Hacker News Reader

It'd be nice if the "political" stories were confined to discussing the code+philosophy of privacy and Internet freedom. But the majority are puff pieces or knee-jerk outrage articles that contribute very little to the overall discourse, except to fan the flames.

There are tons and tons of ways to discuss privacy and security in ways that are topical to Hacker News. Tools, methods, counter-measures, threat models, secure protocols, best practices, crypto, anonymization, companies and startups engaging in such, etc etc etc. These are topics that HN's core audience can engage with, while still being relevant to current events. Even the legal stuff (FISA and warrant compliance, legality of wiretapping, etc) is interesting, especially as it relates to our startups and the companies we deal with.

There is an argument to be made that surveillance/wiretapping programs require a political/legislative fix, not a technical one. But on the whole, I'd prefer that discussions involving the minutiae of such (and the events which propagated them) not be conducted here, at least not in recent quantities.

I hear what you're saying and I agree with you to an extent. Sometimes the flames need fanning to get people thinking and engaged. This is one of those times I would submit.

> There is an argument to be made that surveillance/wiretapping programs require a political/legislative fix, not a technical one.

Remember when Stallman couldn't fix his printer? Do we have an analogy with what is currently happening? Our fellow techies have enabled a system of mass surveillance over us all - just like techies churning out proprietary code for corporations. Look how long it has taken for free and open-source software to make a comeback. Thirty years one could argue. That social ill never got a political/legislative fix. The GPL was a hack. Perhaps we need some kind of Stallman-like hack to act as a catalyst/seed to start pushing back against the erosion of privacy and internet freedom. Until we know for sure that the fix has to be a political/technical one then maybe we should keep the ideas and discussions flowing here. But at the same time I agree, maybe you are right, maybe this is not the right forum. But then, where is?

> You may not care about privacy on the internet but I do.

Did you read what I wrote?

> If HN gets censored I suspect many will leave.

HN is already censored. By a 1%'er, nonetheless.

If you care deeply about privacy on the internet why don't you want to follow and participate in the discussions here concerning the unfolding drama about the erosion of privacy on the internet?

I want to do a bit more than just read about this topic. I want to discuss it with my hacker/geek/nerd/techie peers and that sure ain't gonna happen in the comment section of the Guardian website.

I also want to do more than discuss though, I also want to change things. I'd like to help out a bit maybe. Donate to the EFF or something, anything.

Witness the news about Tox - I'm not gonna hear about that on the Guardian. I suppose I could go back to /. ^shudder^

In what way is HN censored?

PG (and others) moderate it, which is a polite word for censoring. He is a member of the .1%

This kind of censorship is not bad. It's needed. That's why we have a word "moderation", to distinguish that process from a similar one (but stronger), with negative connotations.

I understand that. In what way, is what I'm asking.

He/they sometimes kill stories that they don't feel belong on the site, or don't add anything to it.

Perhaps we should have a separate section or tab on here for political news if it's very important to some people.

I, for one, like HN because it doesn't have all the usual political news nonsense that mainstream news has. The privacy debate is great and all, but it doesn't substantially help my or anyone's lives on here. In 400 years, it's not going to matter whether the NSA read your emails or didn't read your emails. And realistically, reading another article about Edward Snowden impersonating Tom Hanks in a Russian airport terminal isn't going to push the meter toward or away greater privacy an ounce.

However, if you find informative, non-buried-under-political-stuff articles on HN that contribute to you building your business empire that changes the world for the better a little bit... that probably will still matter in 400 years.

Your argument here seems to be that if he believes what he says he does, he shouldn't be saying other things that you don't expect him to say.

If I'm reading you correctly, your comment is a nice encapsulation of David's points about politics on HN.

If I could parse your first sentence and wade past the snark in your second I might be able to come up with a cogent and fitting response.

But I can't.

I'll translate.

Thomas is restating your argument thus: if David "cared about privacy on the internet" then he'd be eager to have the conversation here. Since he actively objects to having the conversation here, he must not care.

If that's an accurate representation of your argument then it's a little disingenuous. David's comment was six bullet points explaining why he doesn't want to have the conversation here even though he cares a lot about online privacy. You don't even acknowledge that, which makes for a frustrating and counterproductive conversation.

And, well, that was exactly David's point.

P.S., you kind of did the disingenuous thing again when you didn't take the time to comprehend Thomas' comment. It was perfectly understandable.

This is beginning to seem like a concerted effort to silence me.

If you read his comment you'll see that David did indeed say that he cares deeply about politics. But in fairness, by way of example, he mentions some story about a politician and bananas? A story which seems strictly political.

I don't think merely political stories should make the front page of HN.

I'm only talking about the online (i.e. tech-related, techies built and understand and are subverting the internet) privacy (i.e. liberty related) issue here. I see it intimately linked with the free software issue. I can't see why if you we talk about one why we can't talk about the other. What about all the patent issues? About all the copyright issues? Can we not talk about them either? They are political issues and yet they are topics that come up again and again in the hacker community: reverse engineering protocols, DMCA, torrenting, software patents.

