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Getting bored of naked politics on HN. Can we have a special politics section so we can keep it separate? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it is bec
by jnordwick 9y ago
Getting bored of naked politics on HN.
Can we have a special politics section so we can keep it separate? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it is becoming disruptive to the technical, scientific, and business side of the site.
- jlgaddis 9y agoIt's not exactly one of my interests either but apparently enough folks are interested in this kind of stuff for it to hit the top so quickly.
- baxtr 9y agoI’ll bet there is a technology angle to this. Maybe blockchain could help here, too?
- jlgaddis 9y agoOnly if the solution is implemented in Rust, of course.
- have_faith 9y agoThe funny thing is that a blockchain ledger could help maybe.
- api 9y agoHere's an idea: we should have a section for off-topic stuff like Ask and Show. That can include naked politics, entertainment, etc. There should still be standards, but the standard should be a combination of interesting, relevant, well-written, and professional.
- ainiriand 9y agoAgree, HN should be for rather unconventional technology news.
- pjc50 9y agoThat's a position a lot of people share, and a politics ban was recently tried. It was reverted because it's very hard to draw a clear barrier between them. Perhaps a tagging system would help, but HN is allergic to features.
- criddell 9y agoIs it really an actual problem though? If the headline is good I generally don't care what gets posted here because it's easy for me to pick out the things I do care about.
- reustle 9y agoHN is allergic to features, but there are many popular sites on top of HN such as http://hckrnews.com http://hckrnews.com where it could be implemented as an experiment
- richardknop 9y agoHN is getting extremely political (it has had a political slant for a long time but it's getting worse now). I agree.
- krapp 9y agoI think Snowden, then Aaron Swartz, more or less opened the floodgates for political content here.
- Fnoord 9y agoNewsflash: there's no such thing as a Godwin's law for politics because everything is [eventually] political, for politics is everywhere. Whenever people say something isn't political or that they prefer such content they're in denial, and likely trying to sell you something.
- gergles 9y agoMe too. The conversations political posts foster on this platform are the lowest-quality I've ever seen here, and nearly all of the headlines and articles are some variant of "Look at what horrible thing the GOP/rich people are doing!!!" and the constant expectation of outrage is what I can get on mainstream news. HN does not have any unique angle or personalities that can comment on these topics, and it basically devolves into a "blue team good, red team bad" and a few -50 libertarians in every single article. A Markov chain could write the comment threads.
- DanielBMarkham 9y ago
- nascar_is_bad 9y agoTotally man, from now on HN will be curated specifically to your interests and feelings.
- thealfreds 9y ago> Offers solution to a perceived problem. > Rather than critically discussing why you don't want the feature you deflect from the idea.
- Fnoord 9y agoThe burden of proof lies at OP, not parent. The argument, as far as it exists, is constructed as follows: 1) I do not like content X. 2) Observes content X is being upvoted. 3) We should get rid of content X. 4) There are a lot of people who agree with me (= argumentum ad populum, and furthermore lacks data). It is basically the same as arguing with the mod system (which is on every website a big fat no-no), but then under a guise of not getting the candy you want (apparently then its OK). You know there's a much simpler solution than complaining about it? You can work around content you dislike by submitting and upvoting content you do enjoy. Or another option is leaving, going to another website, or getting something useful done.
- thealfreds 9y agoI don't think a burden of proof needs to be constructed at this time. OP stated a perceived issue and a possible fix for it. The top reply at the time was a low level deflection of the idea rather than a constructive feedback of the idea / feature as others did above. Deflections don't constructively argue for one side or the other. It is merely to shut down an idea and stop discussion.
