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Political threads are mostly bad when people use it as an outlet to complain and add nothing relevant to the discussion. This article is relevant since there is

Political threads are mostly bad when people use it as an outlet to complain and add nothing relevant to the discussion. This article is relevant since there is likely a disproportionate representation of Libertarians on HN

zzalpha 10y ago
And yet it's still utterly unrelated to tech. If we're gonna start including topics that are slightly tech adjacent, IMO you destroy the key differentiator that makes HN worth frequenting.
- internaut 10y ago
  There's a danger of that. It is worth noting that many of SV's most interesting projects are comprehensively dosed with political ideals. Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Urbit. I'm sure you can think of more. I would also claim Google as a successful utopian project. And they're incubating more of them. One day Google will go 'pop' and thousands of spores will fly through the atmosphere to land on strange and alien shores. Of course there is the Dark Side. The gravitational strength of the left/right divide across the whole Net is extraordinary. There isn't a prominent forum where partisans haven't dueled. Facebook is like Belgium, a hapless neutral buffer and yet the air rings with the whine of dogfighting and the report of the occasional sniper. The Great Project of moderation, to harness or vanquish these forces, is understated but probably matters more than most for the emerging Internet Culture. tldr; You can dial it back from the worst extremes but you can't get rid of it because tribalism is human nature's firmware.
- dang 10y ago
  Plenty of good posts here are unrelated to tech (Pushkin's fiction, J.L. Austin's Saturday morning seminars), so that's not the issue. The differentiator here is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity". Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
yodon 10y ago
I confess to having been genuinely baffled as to why people were discussing HN libertarian biases in the comment section of an article about librarians. Oh.

zzalpha 10y ago

And yet it's still utterly unrelated to tech. If we're gonna start including topics that are slightly tech adjacent, IMO you destroy the key differentiator that makes HN worth frequenting.

internaut 10y ago
There's a danger of that. It is worth noting that many of SV's most interesting projects are comprehensively dosed with political ideals. Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Urbit. I'm sure you can think of more. I would also claim Google as a successful utopian project. And they're incubating more of them. One day Google will go 'pop' and thousands of spores will fly through the atmosphere to land on strange and alien shores. Of course there is the Dark Side. The gravitational strength of the left/right divide across the whole Net is extraordinary. There isn't a prominent forum where partisans haven't dueled. Facebook is like Belgium, a hapless neutral buffer and yet the air rings with the whine of dogfighting and the report of the occasional sniper. The Great Project of moderation, to harness or vanquish these forces, is understated but probably matters more than most for the emerging Internet Culture. tldr; You can dial it back from the worst extremes but you can't get rid of it because tribalism is human nature's firmware.
dang 10y ago
Plenty of good posts here are unrelated to tech (Pushkin's fiction, J.L. Austin's Saturday morning seminars), so that's not the issue. The differentiator here is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity". Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

yodon 10y ago

I confess to having been genuinely baffled as to why people were discussing HN libertarian biases in the comment section of an article about librarians. Oh.