It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.
It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:
As an Australian, I see most political HN discussion revolving around US interests. For the most part this is to be expected, but in the rare cases that other country's politics enter HN (particularly new laws that affect tech), there seems to be a heavy bias toward comparison to the US's laws, so much so, that I think I understand more of the US laws than I do my own! Again, this is probably to be expected with the big tech companies largely residing in SV...
But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community.
So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.
I point this out a lot [1]. The problem is the statelessness of the internet [2]. No matter how often you repeat something, the population that receives the message has measure zero.
There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].
It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.
Fellow Australian, I even find myself wording things from the perspective that I am from the US by accident. I feel so part of the discourse thanks to technology and my line of work that I forget these aren't always my problems.
I've noticed the same thing and also react similarly.
It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.)
Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
I'm in Tasmania, and am glued to US political news at the moment.
I think some of us are acutely interested because what's happening now is historically significant and could have very interesting(?) downstream effects.
As an American I like it when discussion about politics from other countries comes up. It's very easy to get trapped in a US bubble and not hear from other points of view.
As an American who has lived abroad, I honestly will never understand this attitude. I sympathize, but honestly if I went into a .com.au forum and complained because the people there were talking about Australian politics, I'd be ridiculed mercilessly. And for good reason.
It's the same as if you complained that we're all writing in English, and you'd prefer that we didn't. Porque todos los articulos y comentarios estan en ingles?!? Debemos tener mas contenido en español! Es un comunidad global, no?! La gente aqui asuma que todos los lectores son anglos? Es un barbaridad!
Oh, wait. No it isn't. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You're insinuating there is and requesting the mods act accordingly. I disagree.
Seriously, I don't speak for the mods, but I don't recall it being stated anywhere that HN "serves the global community". In fact I just double checked the FAQ. It doesn't. HN has mostly been a site meant to cater to Silicon Valley tech startups for as long as I've been using it.
Let me know when ycombinator.com.au is up and running and we'll join you there and not talk about American laws. Until then...
I don't have any ideas to offer but I did want to say thank you. Based on the phrasing I can tell this takes a toll (eg: "this destroys HN and we must ban this account") on both you and HN.
This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
Have you considered something like the mega threads reddit does on like politics? At least the crazyness is contained in one spot. Like there really didn't need to be all the articles rewording parler, Twitter, Amazon news the last week
I think those megathreads just attract repetitive and incurious debate, things you see play out over and over, especially without specific context to differentiate.
The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing.
One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
Keep doing this work. We need sound moderation. It's required to have an open forum like this on the internet. HN is literally the only place I will discuss anything online. And it should be recognized that the rules and the general willingingness of the users to follow them combined with the care taking of those rules that make HN work. Keep at it Dang. It's nice to skip politics for a while.
"..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error."
I don't think that argument applies here because HN is not a general-purpose discussion site. It has a specific mandate which explicitly doesn't cover everything [1], and that's the most important fact about it. Plenty of things are off-topic here, and that's not "robbing the human race" any more than, say, not letting people walk their dogs in the library.
To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above.
If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work.
Do you know the Monty Python line "God would see through a cheap ploy like that?" People would see through that and rip it to shreds the same way.
Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
Maybe politics keep popping up because it's a conversation that needs to happen?
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
Way way back in the day there used to be a sortof rate-limiting function of sorts where if too many people showed up and tried to talk politics, we'd post lots of stories about...arc, or lisp or something?
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
Nothing is stopping anyone from posting more of the kind of content they would rather see, as opposed to complaining about the content they would rather see less of.
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
as has become more and more obvious over recent years in particular, technology and politics are intrinsically linked. Most obvious was always when topics like Urbit come up on HN. People's political and social views influence the technologies they built, be it clubhouse, or bitcoin or Parler. Even if the designers themselves may not even be aware of it.
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
Of course, and we were well aware of that line of thinking. But the idea was to just try something as an experiment and see what would happen. It turns out that there is no space for experiment with this, not even for a week—there is only space for battle-to-the-death. That brought me a new level of understanding.
Yes, in large part as it is a policy biased toward status quoism. Those with complaints against the status quo, reasonably or otherwise, are disadvantaged if discussion and debate are restricted.