- Fnoord 9y agoDid you actually read OP at all? Or is it that you just agree with their viewpoint and therefore find the lack of a constructed argument OK? OP has not constructed much of an argument, if anything at all. It is itself a political comment which sparked a shitload of political comments. On Slashdot it'd have received -1 Flamebait. My simple solution to upvote articles you find interesting stands. That way, you're able to vote on this website, and every unique visitor has a say on the matter here. Its not unique to HN, a lot of websites work like this (Reddit and lobste.rs for example). Take for example myself. I am not from the USA, so I could say anything related to USA politics or US business or US hiring isn't of my concern. Reality is though that I'm not interested in quantum mechanics. Someone who's a JavaScript developer might not be interested in security. Someone who's interested in UNIX system administration might not be interested about Microsoft Office. And so on, and so forth. And someone who's living in a villa and bought all the villas around him might not be concerned with the privacy of the general population. That's everyone's fair right, and all of these individuals are going to have a certain signal to noise ratio on HN, as well as a vote (as explained above). There is not one single HN visitor who will enjoy each and every article on the FP. And blimey, be thankful of that, because every interesting article which doesn't exist means you got more time for something else. You can already manually hide articles you are not interested in. Alternatively, if it really bothers you, you could write a simple blacklist with keywords which would then be hidden from the list. But don't make your problem someone else's problem. Don't make it appear that your apathy regarding politics should be the status quo. Just like we're not all into quantum mechanics, some of us are interested in politics. What certainly doesn't help is complaining about it. Should I complain in threads about quantum mechanics how I find it boring, how I find it a waste of time, and how we shouldn't discuss or upvote it? I'd get grilled. And for good reason. It is disrespectful to those who do find quantum mechanics interesting. So I GTFO of discussions about quantum mechanics because it isn't my league. If you find politics boring, it probably isn't within your league either. So, sure, stay away from it. You got so many tools within grasp to use for that.
- ganzuul 9y agoFound the banker shill!
- sctb 9y agoPosting unsubstantively like this will get your account banned. Please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ganzuul 9y agoThank you for your kind attention! Whether I express myself truthfully or joke around, my account's value seems to stay the same. I don't feel motivated to conform to any society which I suspect is systematically less than healthy. However I am glad that one of the popular kids here would take the time to discuss, rather than simply hide what they disagree with from view. Hello. =) The substance of my comment was a call to questioning veiled as humor. When I wrote it, it was called for. With all the other suspicious replies, it is fine to be drowned out. Tax evasion is a subject I care deeply about.
- simias 9y agoI disagree, it'll fork the community and attract people who only want to talk about politics and not tech stuff. I don't want "sub-hns" with vastly different tone and quality. I find that HN's community and mods are pretty good at policing flamebait content in general, inflammatory topics don't last long on the frontpage in my experience. I'd sooner ban politics entirely from HN (as has been attempted before) than create a sub-forum for it. I also find that political talk doesn't tend to contaminate other threads the way it does in other communities. If you want to avoid political threads it's fairly easy to do so in general. So it's really not that bad from my point of view, and I don't really like political stuff either.
- wonderous 9y agoThere are clearly already sub-cultures within HN, having tags/filters would make it easier to find content. What should be unified is the rules for contributing to HN.
- jitix 9y ago+1 for tags. Subsections will lead HN to become like Reddit with everyone living in their own bubbles. But tags for quick filtering would actually be nice to have. I definitely don't want to read depressing political news while having my morning coffee. To avoid bubbles, users should not be allowed to save their tag based selections. edit: added some more ideas.
- simias 9y agoI guess it wouldn't be as bad as a separate forum but I'm not sure I see the point either. Who's going to decide which tag goes where? Either the submission is obviously political and you can see from the headline alone or it's kinda-political-but-not-just and in this case where do you draw the line? Look at the current frontpage for instance: >Germany bans children's smartwatches >TechShop shuts down all U.S. locations, declares bankruptcy >Termination of the certificates business of StartCom >There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It >Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers Which ones of these deserve to be tagged "politics"? And for those you'd tag that way, which ones are those you'd consider not part of "core" HN subjects? For instance the smartwatch ban one is objectively political, yet it's probably of interest for the crowd here since it's obviously also about tech.
- dovik 9y agoAvoid taxes by hacking tax rules is, well, a form of hacking!
- digitalengineer 9y agoNo, it's not hacking. It's lobbying to get your hacks into the system and then profiting. Like they themselves say: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
- lavamantis 9y agoHacking is exploiting flaws in systems. Is not lobbying itself exploiting a flaw in the system?
- adventured 9y agoIf you believe lobbying is a flaw. I'll play devil's advocate to that. China has to routinely purge extraordinary numbers of people from their political system (tens of thousands), because most of their corruption occurs behind closed doors, shadow dealings, hidden bribes, and so on. Is that better or worse than instead having a strictly defined system of public lobbying? For emphasis I'll point out that the US lobbying system is extremely tightly regulated, there are very well defined laws for it, they will put you in prison if you break those laws. Systems without US-style open lobbying are not lacking in common corruption, there has always been plenty of that in nations such as Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, South Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, etc. The world is flooded with political corruption practically everywhere, with most of that world not utilizing a system like US lobbying. It'd be easy to say that one would rather eg AT&T not try to influence politics at all, that's wildly unrealistic as it pertains to human nature and history. So is it better to have a public system that AT&T lobbies in, such that you know where they're lobbying and for how much. And if so, is there a better version of that than the US system (and what would that be).