Sorry to labour this but to me it is important. My possible conclusions are that David (and others):

(1) do not see the online privacy issue as a tech issue and/or (2) only see it as a political issue and/or (3) do not care about it as an issue and/or (4) are ok-ish with mass surveillance and/or (5) have reached saturation point on it and/or ...?

I jumped to conclusion 3. I don't know why. Again, I see it as a tech issue, not solely political -- I think that it is an extremely, world alteringly important issue -- we should not be able to reach saturation point on it, it's too important.

> some story about a politician and bananas

Here in Italy, politicians have been saying all kinds of hideous, racist things about Italy's first black minister:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/28/world/europe/italy-politic...

That kind of thing makes my blood boil and I think that, objectively, it's a more important story than the new Bootstrap or most other tech news.

Ciao David,

Yeah, that's some ugly stuff.

I'm sorry for not giving you the benefit of the doubt and jumping to the wrong conclusion.

Nobody is trying to silence you. You're being uncharitable and people are pointing it out. One of David's points is that he doesn't like political discussions on HN because people hear what they want to hear and the discussion becomes, well, uncharitable.

And yes, there's obviously stuff you're missing, but it's hard to believe you're being sincere since what you're missing is exactly what David spelled out, quite clearly, in his original comment. If I were to give a title to his original comment it would be "Why I Don't Think We Should Talk About NSA Surveillance on HN Even Though It's an Incredibly Important Conversation." Some folks would rather not have a conversation at all than have an unproductive conversation. The conversations that happen on HN around this issue are unproductive.

He's not arguing that those conversations shouldn't take place. He's arguing that HN isn't a good place to have them. To be honest, this conversation is likely not productive and I'm beating myself up a little for continuing it.

There's nothing wrong with people like David, Thomas, or anyone else advocating for higher quality discussions. The fact is that the discussions around anything involving politics or the law on HN are (IMO) very low quality and just downright tedious.

Nobody is trying to censor anyone. Saying what I just said above isn't trying to censor anyone. You don't need my permission to talk about these issues.

By silencing I was referring to the downvotes.

I'm sorry for not giving David the benefit of the doubt and jumping to the wrong conclusion.

Ah, well, that's part of it what David is talking about, too. I don't like it, either, and think upvoting/downvoting is not good for surfacing, implementing, and sustaining community norms.

BTW, Reddit has (largely) solved this exact problem with sub-reddits. Once a community reaches a certain size it naturally becomes less cohesive. You preserve that community one of two ways: by limiting who can become members of the community or by allowing the community to form sub-communities with their own norms.

Think of, e.g., http://reddit.com/r/politics

The tension in this thread is an inevitable consequence of how HN is designed, honestly.

I know this thread is getting reeeally long but I want to say that it bums me out as well. I ain't no karma whore but I do become a sad panda when the clock runs backwards and not forwards. I've self-censored on numerous occasions because I felt that I'd take a hit -- usually wisecracks, I'm a lot more jokey in real life and on other forums.

I've never used Reddit. I don't know if I want HN to turn into a kind of Reddit. I thought HN would self-limit because the type and level of discourse. If people feel that the politics stuff has gotten out of hand (I still would maintain that it has not, just that in fairness the Snowden thing is pretty big news) then maybe we could implement a technical solution. Like tagging. Then you could have a list of donotshowtags [politics, religion, kitten(s), ...] If a story contains a tag in your list it is hidden.

Although Reddit is often seen as the land of trolls, there are many subreddits where the level of conversation is orders of magnitude better than what happens on HN.

Reddit is not monolithic in the same way HN is. This means you'll see subreddits with much crazier conversations but also ones with much better conversations. It's not about tagging; it's about having a community robust enough to support different and sometimes-conflicting norms without disintegrating.

See http://reddit.com/r/science, http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/, http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians for quality subreddits.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/politics for politics.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/onetruegod to pay homage to your One True God.

> I'm glad that all these political stories are making the front page. You may not care about privacy on the internet but I do.

So to you "story about privacy on the Internet" == "political post". Perfectly fine, but I suspect tons of people define "political post" differently.

Which is exactly why I was asking for a definition for "political post", before the discussion even started. Sadly, almost nobody seems to care about finding some sort of common definition. And this won't help to get a tangible result.

We're talking about the political stories that have been hitting the front page. That is what the griping is about. These stories have been mainly about internet surveillance, censorship and filtering in the US, Europe, India, China, Russia and beyond (shout out to my peeps elsewhere, you know who you are.)

It's funny cuz I used to follow Greenwald for quite some time in Google Reader (Reader used to be this really cool RSS feed reader back when Google cared more about open standards, you may have heard of it) when he was at Salon. Then he moved to the Guardian and I thought, "good for him. Bigger audience". Then along comes Mr. Snowden and now it appears Greenwald has followed me to HN.

Funny old world. Just goes to show. What exactly, I'm not sure.

No, most of 'these stories' have been about the minutiae associated with Snowden's asylum requests. Reading one of these stories or the associated discussion is like watching an old episode of Three's Company - the details might be slightly different from episode to episode, but you already know the general plot. These stories take the place of articles that are more interesting, degrading the site as a whole, and do absolutely nothing to help any sort of political cause - in fact, because most of the stories are so content-free, they probably cause people to skip over the rarer more-meaningful ones. It's all really rather tiresome.