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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This, 1000% this. The infection of non-NSA threads by the NSA commenters is a much bigger problem than the front page.

Yep. To demonstrate, I present Exhibit A:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361558

A news headline about the Apple iPhone event, completely overshadowed by NSA speculation. The first threads spans 1/2 a page to 3/4 a page and is entirely argumentative speculation with no real benefit to the discussion.

I for one, just wanted some discussion about the phone moving over to 64-bit architecture. But, no, NSA speculation (read: not even new information, rehash) took over.

EDIT: Also, in before -- yes, I know I can scroll down the page. But the point is that in principle, you shouldn't have to scroll down half a page just to find the meat that's actually relevant to the discussion. It's not like we're saying the NSA news is unimportant -- just don't hijack threads that are about other things with obsessive privacy speculation when there isn't any empirical evidence or information to offer. For example, Apple's fingerprint scanning TouchID could be compromised...or maybe not. We don't know. But let's not destroy entire threads speculating about it.

I disagree completely.

The fact that a news headline about the Apple iPhone event got overshadowed by NSA speculation should tell you something. It should tell you that the NSA is fucking everywhere now, in everyone's life, and knows - or can learn - virtually everything.

This should worry you. It should worry you SO MUCH that you should be thinking about it all the time, and you should also be talking about it in every single context that is even remotely relevant to NSA's perpetual and eternal spying efforts.

I don't know about you, but when the true extent of the scandal was revealed, my modus operandi changed completely, including the way I live my life and the way I communicate with people. I moved all my data overseas. I encrypted as much as I can. I stopped posting jokes on Facebook that could even remotely be construed as suspicious by an over-zealous NSA agent. At work we use Microsoft Office Communicator, and even there I am censoring myself when it comes to non-work talk with co-workers because I have no idea what kinds of backdoors could be installed on its server software.

Right now when I evaluate new technology, the first and foremost question on my mind is this: can the NSA use this to spy on me? Therefore it made me very happy that the top comment in the iPhone 5S story was about the NSA. That is the way it should be.

In other words: you can't even complain about comments about the NSA infecting non-NSA threads without that thread itself becoming infected with NSA comments.

You didn't expect NSA comments in a thread about NSA comments?

The fact is, a lot of stuff we talk about is being influenced by the NSA, in a very negative way. The solution isn't to ignore it and go back to talking about the cool shiny color of the new iPhone.

N S A C E P T I O N

please go back to reddit with that crap.

Does it blow your mind that I posted about a topic in a meta-discussion thread about that topic?

Okay. I get your point. The NSA is terribly flawed and out of bounds, and we need to raise hell to fix America. We're in agreement that the NSA is a problem we should care about.

One question: where does it end? I cede the point that Apple and the iPhone are part of tech news. So is the NSA. So they could conceivably be on topic together, especially with regards to privacy concerns.

My friends and I have a fantasy football league running through Yahoo. Yahoo could have backdoors from the NSA! I could be putting my entire online identity at risk by participating in fantasy football.

That's all speculation. I have no proof, just like the fingerprint TouchID theories had no real proof yesterday. Do I tell my friends this?

Instead of enjoying fantasy football, do I interrupt my friends' trade and persistently warn them about the NSA? When they tell me I'm being annoying, that they know already, that they heard me the first ten times, and that I am not offering any evidence or proof, just paranoid speculation, do I begin afresh in my spiel, like some crazed zealot touting Jesus on the street who can't let his friends just enjoy fantasy football? Do I make the sole decision that they need to hear this because I know what's best for them?

Like I said, I get your point. I understand that this is an important, sensitive topic. But again, some of us like Hacker News to aggregate tech news without NSA news necessarily being in front of our faces.

The perspective that I have to read about the NSA instead of the iPhone moving to 64-bit architecture because you know what's best for me is dictatorial. I understand if the democratic system of Hacker News demonstrates this is what the majority cares about, but at least you'll understand our perspective as well. Believe me, we get yours.

"My friends and I have a fantasy football league running through Yahoo. Yahoo could have backdoors from the NSA! I could be putting my entire online identity at risk by participating in fantasy football."

I would say that the reasonableness of that discussion would depend on the sort of otherwise private information your participation in fantasy football compromises.

Does this fantasy football program encourage you to install a phone application that requires far more permissions then a fantasy football program has any business requiring? Then perhaps a discussion about privacy is warranted (I mean, assuming we were discussing Yahoo's fantasy football program in the first place).

Does this fantasy football program just let you use a psuedo-anonymous handle and doesn't ask you for anything personal anyway? Then the discussion is probably a distraction.

Smartphones have a unique/unprecedented amount of access to our personal lives. Discussions about smartphones and privacy should be considered natural because of the properties that smartphones have. If other things share similar properties, they'll get that discussion too.

(As a non-smartphone example, I recall some discussion about privacy and the Xbox One and its (at the time) 'required' kinect sensor.)