- NicoJuicy 9y agoHn is not only tech, but everything that gets voted up by tech people.
- sp332 9y agoThis site is all about politics. Free speech, open internet, regulation of large corporations, venture capital and small businesses and how health care and taxes and incentives affect them, housing crises in our various backyards - it has a deep and immediate connection to the "technical, scientific, and business" topics.
- Fnoord 9y agoNot only that, all those topics you mentioned are related to technology. They're deeply intertwined. That happened the moment technology became ever more important in our lives. The people who only want to discuss, for example, Android from technical merits and completely leave out any privacy aspect are the ones who have an agenda. They're trying to silence our concerns. We should downvote their opinion as its akin to complains about moderation.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago> That happened the moment technology became ever more important in our lives. Which would be when our ancestors first began making hand tools and using fire, right?
- Fnoord 9y agoFair enough, technology has always been around. If you look at the history of cryptography, same. Cryptography is very old as well. However it has become increasingly dominant over our lives with the invention of things like the Internet, computer, car, smartphone, magnetron, and a whole plethora of inventions which I cannot even fathom. Take for example a very obvious example: electronic voting. It has to do with technology and politics. Should we avoid discussing that? Should we avoid discussing the privacy topics of Facebook? Google? Should we avoid all the topics brought up by a series such as Black Mirror? [1] And why is it that with non-political topics (as for as these exist) we should be allowed to vote on them, whereas as soon as politics get somehow involved it should be avoided on HN? And, since politics isn't a clear proposition, where do we draw the line? [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/
- keepper 9y agoGetting bored of people complaining about politics on HN... Can we come to terms that if stories are getting voted up, it means people want these? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it's complementary to the technical, scientific, and business side of the site. See how that works? Don't like it? down vote it? :)
- adventured 9y agoYou can't vote a story down :P
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nothrabannosir 9y agoI can’t downvote stories. Is that even possible?
- krapp 9y agoYou can hide them.
- pwg 9y agoNo, but after you accumulate a "small karma threshold" (that is a direct quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) you gain a "flag" link on stories. Then you can flag the ones you don't want to see (and then hide them to make them disappear for you if you like).
- krapp 9y agoFlagging stories simply because you don't want to see them is an abuse of the flagging system and will get your privileges revoked - putting a stop to that is why hiding stories exists an alternative. Stories which are obviously off topic or spam should be flagged, but stories you simply don't care for should just be hidden. If you flag stories because you don't like them, you're making it more difficult for everyone else to participate in that thread.
- dleslie 9y agoHacking is a subversive political act. News for hackers is intrinsically political.
- kharms 9y agoI've never seen a political post last more than a few hours on this site before some mod kills it. If it mentions Russia it happens even more quickly. Just ignore this post, it'll be gone soon enough.
- mlvljr 9y agoSee wat u did there?!
- seanmcintyre 9y agokeeping politics separate is a luxury few have
- ameister14 9y agoSure, when I worked on boats as a deckhand in Kentucky, I know that international politics were intricately tied into my day to day life. On a serious note, most people don't vote. Keeping out of politics is not a luxury few have, it's the choice the majority makes.
- xenadu02 9y agoSticking our heads in the sand is how we got garbage like CFAA and the DMCA. When software eats the world that means politics and software are only going to intersect even more.
- lazyant 9y agoHN has some "evergreens" hot topics that maybe could be separated: - Health (bad service in the US and nutrition), body hacks - University/education (decline / loan in the US, do I need a university degree to be a developer, Google/Amazon/Facebook favoring same top universities) - Government surveillance and other threads to freedom - What I like/disliked or how I moved from language A to B - Tesla / electric cars, renewable energies - Online scams, phishing etc - drugs, war on drugs - how broken are programmer interviews - wealth distribution/inequality have I missed any big topic? weekend project: parse HN (top) submissions and classify according to the above
- DanielBMarkham 9y agoIt's naked politics, sure enough, and if you try to say something meta or neutral, they'll down-vote you, because after all, we downvote here to indicate disagreement. Which has turned HN from stuff-that-hackers-find-interesting to something closer to viewpoints-hackers-most-agree-with And this is true for many other things aside from politics, politics is just where it's most obvious. (I think the format/process worked early on with a smaller, more startup-oriented crowd. Those days are long gone)
- Fnoord 9y agoEvery ecosystem consisting of groups of people ends up in that mess. Even consensus-driven systems end up that way. As long as you're free to make your own ecosystem, is it really a problem?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- arethuza 9y agoOut of interest, why not just click on "hide" and then forget about it?
