quickly. I'm just saying it shouldn't.

> people here who have the power to take action.

You have the power to take action. 'Upvote it so someone else will do the work' is lame.

    > Ecuador too of all countries is taking an anti-US stance. It's a
    > strange country to claim to be supporting human rights

If you're already on unfriendly terms with the U.S. it would seem to be in your interest to undermine them and cast them in a bad light.

You don't need noble intentions to score political points by accepting a high-profile refugee fleeing from a government largely hostile to you.

The strangeness he's referring to is on Snowden, not Ecuador. Of course Ecuador is doing this to spite the US. However, Snowden shouldn't be surprised when it becomes convenient for Ecuador to change its mind once he is no longer useful.

I agree with everything you just said (and I can't claim that about anybody very often). Like someone else said, I will upvote every Snowden-related story because only by talking about this and taking action can we have even the slightest possibility of change. And this issue is far too important to let it slip through the cracks. We are literally at a turning point between free societies and totalitarianism. Are we really going to stick our heads in the sand and be "good Germans?" (no offense intended to current German citizens)

this one is an exception

Just like the last hundred, right? The problem with this is that it never ends, because every asshole with an itchy mouse finger thinks it's his job to keep people informed by mindlessly upvoting increasingly trivial details about allegedly important stories. The site just sinks under a sea of exceptions. Nothing important actually happens as a result, but everybody feels empowered because they're "raising awareness" of things everybody who didn't abandon ship has already turned fanatical about. All you're accomplishing is the sustainment and amplification of your established convictions.

Wake. Up. Sheeple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcotizing_dysfunction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_minutes_hate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

Thank you. It also appears that there has been some aggressive filtering of the Snowden topic on reddit so we have all those "discussions" spill over here and turn this site into NSA news.

This is a problem with Hacker News. Maybe because most people can't downvote (or I dunno some other reason), it has a big big problem with duplicate stories. When Steve Jobs died for example, 30/30 stories were "Steve Jobs has died" for quite some time.

It is irritating, that's for sure.

People can flag submissions. I don't know if there's a karma threshold for flagging.

People should be visiting new and flagging articles that don't belong here, and upvoting good articles.

It's a bit worrying that "over flagging" could cause someone to lose their ability to flag articles - some users have reported that.

Still, most of the Snowden articles are garbage and should be flagged.

Flagging != downvoting. We should upvote things we find interesting, and flag things that isn't appropriate at all.

No you can't flag stories. Theoretically you can, but if you try to actually flag 25 Snowden stories today, since all of them are off-topic according to HN guidelines, your flag ability will be removed in a matter of minutes.

> But we all know essentially how this will end

The thing I have learned from reading history is that it often does not turn out the way people expected at the time. The details of what happens matter.

At least give us the important details when we have them. Right now it's just cranking out any and all details we can find about his current whereabouts, which are of no value as far as I can see. Do a writeup two days later about where he is, how he went there, and why. That'd be totally fine. All it takes is one story, not a filled homepage like we had for the past few days.

I guess I'd like to have more technical news too. The issue is what happening is way more important than anything else. I guess we can bare some "gossip" news if it can help the community a little.

I actually came to HN every day in the past two weeks just because I want to read more about the Snowden affaire. From the technological, political, dramaturgical points of view this is one of the most interesting stories a hacker could think of.

Honestly, the timbre of this post implies a viewpoint which is fatalistic and frustrated with the issue, from someone who perhaps doesn't think the issue is as severe as others do.

I say, don't hide your opinions in a separate complaint, just because it is easier to defend. It is easy to criticize the headlines for being superficial, even if your issue is that you don't want to talk about Snowden anymore.

Keeping the headlines up keeps awareness up. Perhaps that is precisely what you don't like. Why do you think PRISM is inevitable? Why do you think his asylum requests in Ecuador are less interesting than the latest coffee script variation?

I think it is fascinating that Hacker News is having such a political reaction to this issue. That, to me, is deeply interesting in and of itself.

I would love to see more posts, which discuss how PRISM will change the future of the technology world.

Turn your tv back on, pay your taxes, shut up and let us keep killing and watching whomever we want.

Good luck with this. A week or so ago I even lost the privilege of flagging submissions because I flagged one too many PRISM posts. It's been a boring couple of weeks, that's for sure.

