Hacker News Reader

Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

My theory: Hacker News has been allowing more political stories through, which attracts a certain kind of poster, which has the effect of lowering the level of discourse overall (even among erstwhile "good" commenters). The actual political threads themselves, like this one, tend to be a little ahead of the curve.

The strong aversion to politics was one of the things I liked about Hacker News. A lot of political issues are important, but they always turn discussion sites into dull point-scoring. Hopefully the moderators clamp down before it's too late.

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The noteworthy politics-related stories I've seen in the last months almost always deal with either the NSA scandal or other attacks to basic human rights, including this one.

And I don't see any reason for these stories not to be on HN. Human rights matter for everyone.

Yes, human rights matter to everyone. So do urination and defecation — we quite literally could not live without them — but those aren't appropriate in all situations either.

When I say something doesn't belong on Hacker News, I don't mean it's unimportant or doesn't matter. I just mean that it isn't what this site is for. There are many, many stories that are relevant and important to me personally that are still not appropriate for every site I go to.

Think about it this way: Would you go on a My Little Pony fan site and post this stuff there? Human rights are just as crucial for My Little Pony fans, but it's easier to recognize that they aren't appropriate for a single-topic site. Hacker News is not a single-topic site, but it is still a site with a focus. If you look at the guidelines, politics are explicitly called out as being off-topic.

Granted, this specific submission can be qualified as off-topic under the guidelines. But I seriously doubt this for any NSA-related submissions, given their impact on the whole US tech/startup sector.

The NSA submissions are more of a mixed bag. A lot of them are still not a good fit as they are more outrage than information, but yeah, a lot of them are relevant to the site. (I still think even the relevant stories have a negative impact on the signal:noise ratio by encouraging people to post important-but-irrelevant stories like this one, but you're right, the NSA stories do belong here.)

I read political stories here, as the responses are generally a lot better thought out than the kind you will get on Reddit. (To be fair you get decent responses on Reddit, but they are tucked away amongst a lot more noise).

I don't doubt it. A lot of people obviously do. My point is that it is not desirable for people to want to come to Hacker News to talk about politics.

People do talk about politics though. They do it everywhere all over the place and even those who claim to not want to talk about politics end up talking about the politics of not talking politics. I am not sure it is possible to stop them.

I see your point, chc. And you are right. Talking politics on a site like HN is defacto undesirable. But the NSA dogs made feces mandatory conversation--if we want to live our lives *shit free--and so the door once opened just gets wider. It is sad. All this stuff is really sad.

I believe this is because Reddit is like 4chan... everyone knows it, everyone uses it - including those who are just plain stupid.

HN, in contrast, is mostly known in educated circles and so does not attract as many trolls and idiots as Reddit does.

No. It's pretty much always been like this.

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