Everything these days seems to be politicised, but politics isn't so much the problem, it's the tribalism that it generates and why you were probably brought up to never talk about politics, sport or religion in a social setting.
There's something I've wondered about but I haven't seen addressed in your posts (I may have missed it):
It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently?
I have the same feeling; it seems the 2020 election fight was far less intense than the 2016 one - but it might just be me being less on Reddit.
One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
Sorry, even after looking at those links and rereading your edited comment, I'm not sure I follow: How did it make things worse? Was it that "nothing even remotely political" was just way too broad?
So many stories are political regardless but it really gets worse during election cycles when nearly every story is nothing more than a policy announcement or trial balloon being floated by one candidate or another. Usually its found after a few paragraphs and suddenly candidate X's name appears.
What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label.
on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
It's against the values of this site to laugh at and put down people who know less than you do. Rather than being snarky, why don't you share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn? I mean that quite sincerely.
If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
In 2019 my New Years Resolution was to avoid all news and social media. The reason I started the ban was because I found my mind unsettled after reading the news and I had trouble coming back to a tranquil headspace.
The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus)
I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over.
At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.
I started this concept ten years ago. Dropped Facebook, no more economist subscription, no papers, never had TV. That doesn't mean holding a hard line and hiding your head in a pillow. There is enough overflow from HN, the radio, friends, occasional newspapers.
It seems I have a much healthier laid back attitude to work, friends, family. I see them all uptight about some event. Following news story breathlessly, fuming or arguing. Meanwhile, I'm trying to calm every one down, don't worry about it, it doesn't matter. Political parties change, administration doesn't. Think about long term goals, and affects you can have on that. Skip the day to day arguments.
There is so, much valuable news and information on HN, and so much valuable discussion, often from experts in their field. (More rare lately?)
You can gather your data, and solve most of your issues, from links provided in HN. So many interesting intellectual topics to pursue. For example:
Need covid numbers? Look at worldometers.com
Keep it up Dang.
Lucky for you that politics doesn’t have any direct influence on your life, but in the US having a semi-functional government during the Covid pandemic would have led to a lot fewer deaths and a lot less economic damage.
It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this »
I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it.
You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.
> It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you
I do not consume the news or social media and don't find this to be true. Politics do impact me.
I was arrested when I was 21, prior to joining the military, for an offense that was quite trivial. I was man-handled, hauled off to jail, and forced to wait until a friend read that I was arrested in the town paper (yes, that was pretty humiliating too) and bailed me out.
I'm a veteran, one that's been to Afghanistan with mild to average combat experience. When I got out in 2012 I watched my friends struggle, I struggled, and there were few options to get support and help. The help that was available often came with a catch 22. There was a time I spoke about these experiences more candidly under my real name and I was attacked by other veterans and even non-veterans for doing so. The statistics are grim from my point of view and that's not just speaking about suicide statistics. Things have, in some ways, gotten better. I've used my success to help fund some of my friends starting foundations that focus on jobs and mental health but progress is slow.
A number of my childhood friends were killed during the opioid epidemic, some while I was mid-service and was unable to go home to bury them.
The list goes on. When I read things like:
> You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
It always comes across as a dismissal, that I must be just living in denial or that I've somehow reached some stage in life where these things don't affect me anymore. Feel free to read through my post history, they do. When I talk to my friends that are still patching their lives together post-service I am reminded that my own journey continues on-wards and often with them. They are the only people I can readily depend on to know experiences I know the way I know them.
The problem with politics is that change is slow. Getting a whole country the size of the United States to realize why and how your group is important and worth paying attention to takes time, energy, and resources which do not appear over night. People will doubt you, even question you, and it takes a piece of you with it every time they do. These are exacerbated if you appear mad, vindictive, or frustrated in the process and it's hard not to.
News on the other hand moves at the speed of lightning. Attitudes and windows of understanding rapidly close and open and it can be difficult to watch in real time. I've told people before that history is macro-understanding, news is micro-understanding, and social media is nano-understanding. History I can do, the rest; well, it's a bit overwhelming and it has everything to do with my attachment to these subjects and the discourse in between that inevitably belittles me as a human with real experiences.