People keep suggesting that his flight itenerary and whereabouts aren't interesting. This is simply not true. This is extremely important and could have much larger implications. China and Russia are essentially spitting in the US governments face by allowing him to move in and out of their countries, and if that isn't interesting to you maybe you should spend more time on reddit or imgur.

I reject your analysis. I will be upvoting every Snowden story on HN.

PS - Hi NSA.

Yeah we need to clear out this news about the most important case of domestic spying in the history of the world so that I can finally see some stories about which startup raised money...?

Perspective please.

Agreed. This is better and more relevant than the usual Techcrunch parroting.

You can install "Selectivity for HN" Greasemonkey script to hide those stories. It reduced my front page to just about ~10 relevant posts.

It might help to flag those posts too, but if you try it they will most likely just remove flag privilege for you, since this Snowden thing seems to be a new fetish here on HN, similar to the time Steve Jobs died when you couldn't read anything else.

Btw, from the HN guide: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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."

These Snowden/NSA/PRISM articles are pretty much the definition of off-topic, and it seems that we can't fight them out of front page, since we can't downvote posts, and flagging them will just lead to removal of flag privilege.

Could you possibly link to the script, I'm having trouble finding it for some reason.

You can find a script home page at http://swapped.cc/#!/iip

However, I had to manually enable script on https://news.ycombinator.com/* since it is enabled only on http by default.

In general I'm in agreement with the OP.

The majority of the stories, even those where Snowden is claiming something, are just that: stories. There is little deeply interesting or worthwhile here.

They spark serious discussion for sure, but one thing I've seen is that many of us on HN are taking Snowden's claims at face value.

This disturbs me. We should be sitting down and asking ourselves "what information here is valid? How can we even trust this guy? Can we analyze the source, the data and the conclusions to find inconsistency and think through what is really going on here?"

Ask any veteran spook and they'll tell you to trust your instincts. My (non-spook) instincts - and those of many people I know - are screaming "there is something really, really wrong with this story."

Because Congress and the President clearly care about how many upvotes some cause gets on Hacker News.... seriously voting something up on Hacker News isn't advocacy at all and I can guarantee that everyone on Hacker News is pretty much 400% more educated on this issue than the general public.

If your passionate about something and you feel it needs to change write your congressman a hand written letter. Go visit their local office. Remind them your the person who decides if their unemployed during the next election.

If your passionate enough that you need to upvote everything on a subject then spend 10-15 minutes a day and write a handwritten letter to one of your elected officials. Thats more likely to make a difference than upvoting on hacker news.

"Can we please slow down the stories about ..." - If the community didn't want them they wouldn't surface. They clearly do.

Come on. We should never, ever make a post asking the community to reconsider what's been going on? That's ridiculous.

I don't have a problem at all with the volume of stories, I just think that we need to honor Snowden's wishes. He explicitly asked that focus remain on the content of his leaks rather than about him personally. Let's talk about his leaks and how we are going to create a future without the need for them rather than about the man himself.

We need stories on Snowden because ultimately this story is not about Snowden but how the government deals with the privacy of individuals.

We are at the intersection of privacy of individuals and technology. The internet made information abundantly available for anyone (including govt) to search. Our entire lives is being tracked and recorded permanently in history. The people ("big brother") that control this information can control our lives (we all have secrets and/or broke the law one way or another without knowing it).

We as the tech community, we have a responsibility to protect the privacy and the rights of individual more than anyone else. Some of us on Hacker News build products that millions of people use. We need people that build these product bring awareness of privacy concerns to their companies. If we will not stand up for the privacy of individuals, who will? the Senators of our country?

We need to make people more aware of privacy issues, not less.

Considering many of these stories are a pain to find in MSM sources (unless you are continually checking every media source's homepage), I appreciate the fact that HN is aggregating them all to one location. I understand that it can be annoying to see HN full of stories about the next plane that Edward Snowden may hop on. However, I would rather see that crap on here and still be updated on new developments regarding the issue as a whole vs missing out on new information because stories about PRISM, Edward Snowden, and the NSA are no longer being shared on here.

In addition, your defeatist attitude towards the whole PRISM ordeal is ironic, considering your willingness to speak out against Snowden stories being upvoted on here. If you were willing to channel that energy into action or ideas against PRISM, maybe things would change. Oh, and you're comments are in direct conflict with the second rule of HN.

