I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.
Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic.
A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.
Not having a valid counter-argument to being accused of apathy, is ignorance.
> a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it
talk about projecting. i'm sure it was super democratic and indeed the voice of the people that got an NSA/snowden filter put in place and how robin hood of you to spring to its defence.
Are you sure? I don't see anything in your first paragraph that either we or HN's policies would disagree with—quite the contrary. And obviously HN hosts a great deal of just such discussion.
Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it?
> it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.
No, that's incorrect. The first thing the site guidelines say is:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
There's no question of the Snowden stories being off-topic. The issue is purely one of balance. The right principle seems to me to be that articles with significant new information are more HN-appropriate than those without it.