That ties right back into the original comment, though. The quantity of suffering in the world is great, and even those of us with the ability to do something about some small part of it (already a pretty small number) are severely limited in their impact.
For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs.
For me, the calculus works out like this:
1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial")
2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally)
3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on.
The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.
>> It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this »
My grandparents paid attention to politics, as did many in the United States at the time. TV news was watched, no Internet, lot of newspaper reading.
They were sent to Tule Lake and interned for being Japanese-American all the same; their possessions stolen by a government who doesn't care if its citizens "care" about politics.
The average person has no control over "politics." Caring about it didn't save my grandparents, nor the protests of all of their friends.
No one took care of that dirty work. That's the great delusion.
How many people that keep up with the news actually do a damn thing about it? The vast majority of people that check social media everyday also let "others do the dirty work".
And who are the "people around you"? With the internet that could be half the damn world. It sure is a privilege for you not to have to worry about injustices in the Middle East.
I'm not saying people should be selfish, but I don't see how what you're suggesting is productive either. Even the most well meaning person on this planet cannot possibly have an impact on all these different issues. Pick some areas you know you can contribute to and focus on that.
Exactly. As members of society we have an obligation to participate in society whether or not we are impacted negatively by its current shortcomings. In fact, the greater our privilege, the greater our obligation. Society would unravel if this were not true, because it would place undue burden on those lacking power to fix society - an impossible task without power. This is the subject of MLK's writing on justice and mutuality, that 'an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere' as well as Niemöller's poem about 'first they came for...'.
The question is really how to optimize awareness & participation with personal wellbeing. There's a big difference between getting psychologically clobbered by the outrage engines of social media or TV news, and being able to take in and understand current events in a way that encourages contemplation of how to best participate.
One way is to focus our attention and efforts on the things we can control as OP mentions. Another is to shift sources from fast/reactive news to more infrequent and considered sources. Another still is to participate locally and learn things firsthand.
> It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you.
And it doesn’t for 99.999% of the US. How much time and energy was lost on the first Trump impeachment and the year investigation leading up to it. Absolutely no relevance for the day to day life of US residents.
How much time was spent hearing about a phone call to Ukraine? Also not relevant to real life.
Even the events in Congress last week were bad, but literally had no impact on people’s lives outside of the politicians/cops/etc in the building.
I want to share with you an important quote. It sits at the top of [0] and is used by libertarians, but it is applicable across the political spectrum. "We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis." ~ Milton Friedman
The goal of staying politically informed is not so that you will necessarily take direct action. It is so that you will be able to take direct action if it becomes necessary for you to do so.
As many others have pointed out in the thread, it is quite selfish for you to do what you did. Millions of folks do not have the food security, income security, or essential freedoms and rights which are secured to you. However, selfishness is not inherently bad. What is bad is the myopia and the willingness to be ignorant which comes with it.
At the end of "Game of Thrones", nothing of interest happened. We all just turned off the TV and went on with life. However, politics is not just on TV. Your username suggests that you live somewhere in California; I live in Portland. Not all of us have your luxury.
Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion. Presumably one of the benefits of living in such a regime is the ability to participate in policy formulation through voting, political campaigns and various forms of public service. As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy? Therefore the majority of political discussion would be rigorous, fact based and consider a wide variety of points of view.
Analogously it would seem that citizens of dictatorship-based regimes don’t have to worry about these details (hopefully the dictator and their lieutenants have taken care of everything) and can focus on enjoying their lives.
> Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion.
It's turning HN into r/politics, I personally don't come on HN for that, there is already many many places online where political discussions happen, like reddit. When I say politics here I'm talking about USA cantered partisan politics.
HN is a great place for tech discussion AND it's also an opportunity to talk directly to founders, or important people and technologists in IT, in a better format than Twitter. I'd like for HN to stay in that niche.
How though? You don't have to click on the discussion? Just ignore it and move on to the next item. I do think it might be a good think to require a [political] tag or something though.
At 41, I'm not sure I'm old enough to comment on "how things were", and I'm not enough a student of history as I should be. But I believe the current trend across the globe is from democracy to autocracy[0], and toxic political polarization[1] is moving opinions so far apart as to effectively eliminate meaningful discussion about compromise or allowing yourself to change your opinion closer to what you believe to be a wholly terrible if not blatantly false perspective.