> "But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim."

> "Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking [...] but they do have to be deeply interesting."

I understand that many people here share your pessimism and this NSA business is surely getting tiresome for them.

It might be I'm just more naive and personally invested in this widescale spying thing because privacy on the internet is something I've always deepely cared about. But that's why, until this thing is sorted out (if at all, I have no idea how), all this wonderful technical stuff that's usually discussed here appears somehow less important in the lights of recent events (to me).

Edit: That doesn't mean that we should flood Hacker News with links to unreliable tabloid articles and force out the technical content entirely, of course. There has to be a middle ground.

I never thought I'd see the day when /r/programming was better than HN. However, it's happened ever since Bitcoin, Asange, Dotcom, and now Snowden has taken over here.

I've gone from checking HN, including the new section, a couple times a day, to taking a look every 4 or 5 days.

It involves all the largest Silicon Valley companies so it will be of interest to everyone running a company or working with technology in the valley and the US.

I'd also argue all the linking from sites like HN and reddit are keeping this in the news since it gets the hits on the mainstream sites. The interest in it on these sites might actually keep the heat on to change this bad situation.

A week or two is too little to give to this immensely impactful story. With that said I am only up-voting stories that I feel are defining of our times and major breaks, trouble is so may of them have been recently.

Yes, we'd all like for it to end and get back to business which we must continue doing but ignoring it isn't going to change the general community interest in it as it is a huge issue.

> But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim

Not only do I disagree with this point, I would go so far as to say your defeatist attitude will make this terrible outcome a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we talk about these things the more we can fix them.

Shoving your head in the sand will guarantee the programs stay and Snowden's outcome be grim. Talk about the issue enough, forcing it into the spotlight, and only then is an effective debate possible.

As a community, instead of solely upvoting news about snowden (which I believe we occasionally should), I think we need to write to attack the core of the problem: We (the HN community) obviously agree on how whistleblowers need to be treated and how any government authority should keep off of our privacy. Easy champs. Solely upvoting news is not fighting. Dare and write to your congressman. Give me a little bit of the old HN where it was not 80% about one man and which used to be awesome.

And this is yet another post dedicated to Edward Snowden :) It's sort of like asking kids not to think about pink elephant.

The moment you asked - everybody is thinking and discussing it.

> But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim

It is not obvious to me that either of these propositions is correct.

Perhaps we can have a button - purely tech articles, and everything else. Readers can turn off/on this button and the links appear/disappear accordingly?

I'd really like to see topic-based threads of submissions here, or tag-based grouping. Even if this lives at the top of the active topics list, it would consolidate and give other topics room on the front page.

I believe there are ways to both accommodate extensive discussion on the breaking / on-going news as well as keeping space for the core HN topics (hacking, CS, entrepreneurship, etc).

Unwarranted surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the foundations of a democratic society.

People are commenting and upvoting because they are angry; not only because of the above, but also because on top of that the US government wants to punish Edward Snowden for telling the truth to the world.

Just adding my 50 cents...

This will be followed in 2 months by "why does the US have such a short attention span? Our news cycle is too short for anything to every happen."

I'm very happy to have my sacred tech news site "cluttered" with Snowden stories because it means that enough people, like me, still care about them.

The same thing happened when Aaron Schwartz died, and earlier with Steve Jobs' death. It's the mark of a community that cares. Sometimes, I agree it's frustrating, but I prefer that it happens and I have the minor inconvenience, than for it not to happen at all.

Google Trends [1] seems to indicate that Snowden has become the story and the underlying issues less so.

This is understandable, Snowden is the classic Robin Hood character.

[1] http://s831.us/12ZUwZP

"It means stuff that teaches you about the world."

I guess you do not find the story is teaching you anything about the world?

"But if this... was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be."

Maybe it is, but you just are not seeing it?

It seems that the HN mods is killing most of the bad Snowden related content. Yesterday morning the front page was covered in his flight details, then in the afternoon it only had 1-2 Snowden related pieces of content.

If I m not mistaken, the PRISM story is directly related to the IT sector. If surveillance is going to be a permanent situation in online media, people will grow reluctant to use them over time.

