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Uhm, the point was that this isn't hacker news.
by wheels 18y ago
Uhm, the point was that this isn't hacker news.
- rms 18y agoI understood your point. I disagree with you because this isn't Hacker News for you. The main Hacker News page is never going to be 30 perfect stories for every single hacker in the world because it isn't a customized page so it can't be perfectly individualized. Hackers like different stories. More than 50 people liked this. Hacking doesn't have to be in python. The hacking Mr. Mortenson is doing is incredibly noble. Why do you find this story to be so objectionable? From the guidelines: >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- davidw 18y ago> I understood your point. I disagree with you because this isn't Hacker News for you If it gets bad enough, then eventually people will start moving on to something better, that is actually about hacker news, and not the political article du jour. This article and discussion were both extremely off topic. And it's not just any off topic, it's politics, which brings out the lowest common denominator in most forums it's introduced in. I mean, how can people vote up stuff like "The system we are part of is not the best. In fact it is arguably the worst system since the caveman era." ? Apologies to rokhayakebe, but that's not serious, interesting discussion, it's hyperbole typical of thousands of other internet forums. I would prefer to try and keep HN from becoming just like all those other forums, although perhaps it's a vain hope.
- rms 18y agoWell... we've had this discussion before, but my attitude is that politics and economics will show up here because they don't violate the guidelines and I think it's great. You think that having articles about economics and politics (which do indeed generate conversation of lower quality than the rest of the site) will inevitably pollute the rest of the site and drive away users. Right now economics and politics stories are a small percentage of stories here and I find the negative response rather annoying. If they get to be too much, PG can change the guidelines or the voting mechanism. I'll agree that the discussion in this thread is rather mediocre and is evidence of the phenomenon you are concerned about. But I've seen great discussions about politics and economics here and I like hearing it from the perspective of the users here. I've learned things and I just don't understand why you think we'll be better off not learning about these issues from each other. It reminds me too much of a generic rule for pleasant banal conversation, "don't talk about religion or politics." We disagree about whether such discussion about things we are less knowledgeable is inevitably bad for the site. Ultimately the answer is unknown and I would like to see the limit pushed as far as possible to make the test of not degenerating into the lowest common denominator harder. I think it can be done, though downvoting stories may have to be enabled eventually.
- edw519 18y agoI agree with you, davidw. Except we're beginning to have a new problem here at hn. The only thing worse than threads about politics, religion, drugs, or popular culture are the comments about how they're not "hacker news". We're starting to sound like a committee that gets together and spends most of our time writing the agenda.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoIt's much more fun to square off right vs. left and have at it. But it's not hn. Davidw is right, in my opinion. Perhaps the reason we keep having this discussion is that the board continues to serve up material that we find innappropriate? That people vote based on emotion, not on whether it is good material for hackers, and political stuff has the most emotion-laden content of all? This is a nice seque into our other favorite topic: how rating systems are broken. I'm afraid these two are highly connected.
- edw519 18y agopeople vote based on emotion Yes! Even more so with their purchasing dollars. A nonintuitive but incredibly important lesson for any budding entrepreneur.
- davidw 18y agoSaying "these discussions are even worse than the ones they seek to avoid" is an easy out though, unless there's some other way to express our dissatisfaction with said politics articles (down arrow, or whatever else). Furthermore, they serve to pass on information to new members of the community.
- edw519 18y agoFair enough.