To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation.
On most of the political issues dear to me, it is impossible to have a scientific study decide the truth. To believe that science could; that would be replacing morals and beliefs with scientism, not far removed from religion and ultimately a worship of intellectual authority and the elite.
> Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion.
Generally, they shouldn't want to do this. In specific spaces, however, this makes a lot of sense.
From a more distanced perspective, political discussions are exhausting at best, as you need to discuss many varying aspects influencing a complex system, and harmful at worst, as soon as they turn toxic (which they tend to on some topics). Having a break from these is necessary. That doesn't mean we don't need those - having these discussions is important. But there is a reason politician is a full time job.
Additionally, HN has a very international audience. Internal politics is irrelevant to a large part of the readership - irrespective of the discussed country - and therefore these discussions are simply annoying.
>Im not sure why citizens of representative democracies would want to inhibit political discussion.
There is nothing to inhibit. An open political discussion on the internet between the left and the right is no longer possible. That train has left the station.
In the USA, yeah, because it's a left and right divide. Nuance gets completely lost and it's hard to find common ground because you may agree on one thing but then you'd have to 'give in' and lose face.
> Presumably one of the benefits of living in such a regime is the ability to participate in policy formulation through voting, political campaigns and various forms of public service.
As someone who has lived in both types of regimes, I can assure you that it is also one of the downsides of living in such a regime, as you yourself allude to in your last comment.
> As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy?
This really doesn't follow from the premise, and I would argue is demonstrably false. No - most individuals are not very knowledgeable about them. Just as many who have the privilege to eat healthy still do not.
I'm not sure if you are being serious or satirical (if the latter, I salute you!)
It's healthy for all citizens to have the option of such discourse, and to exercise it regularly. I'm not sure it's healthy to feel unable to leave it for a moment, lest $_scary_opponent seize the day.
It is a representative democracy after all. Citizens should feel like they've done their duty after choose a representative. Not (poorly) running a thousand mini-parliaments online.
(Edit): If we had the ability to tag posts, and then ignore categories like politics, this might help. While American politics is generally fascinating (whichever side you happen to end up on), everyone likely already has their own means to get this. Some find it divisive and exhausting.
It's part of the ethos of the site that it isn't siloed. When Dan says there needs to be room for sites like HN, that's part of what he means: sites where we're all encouraged to read and discuss the same ideas. If what you want is something with tagged posts and categories, you've already got that in Reddit, at a much greater scale than HN, or in lobsters, if you want a smaller scale.
I think they mean tags come with the content and you can hide whole tags. Hiding individual stories requires you see the story to decide to hide it so you can't really hide ones you don't want to see rather ones you don't want to see again.
I wrote a user script that compares each entry to a blacklist and removes the post from the page. Just by blacklisting the top 15-20 news sites I've been happier.
Do you know of any already-established scripts that do something like this? I was contemplating introducing a block site extension, but I don't know how much self control I'd have to not just remove it when I see a juicy article I just have to read.
no sorry. but the code I shared is really short and sweet. I don't even see the entries on the homepage on the blacklist so there's no temptation to "just remove it".
Try pasting my snippet into your JS console on the homepage to see what i mean (code is short, no HTTP calls)
Humans are tormented by choice/options. The hardest time for someone on a diet is when they have the option to choose junk food. My user script removes it from your HN homepage.
From what I've seen of Biden's plans, that's what he's going to do - just calm, very little changes.
He isn't going to overturn Trump's things, but also not continue them. (At least the things I checked on - for example he won't keep building the wall, but he's also not going to take it down.)
But he'll probably have pressure to actively overturn everything, so who knows.
Seeing so much political topics, and especially bad news most of the time makes us feeling bad and pessimistic about many things that are objectively not so important.
A big part of the people working for influencial companies (GAFAM) are most certainly members of this community.
So this made me wonder: would it be possible that we have a collective responsibility or influence over those companies through those people? Would making the debates and trends here more interesting, sane and positive have a positive influence on those?