Great points. And good techniques for compensating the problem.

This is giving mainstream a great story to focus on while other things can get passed hidden under our noses.

Snowden's past is immaterial. Snowden's future is being watched by potential leakers, and thus is very important.

Just had a thought, but obviously not a unique one:

>whereisedwardsnowden.com is already registered, but these options are available...

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

Paul Revere just rode by shouting something. Back to bed then?

if you hadn't posted this there'd be 50% less stories about him on the front page right now.

I agree not only with regards to Edward Snowden but generally worthless articles about people who happen to be in the tech news lately. E.g. "Kim Dotcom braids his hair!", "Julian Assange orders Cherry Coke instead of regular!", "Elon Musk buys three rare white leopards!" It's tedious.

Unfortunately what makes good click bait also makes good upvote bait and most people will just fall for it unthinkingly. And looking at the comments so far, apparently will defend doing so.

Yes there are larger issues at stake which are why these people are in the news, but 99% of the stories being upvoted have nothing to do with the larger issue and are instead press releases with no interesting content, meant solely to drive clicks and in the case of older stories like Kim Dotcom, meant to keep their names in the news.

Stop being a sucker; be more critically minded with what you choose to upvote and read.

Stop being a douche with crap examples of posts that would never be on Hacker News; let others have their own opinions. Click and upvote the links you find interesting?

Right because I meant those as serious examples of what has appeared here and not humorous, satirical exaggerations meant to highlight the irrelevance of the actual articles which get posted by extreme comparison.

Also, calling me a douche for expressing an opinion shows that you are clearly a very intelligent and thoughtful person so I am very interested in your well considered opinions on important matters. I'm sure you contribute a lot to not only this community but the world as a whole with that keenly honed intellect of yours.

While I don't agree with the name calling, I do agree with the sentiment. None of the articles being upvoted are even close to as absurd as your examples.

The example I keep seeing is people complaining about his flight itinerary. It isn't irrelevant, not even close. The fact that China allowed him to leave is very interesting. The fact that Russia has allowed him to enter is very interesting. If they let him leave and eventually make his way to Ecuador, that will be interesting as well. This is a window into the relationship being the US and China and Russia, and it turns out those relationships are very important. If you think this stuff is irrelevant, you aren't paying enough attention.

What's tedious is people complaining about what other people up-vote.

This is the most riveting real-life drama in history, and it's unfolding before our eyes. I want more stories on Snowden, not less (although my productivity will surely suffer).

Besides, half the stuff that gets voted up to front page is regurgitated anyway.

Is it? It feels more like an "Edward Snowden Goes to Cuba" road trip movie right now.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

If the guidelines state that you shouldn't complain in comments about submissions, then certainly you shouldn't post whole Ask HN submissions. And the irony of this comment hasn't escaped me.

No hacking without freedom.

This is like asking on a weapons manufacturer forum to only discuss small arms used privately.

News services are making money of this? Oh my, as opposed to the usual posts here, which never are about money, at all? Are you actually serious? If I read the current front page, there is so much stuff on it that is not "deeply interesting". I just don't want to bash any particular one of it, I don't mind that, but I gotta call hilarious, unintentional irony here.

If you're that worried about deeply interesting subjects, and not an apologist for power and its abuses, then I am looking forward for your threads on all the other stuff. Funny how so far the people who complain seemed to have more of a problem with this particular topic, than superficial things in general? You think there is a connection?

As for the "this will not stop anyway", that's nonsense.

Somebody is saying this is inevitable - and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true. -- Richard Stallman

What an unbelievably awful defeatist attitude.

If everyone had your terrible attitude, nobody would ever do anything about any issue and just simply bend over, cry, and take it.

I'm glad this joker peterwwillis has absolutely no say on what is and isn't upvoted on this site.

Btw peter, I checked your submissions and I thought the majority were extremely boring, unoriginal and worthless, much like this post.

...and links form medium.com, please!)

Unfortunately, it can't be helped. The visitors set up trends. As long as it just a popular tech site the quality of its content will match the average intelligence of its visitors.

Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

They will, as soon as I finish writing my "How I made $7 billion on an app built while sharing the screen with Snowden stories"

Indeed.

That these stories are upvoted so much only proves that it's an interesting topic to the community.

So your post is kind of senseless.

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