- JohnTHaller 9y agoBecause then someone might express an opinion I disagree with and I won't see it? I'm just guessing here.
- yodsanklai 9y agoI'm not sure how I stand on this. On one hand, I like how this forum is mostly politic free. Political discussions are usually unproductive and it's very easy to get dragged into them. On the other hand, we have a community of well-behaved and knowledgeable people and a working moderation system. It's always interesting to read well-argued point of views from all sides of the spectrum.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago> It's always interesting to read well-argued point of views from all sides of the spectrum. And this is one of the few places where I can do that. I agree that political threads here have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than other articles. It's just that here is better than almost anywhere else these days.
- untog 9y agoThis is a side-effect of tech becoming mainstream. Science and business have always been intertwined with politics, and it's silly to pretend they haven't. Tech now is too - from allegations of monopoly against Google to Facebook's ability to change a population's opinion on things. These are all very worth talking about. Not least because people are going to be talking about them whether we do or not, and the discourse benefits from people with actual technical knowledge contributing towards it.
- beager 9y agoYour assessment of this as naked politics is purely subjective, and while you're free to voice your opinion on submission quality beyond just hiding it, realize that by policing it with your comment, you're exerting your own politics on HN to an extent. IMO, this topic has huge intersections with modern tech. From attitudes about US tax reform in the tech community, to means of creating transparency in wealth with tech, to means of aggregating and distributing investigative journalism about such large and complex matters with tech.
- perfmode 9y agoHaving everything in one place helps to ameliorate the filter bubble effect.
- philipodonnell 9y agoIt'd be nice if it was just insisted that the politics stuff has some bearing on tech. Net Neutrality stuff, SOPA, that's "politics" but its very impact on tech. Tax avoidance, not so much.
- logfromblammo 9y agoPolitics? This is not about people who are just hacking their tax system? If we pay close enough attention, surely we could automate all this into a tax-avoidance-as-a-service app. Maybe turn it into smart contracts on a blockchain machine-learning cloud buzzword buzzword? And once you start making real money, you can eat your own dog food to keep more of it. I guess I could see how some readers might let their primate fairness response generate an emotional reaction, but I think it's pretty cool how these people exploited vulnerabilities in the code--that typically go years or decades without getting patched--to improve their lives by a marginal amount at a relatively large cost to absolutely everyone else in their respective countries, in a way that strictly obeys the letter of the law while completely subverting its spirit. If that's not hacking, I don't know what is. Why, that's no more political than attaching a RazPi and some 3D-printed plastic components to the optics and lower receiver of a sniper rifle, such that an attacker could successfully strike a moving target--as a completely hypothetical example--on the deck of a luxury yacht cruising more than a mile offshore through somewhat rough seas, somewhere between Malta and the Caymans. And it isn't as though many of us are paid, sometimes very well, to eliminate jobs through automation, or to mine and reduce big data from the consumer population, or disrupt existing industries to the detriment of the people who built careers in them, or to create technologies that tend to increase the concentration of wealth and power in those who already have it. We're completely apolitical! We have no real need to consider the social ramifications of what we do! ~ (Poe's Law warning: satire)
- yndoendo 9y agoTax loop holes and methods are no different than software loop holes and methods. Hacking is not just digital but social and political too. Technically tax codes and laws are source code to Governmental society.
- m_fayer 9y agoWe live in a hyper-polarized time and belong to an industry and community (SV) that is both responsible for a lot of that polarization, and is busy trying to remake the world and the experience of the world as it sees fit. We're hardly selling car doors here. That being said, it seems a little rich to complain about the intrusion of politics into this genteel little salon we've got here.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoYou know, the title was pretty accurate on this one. You pretty much knew what you were getting when you clicked on the topic. So if you don't like it, just skip it. (Others have said that you can hide it, but you can also just scroll past it.) What does it matter to you if we discuss stuff you don't care about in thread that you don't bother to read? It's not like you can only look at articles on the first page. (Yes, I know, you have to scroll further than you otherwise would. That seems like a fairly small problem. I wonder if it deserves such a large solution...)
- sctb 9y ago> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you think it's disruptive, then please email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We read all of those, and we routinely penalize stories that are off-topic for Hacker News.