For some people, politics isn't a choice, a luxury, an option to discuss or not, just because of the breadth and width of what politics means. T
Even then, there'd probably be a better time for a politics detox week than the current week, since it will be so impossibly difficult to not discuss the goings on. I mean, these are historic times (in the US, with international repercussions).
Readit News
It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.
These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
But it sure does stand out when HN comments are made with the assumption that the fellow HN readership is US. Any time I've tried to highlight how this looks from the outside it's generally met with downvotes, to the point that I self censor comments that I otherwise feel could have enriched this global community.
So, maybe there is the chance in your comments @dang to make a reminder that it serves a global community? It might help soften feelings of any comments that are heavily partisan.
There's more international political battle on HN than you'd expect. There have been a lot of flamewars about Indian politics, pursued mostly by users in India or of Indian descent. And don't get me started on the internecine warfare of the Swedes [3].
It's true that a lot of misunderstandings on HN, often bitter ones, happen because readers assume other users are American when they're not. The site is a lot more international than people assume; only about half in the U.S., and a lot of those users are immigrants or expats.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It also becomes apparent when talking about issues such as zoning, and housing. (Every time you hear talk about reassessing houses for taxes I get confused, because in the UK, and Finland, the two countries where I've lived and bought property, we don't have annual taxes that work like that.)
Mostly I bite my tongue and keep quiet, though there have been a few Brexit-related posts over the past few years where I can sometimes be involved.
I think some of us are acutely interested because what's happening now is historically significant and could have very interesting(?) downstream effects.
It's the same as if you complained that we're all writing in English, and you'd prefer that we didn't. Porque todos los articulos y comentarios estan en ingles?!? Debemos tener mas contenido en español! Es un comunidad global, no?! La gente aqui asuma que todos los lectores son anglos? Es un barbaridad!
Oh, wait. No it isn't. HN is an American website hosted on American servers catering to Americans and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You're insinuating there is and requesting the mods act accordingly. I disagree.
Seriously, I don't speak for the mods, but I don't recall it being stated anywhere that HN "serves the global community". In fact I just double checked the FAQ. It doesn't. HN has mostly been a site meant to cater to Silicon Valley tech startups for as long as I've been using it.
Let me know when ycombinator.com.au is up and running and we'll join you there and not talk about American laws. Until then...
This is one of the last places on the internet I feel that I can go to be free and have genuine conversations with people, even with people I wildly disagree with. Whatever hell you're going through as a result, I regret, but know it's worth it to the masses that come here.
The nice thing about HN-history links like this, is newer people get to learn about the community around HN a bit more and people's attitudes toward it, which I think makes people more respectful of the site and rules and fellow users. So I think posting stories like this one and the comments that come with it help solve the problem we're talking about here, which is at least partly an Eternal September kind of thing.
One other thing they might be able to do to improve discussion/post quality is to increase friction for posting and commenting, but that could understandably harm the site, too, and I figure it's been considered.
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- John Stuart Mill
To argue otherwise is basically to say that all sites have to be the same. That can't be right. I think there's a place for a website (at least one?) dedicated to intellectual curiosity. We can't have both that and uninhibited political battle, so if HN is to exist at all, it needs a moderation strategy similar to the one I've outlined at the links above.
If anybody has a better idea, I'd love to know what it is, but please make sure you've familiarized yourself with those past explanations first. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why it won't work.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is absolutely no other way to express your political opinion.
We have to keep shoving politics down HN readers throats for their own good.
Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
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It seemed to me that in 2016 there were much more political news posts that I'd have said violated the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" guideline than there were in 2020. Is that difference because of a change in moderation policy? Or is it because a change in user behavior, where users are posting political articles less fervently?
Or is this just selection bias on my part?
One very important factor is COVID, though - a lot of headlines simply focus on everything surrounding it; it steals the spotlight quite well, which would otherwise be on politics.
Reading political discussion alone gives me a heavy heart; I can't imagine moderating it.
What I would love to see is a "flag political" option so if more than a few people flag it it gets a label.
on a side note, would love to see an option to suppress my karma numbers
Politics nowadays is irreversibly different, and an attempt at a detox now would be even worse.
Before or after, you can.