As a military officer who has stood the watch, yes, please, do everything in your power to pull every string and lift every stone. As depicted, the NSA's behavior is very much not what I swore to defend.

  my modus operandi changed completely
    the way I live my life
    the way I communicate with people    
    I moved all my data overseas
    I encrypted as much as I can
    I stopped posting jokes on Facebook

I wouldn't sweat the jokes, my friend. :-)

</suddenly realizes humor helps prove Tom's point>

While I sympathize with those who find it disconcerting that the iPhone 5S news was hijacked by conversations about the NSA, I personally agree with those in this thread who have pointed out that the severity of the NSA situation is, at least until something fairly substantial changes, great enough that it can trump nearly anything.

Given how the NSA has turned the table on conspiracy theories--proven many wild theories actually or plausibly true--those of us who would like to cast conspiracies with a healthy dose of doubt need to keep an open mind to even those theories that strike us as outlandish.

I am personally strongly opposed to flagging submissions. I have written elsewhere [1] that I find flagging a measure of last resort. It bothers me that so many people flag submissions as if it were equivalent to a downvote. It's not.

However, with all of that in mind, some NSA threads cause my brain fatigue. They generally make me sad about the deeply immoral state of the US government and the undermining and impotence of technology. I can only take so much NSA-caused despair. I don't have a short attention span, but honestly, fully comprehending how much we have been hurt by the NSA is a deep emotional burden. Sometimes I need a break.

So for those times when you too need a break and want to just think about technology, I'd recommend installing a collapsible comment user script [2] to allow you to just hide the NSA sub-threads until you're in the mood to dig into that fray.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6293034

[2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037

Re: Exhibit A

pilif has an average karma score of 7 and that post got a ton of replies and obviously a lot of upvotes. Those three factors are what led to the top spot on the comment page. If you're going to try and convince "us" not to hijack threads with baseless NSA speculation, then you've got to persuade the users with high average karma scores to not make such comments.

Edit: for the record, I welcome NSA related comments on any and all posts. Very, very few of my friends are willing to discuss anything other than the details of Snowden fleeing the U.S -- it'd be sad to see the 'ignore it until it goes away' mindset also happen here on HN. I'm willing to trade an inane iPhone incremental vs revolutionary argument for speculation of potential NSA abuse of a phone feature any day, and I'm willing to bet a large amount of other HN users do too.

Fuck Apple and iPhone. I don't care about it and I don't want to read about it. Apparently most people on HN agree. Now you can kick and scream or read other site. It is just how it is.

> and is entirely argumentative speculation with no real benefit to the discussion.

Like a chat by the water-cooler you mean. I would love more Snowdens and leaked documents to come out. Unfortunately there aren't at the moment, so we are left discussing what is there. Talking about the future, the implication to US businesses, implication to what it means for this country, the Constitution, privacy, and so on.

I understand that is not interesting for most people, especially non-Americans. Well c'est la vie, a good majority of HNers are Americans.

The rage and indignation about this is quite strong (and it should be so). These revelations, have shattered the perceptions many have been brought up and believed in for most part of their lives. It is hard to deal with that so well you get lots of discussion.

You have the downvote button, click it if you don't like the topic. But stomping your feet about hoping maybe moderators will notice and will start pushing Apple related stories higher might not work.

It's also worth noting that that thread was overwhelmed with meta-discussion about the validity of NSA comments in that thread, not the NSA discussion itself. If you take out the comments complaining about the NSA comments, that thread would be significantly more trim.

Maybe we need another poll to tell us what the HN comment voting system already told us: that discussion about the privacy implications of a new Apple device in a discussion about said new Apple device is on-topic and valued by the community. Oh oh, for that matter, lets get some polls about polls, where is the fun in derailing meta-conversation if we only stop at one level of recursion? /s

> A news headline about the Apple iPhone event, completely overshadowed by NSA speculation.

Discussion on articles of one topic being completely overshadowed by tangential other topics is a problem with the way HN's commenting system works (Reddit does this much better, folding certain comments away, based on votes and nesting level), not at all specific to the NSA discussions.

It happens for every topic on HN that receives a lot of mindshare over a longer period of time. It annoys me there too. Thankfully I have a bookmarklet that allows me to collapse threads on HN :)

You don't mention the fingerprint-reader. Why not?

Reddit posts often get one off-topic top level comment that spawns a huge subtree, but it's easy to deal with there because the uninterested reader can click the [-] button to collapse the whole mess. I wonder if HNers would stop viewing the NSA threads as such a problem if HN implemented comment collapsing.

There's a third party implementation of that (https://github.com/jaekwon/HNCollapse), but I that doesn't really help a commenting culture that is shaped by not having it built in. HN commenting threads are winner take all with respect to the top level comments. Once one gets entrenched the others die on the vine. To a lesser extent the same thing happens at subsidiary branches as well. It makes for a very unbalanced tree.

HN Collapse is an absolute must and should be implemented by default, IMO. Whenever I'm on a machine/tablet without it, my reading experience is much poorer.

When I'm on a phone or tablet I use http://ihackernews.com, which has comment collapsing.

hah, I forgot about this thing. does it still work? :)

There's a Firefox extension that does[1], I believe there is a Chrome one as well, and there used to be other bookmarklet(s) that worked too.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...

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