5 ms·
Is it just me or are there more off-topic political posts on HN lately?
by xyk2 5y ago
Is it just me or are there more off-topic political posts on HN lately?
- cryptoz 5y agoThis isn't off-topic for HN. We've always had 1) submarine posts (aha, I mean both meanings here haha), 2) military strategy posts, 3) $40B deal-falling-apart posts, and even 4) war escalation posts. There's even a prized technical angle about the development of high-tech nuclear submarines. On-topic.
- RobRivera 5y agogeopolitical topics != politics impact of nation-state relations have a very real impact on the world commerce
- akfanta 5y agoDidn't know we are are Commerce News.
- math 5y agoDisturbing observation: 5 years ago, the trends that seemed most important to me were all technical - I really paid no attention to politics. Today, they are mostly geo-political.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoLet me guess, 5yr ago you had an order of magnitude (or two) less money tied up in markets and illiquid investments.
- MarkLowenstein 5y agoCould it be an ennui about tech news, resulting from the Tower of Babel of great projects and great ideas, that haven't reliably improved our IT or development experiences?
- dougmwne 5y agoIt seems that the user base here has been deteriorating and the focus has been drifting away from the SV startup scene. I've also been noticing a growing political atmosphere that is in opposition to SV norms. A sign of the times probably, but I also suspect that HN's usefulness to Ycombinator is fading.
- chrisseaton 5y agoMassive technical military contracts seems extremely SV to me? Isn't that where it all started?
- AndrewBissell 5y agoPresumably "SV norms" here refers to the expectation that one does not ever explicitly acknowledge this element in Silicon Valley's history, lest it undermine the "plucky dudes in a garage" mystique.
- justinzollars 5y agoThis is all geopolitics. nothing about technology or specifics on anything interesting.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> nothing about technology Well the whole point is that they've switched technology from diesel to nuclear, based on changing user requirements. Agile, if you like!
- redis_mlc 5y agoThe word you're looking for is "pivot."
- sergiomattei 5y ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- toomuchtodo 5y agoPolitics is a human system. Systems analysis and nudging systems is of interest to hackers, no? Humans are the infrastructure on top of which technology runs.
- tomc1985 5y agoHey now, lots of startup hackers are interested in geopolitics
- jonshariat 5y agoNo downvote on posts, I wish this were implemented but I also know the implications are many
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoYou can flag posts, even if you can't downvote them.
- justinzollars 5y agoDang would have to respond, politics are allowed according to the rules, but I think the rules need to be reconsidered. Too many flame wars and not enough on software and hardware.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoI'm not sure about that. I think if enough people flag a post, it automatically... well, it doesn't remove a post, exactly, but it marks the post as "flagged", which also means that people can't add comments to it any longer.
- Zababa 5y agoI think the COVID slowed down the open source development scene. For example, we didn't see many JavaScript frameworks these last two years.
- skhr0680 5y agoI hope it slows down. I never understood why web devs feel the need to reinvent their entire stack annually
- Zababa 5y agoI think people were genuinely looking for good patterns, and still are in a way.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoI think that requires replacing javascript itself
- Zababa 5y agoThat's what people are trying to do with WASM. There's a project currently on the front page or not far about a frontend framework in Rust, and it's one of many. There's also TypeScript, and other alternatives. User interfaces are far from being a solved problem.
- olalonde 5y agoThis trend started years ago. My opinion is that politics should be off topic on HN but the "everything is political" crowd doesn't seem to agree.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- VictorPath 5y agoI've been busy today, didn't see if the daily yellow peril story hit the front page (China's about to invade Taiwan, China should respect British sovereignty in Hong Kong, China should treat Uighur terrorists nice like the US did in next door in Afghanistan etc.)
- justinzollars 5y agoIt's not just you. That's all it is these days. I was thinking of making an app that would take HN posts, and apply a categorization layer that would filter out political posts. Too much excitement around what regulators are doing. I really don't care.
- 72f988bf 5y agoUnfortunately... I found lobste.rs to be a good source of purely technical articles, but those made up only ~half of "the good stuff" on HN. The other half is startup/entrepreneur related posts. For those, HN is still the best, but the signal-to-noise ratio is getting poorer with all those off-topic posts.
- caycep 5y agoYou can argue perhaps the central concern of all of this is, "What happens to TSMC?"...everything else follows...
- yyyk 5y agoTSMC is geopolitically irrelevant.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alcover 5y agoSame feeling and concern. And the politization results in many replys or whole subthreads getting greyed out into oblivion. That shading reflects the virulence of posters. It looks bad.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoIt's probably sample bias. This perception goes back at least a decade. There's a bunch of links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869