In other words, at the height of political emotion the experiment was bound to fail. That's not necessarily the case at any other point in time.
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I'm laughing at the naivete of this. Don't quit your day jobs, y'all.
If you mean something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786476, or "everything is political", or "not to have to deal with politics is just privilege", or "being apolitical is just being political in favor of the status quo", we knew all of that already. But of course there are degrees of experience.
The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus)
I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over.
At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.
It's saddening, but maybe for the best too.
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I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it.
You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.
I do not consume the news or social media and don't find this to be true. Politics do impact me.
I was arrested when I was 21, prior to joining the military, for an offense that was quite trivial. I was man-handled, hauled off to jail, and forced to wait until a friend read that I was arrested in the town paper (yes, that was pretty humiliating too) and bailed me out.
I'm a veteran, one that's been to Afghanistan with mild to average combat experience. When I got out in 2012 I watched my friends struggle, I struggled, and there were few options to get support and help. The help that was available often came with a catch 22. There was a time I spoke about these experiences more candidly under my real name and I was attacked by other veterans and even non-veterans for doing so. The statistics are grim from my point of view and that's not just speaking about suicide statistics. Things have, in some ways, gotten better. I've used my success to help fund some of my friends starting foundations that focus on jobs and mental health but progress is slow.
A number of my childhood friends were killed during the opioid epidemic, some while I was mid-service and was unable to go home to bury them.
The list goes on. When I read things like:
> You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.
It always comes across as a dismissal, that I must be just living in denial or that I've somehow reached some stage in life where these things don't affect me anymore. Feel free to read through my post history, they do. When I talk to my friends that are still patching their lives together post-service I am reminded that my own journey continues on-wards and often with them. They are the only people I can readily depend on to know experiences I know the way I know them.
The problem with politics is that change is slow. Getting a whole country the size of the United States to realize why and how your group is important and worth paying attention to takes time, energy, and resources which do not appear over night. People will doubt you, even question you, and it takes a piece of you with it every time they do. These are exacerbated if you appear mad, vindictive, or frustrated in the process and it's hard not to.
News on the other hand moves at the speed of lightning. Attitudes and windows of understanding rapidly close and open and it can be difficult to watch in real time. I've told people before that history is macro-understanding, news is micro-understanding, and social media is nano-understanding. History I can do, the rest; well, it's a bit overwhelming and it has everything to do with my attachment to these subjects and the discourse in between that inevitably belittles me as a human with real experiences.
For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs.
For me, the calculus works out like this:
1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial")
2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally)
3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on.
The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.
My grandparents paid attention to politics, as did many in the United States at the time. TV news was watched, no Internet, lot of newspaper reading.
They were sent to Tule Lake and interned for being Japanese-American all the same; their possessions stolen by a government who doesn't care if its citizens "care" about politics.
The average person has no control over "politics." Caring about it didn't save my grandparents, nor the protests of all of their friends.
No one took care of that dirty work. That's the great delusion.
And who are the "people around you"? With the internet that could be half the damn world. It sure is a privilege for you not to have to worry about injustices in the Middle East.
I'm not saying people should be selfish, but I don't see how what you're suggesting is productive either. Even the most well meaning person on this planet cannot possibly have an impact on all these different issues. Pick some areas you know you can contribute to and focus on that.
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The question is really how to optimize awareness & participation with personal wellbeing. There's a big difference between getting psychologically clobbered by the outrage engines of social media or TV news, and being able to take in and understand current events in a way that encourages contemplation of how to best participate.
One way is to focus our attention and efforts on the things we can control as OP mentions. Another is to shift sources from fast/reactive news to more infrequent and considered sources. Another still is to participate locally and learn things firsthand.
And it doesn’t for 99.999% of the US. How much time and energy was lost on the first Trump impeachment and the year investigation leading up to it. Absolutely no relevance for the day to day life of US residents.
How much time was spent hearing about a phone call to Ukraine? Also not relevant to real life.
Even the events in Congress last week were bad, but literally had no impact on people’s lives outside of the politicians/cops/etc in the building.
Unfortunately I actually do need to follow news in order to keep up with covid rules which at least here in Denmark changes with very low warning.
