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Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if
by geofft 8y ago
Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy just as many normies do. Earlier there was an NYT opinion piece from a sad conservative college professor (flagged), and before that a page from GOPUSA.com calling an internal Google presentation "the end of free speech as we know it" (flagkilled).
How is this stuff getting upvoted?
- nostromo 8y agoThis is a report on the competitiveness of the US economy. Seems pretty very relevant to a group of entrepreneurs.
- arama471 8y agoIsn't the Bloomberg thing literally about hacking? Or are you talking about a different China Bloomberg article than I am
- jackconnor 8y agoWell, big argument about this was as it's technically "about" hacking, it just seems that they made most of it up. It is definitely China fear-mongering, though, so I'd say you're both right.
- xeroaura 8y agoI think they mean the one that is #2 right now about China's hidden debt.
- enraged_camel 8y agoEconomics is totally fair game IMO. But if we start seeing articles about, say, midterm elections, that would suck. :)
- charmides 8y agoI would like it if submitters could tag their posts in three different categories or so; pure tech, economics, and politics. Users could then configure their settings to see the content they want. I think that this approach could be taken too far so that we would end up with a reddit clone, but a step in this direction seems to be in order now.
- jackconnor 8y agoYea I've noticed that too, especially the number of bogus Bloomberg articles. They get upvoted because people don't know the guidelines and just vote on stuff they find interesting, so perhaps it's a moderator who should be trimming the feed a little more closely?
- enraged_camel 8y agoPeople always bring up “the guidelines” when they see content they don’t like. However, the fact of the matter is that people are free to upvote things they find interesting. If you don’t find something interesting, you don’t have to read it or comment on it.
- spork12 8y agoHow is this stuff getting upvoted? I dunno... prob because it's popular and people want to read it.
- cprayingmantis 8y agoI’ve been noticing this for some time as well. Either HN is becoming more political or someone is manipulating the voting. I honestly think HN is at its best when it’s apolitical.
- paulpauper 8y agobut sometimes non political stuff can become politicized
- tareqak 8y agoWhat about when technology or a technological platform is used for political purposes, and the stewards of said technology or technology platform are slow to acknowledge or catch up?
- cprayingmantis 8y agoYou know honestly I don’t have a good answer for that. On the one hand I feel like we’re intelligent enough to rise above partisan or two sided politics but on the other hand we’re not intelligent enough to realize what the true implications of some of the platforms we’ve built are. And we’re definitely don’t have the forethought to understand that our platforms will and should be used by people we don’t agree with.
- tareqak 8y agoI appreciate your answer, and answers like yours are reason enough for me to believe that this topic is one we should talk about more openly despite the risk of the conversation devolving into something undesirable and unhelpful.
- lunulata 8y agoidk if it's that the articles get up voted or the comments on the article and how it sucks and shouldn't be here getting up voted :P like I definitely just up voted your comment here
- DoreenMichele 8y agoThere are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day. I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later. I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons. I certainly don't post things to promote any kind of political agenda per se. I also didn't notice the things you are specifically commenting on. I recall different details from the front page. So there's possibly a certain amount of "You just happened to see X for some reason." which isn't conclusive proof of objective fact.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoYeah, HackerNews seems to be getting closer to Reddit by the day.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI don't know what you mean by that. I participate on Reddit. I experience HN and Reddit as completely different animals. I see them as very extremely an apples to oranges comparison.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoPerhaps my comment was the prime example ]= What I meant is: Three years ago, HackerNews seemed (to me) to be a forum for intellectuals to discuss things business/tech-y. Opinions were mostly well thought out. When they weren't, they were challenged (thanks for calling me out [= ). Now it just seems like the break-room banter. A lot of sensationalist articles seem to make the front page. A lot of purely comedic comments (which I do appreciate). A lot more unfounded anecdotes. A lot of promotional posts, etc. Also -- and I'm admittedly putting on my tin hat here -- I've seen a lot of discussions that seem like they're just troll accounts trying to further polarize the community. Maybe I'm part of the problem ]=
- microcolonel 8y agoThis is not really political per se, and I think it is relevant to an audience of entrepreneurs. Hacker News was once called Startup News. As for why things are upvoted, they are upvoted because registered users click the button. You can promote your own preferred stories by upvoting them.
- keyle 8y agoI suspect there is something at play here. I've also noticed the front page is constantly bombarded with economic/political news. Everyday is a new nytimes article, bloomberg twice a day, etc. It's as if startups have slown down and programming novelties have died off, and it's being padded with politically driven articles.
- jmcgough 8y agoBoth of these are about economics moreso than politics. A lot of HN readers are interested in economics, since the current state of the economy can have huge impacts on startups.
- pjc50 8y agoThe upvote threshold for getting out of "new" is tiny. And the US is now so polarized that almost nothing is truly apolitical.
- ashish01 8y agoIf we have a sufficient corpus of flagged and flagged killed submission. Maybe we can train a classifier for it. And maybe send for review if the confidence of the classifier is high enough for a new post.
- fanzhang 8y agoWhy are all the examples of bad political news ones that have a right-bent to them?
- okonomiyaki3000 8y agoNews about the economy is only political if you dislike the current administration and hope to blame them for all economic bad news while finding ways to avoid crediting them for any good news or the exact opposite of that. If you look at economic news as just facts about the current situation avoid forming strong opinions about which policies may or may not have brought that situation about, you won't see such things as political issues. You'll also probably be better positioned to make the most out of whatever economic climate you find yourself in.
- dang 8y agoThe general mix is probably about the same as ever. Streaks of otherwise are probably just random; that of course is how randomness works. Complaints like this go back about as far as HN does. I wrote a thing about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.