I am looking forward to getting out and getting drunk with my friends and forgetting the news even exists once this is over.
The goal of staying politically informed is not so that you will necessarily take direct action. It is so that you will be able to take direct action if it becomes necessary for you to do so.
As many others have pointed out in the thread, it is quite selfish for you to do what you did. Millions of folks do not have the food security, income security, or essential freedoms and rights which are secured to you. However, selfishness is not inherently bad. What is bad is the myopia and the willingness to be ignorant which comes with it.
At the end of "Game of Thrones", nothing of interest happened. We all just turned off the TV and went on with life. However, politics is not just on TV. Your username suggests that you live somewhere in California; I live in Portland. Not all of us have your luxury.
[0] http://www.erights.org/
Analogously it would seem that citizens of dictatorship-based regimes don’t have to worry about these details (hopefully the dictator and their lieutenants have taken care of everything) and can focus on enjoying their lives.
It's turning HN into r/politics, I personally don't come on HN for that, there is already many many places online where political discussions happen, like reddit. When I say politics here I'm talking about USA cantered partisan politics.
HN is a great place for tech discussion AND it's also an opportunity to talk directly to founders, or important people and technologists in IT, in a better format than Twitter. I'd like for HN to stay in that niche.
To rephrase, I don't think most discussions around policy involve providing peer-reviewed studies with relatively conclusive evidence in regards to a potential policy change, or objective evaluation of the communication, legislation and vote records of politicians. It is too easily converted into ad hominem attacks, bold assertions that one might believe have evidence but if (quite) thoroughly investigated might be disproven. More regularly each side dismisses the other based on strongly held beliefs formed on very shallow investigation.
[0] https://www.v-dem.net/en/publications/democracy-reports/ (specifically https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/39/de39af54-0bc5... PDF)
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162188187...
Generally, they shouldn't want to do this. In specific spaces, however, this makes a lot of sense.
From a more distanced perspective, political discussions are exhausting at best, as you need to discuss many varying aspects influencing a complex system, and harmful at worst, as soon as they turn toxic (which they tend to on some topics). Having a break from these is necessary. That doesn't mean we don't need those - having these discussions is important. But there is a reason politician is a full time job.
Additionally, HN has a very international audience. Internal politics is irrelevant to a large part of the readership - irrespective of the discussed country - and therefore these discussions are simply annoying.
Before seeing dang’s post here, I would have thought that removing politics would have helped.
There is nothing to inhibit. An open political discussion on the internet between the left and the right is no longer possible. That train has left the station.
As someone who has lived in both types of regimes, I can assure you that it is also one of the downsides of living in such a regime, as you yourself allude to in your last comment.
> As a result, would it not be reasonable to assume that most of these individuals are very knowledgeable about a variety of aspects of public policy?
This really doesn't follow from the premise, and I would argue is demonstrably false. No - most individuals are not very knowledgeable about them. Just as many who have the privilege to eat healthy still do not.
I'm not sure if you are being serious or satirical (if the latter, I salute you!)
It is a representative democracy after all. Citizens should feel like they've done their duty after choose a representative. Not (poorly) running a thousand mini-parliaments online.
Try pasting my snippet into your JS console on the homepage to see what i mean (code is short, no HTTP calls)
Humans are tormented by choice/options. The hardest time for someone on a diet is when they have the option to choose junk food. My user script removes it from your HN homepage.
I'm using the Userscripts Extension in Safari for reference. But the code should work in any browser. https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#readme
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He isn't going to overturn Trump's things, but also not continue them. (At least the things I checked on - for example he won't keep building the wall, but he's also not going to take it down.)
But he'll probably have pressure to actively overturn everything, so who knows.
He's gonna tear down the metaphorical wall right quick.
A big part of the people working for influencial companies (GAFAM) are most certainly members of this community.
So this made me wonder: would it be possible that we have a collective responsibility or influence over those companies through those people? Would making the debates and trends here more interesting, sane and positive have a positive influence on those?
Edit: I just noticed that it was from 2016
Even then, there'd probably be a better time for a politics detox week than the current week, since it will be so impossibly difficult to not discuss the goings on. I mean, these are historic times (in the US, with international repercussions).