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"We are a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative pri
by JohnTHaller 5y ago
"We are a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles."
A ton of conservative opinion pieces are being posted to Hacker News every single day lately. Often by younger accounts that tend to post a lot of things in a similar vein.
Political opinion pieces generally don't belong on HN:
"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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- refurb 5y agoI come to HN for a diversity of opinion. I'm more interested in the ideas than the ideology of the authors. Good ideas can come from anywhere.
- thereare5lights 5y agoThere is no diversity of opinion here though. Liberal leaning articles get flagged and removed all the time. When if/when they're unflagged by mods, they remain buried.
- version_five 5y agoYeah, there is a flag button for inappropriate content. Outside of that, provenance should be irrelevant. But it's often leveled as an ad-hominem style attack when people don't actually have something to contribute
- asveikau 5y agoI feel like the recent thread on Joe Rogan was a bit less "diversity of opinion" and more "a large crowd expressing fringe narratives". While most people in other places were talking about Joe Rogan's support for ivermectin, telling people to avoid vaccines, or platforming the guy who calls pandemic response "mass psychosis", over here, the story was that Spotify was censoring him, and what an outrage that is.
- fallingknife 5y agoAt this point covid is endemic. This means that your probability of catching it is 1. "Mass psychosis" is a good term for continuing to impose restrictions on society which no medical experts think will halt the spread of the virus.
- asveikau 5y agoDespite good news lately I do not believe we're at endemicity quite, or that probably of catching is 1. It will probably take time for governments to discover and adjust to a changing situation. Aside from that, I have been close to people who suffer psychosis. I'd say you're pretty wrong on that too.
- fallingknife 5y agoI will concede that I'm using "psychosis" very casually here. It's absolutely compulsive, irrational behavior, though.
- MrMan 5y agothose HN-ers are just "curious" and "asking questions" just like the owners of this site like it.
- panny 5y ago>I come to HN for a diversity of opinion Articles are auto [flagged] based entirely on domain name here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17974697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17974697 Wouldn't it be interesting to see the list of domains that are flagged automatically?
- CaioAlonso 5y agoIs that a problem?
- wayoutthere 5y ago[flagged]
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoPlease explain why that is true.
- otterley 5y agoBecause a core value of modern conservatism in the U.S. (as expressed through the leadership of the Republican Party) is questioning the outcomes of freely- and fairly-held elections (including the last Presidential election), to place new obstacles in allowing qualified citizens to vote, and resisting changes that would make it easier for more people to vote (such as voting by mobile phone, or on a weekend).
- rustybelt 5y agoQuestioning the outcome of elections is far from exclusive to conservatives.
- otterley 5y agoYou won't find liberals questioning election outcomes that were determined by a margin of thousands of votes with a clear paper trail. The 2000 election in Florida, which you're probably thinking of, involved just a few hundred votes where the intent of the voter wasn't super clear (hence the "hanging chads" brouhaha); and once the election outcome was finally determined, liberals let things go. While they disagreed with the procedure and were upset about the outcome for a while, they didn't let it define their party for the next 4+ years.
- 5y ago
- josephcsible 5y ago> A ton of conservative opinion pieces are being posted to Hacker News every single day lately. Yes, but they end up "[flagged]"/"[dead]" way more often than liberal opinion pieces on the same topics do.
- version_five 5y agoI mostly agree with you, however I note that another person has posted exactly the opposite comment. I find it interesting that people looking at exactly the same site can have such different reads of it. Overall though, I'd say we're all right, in the sense that most partisan content gets flagged, and presumably each is more in tune with the stuff they agree with more. I end up commenting a lot on political threads, but overall, I'm happy HN keeps them in a tight leash and usually flags/buries them, because they really don't add much to the site. The only exception I'd say is that HN is still basically the only place where one can have a (semi)adult discussion about many polarizing issues, without one side being banned entirely. Compare it to reddit, where anything outside the groupthink is not allowed to live at all. Possibly it's the threat of having the thread shut down entirely that keeps people on both sides more civil
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
- commoner 5y agoI'm disappointed that this submission was (edit: had originally been) flagged. While The Dispatch leans center-right (and anti-Trump),* this particular article argues from a libertarian position and tries to appeal to everyone from the left to the right. I don't think it's off-topic, because HN has had a ton of submissions about social media removals hit the front page, and individual rights like speech are often discussed on HN. * https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/the-dispatch-is-banking-on-a-post-trump-media-moment https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/the-dispatch-is-bank...
- ianai 5y agoI’m hoping that uptick in the past of politics hitting the front page was an aberration and we’ll now trend back towards the mean.
- klyrs 5y agoI don't think this is a conservative opinion piece -- or at least, it's not well aligned to the Republican tribe. While it does mention some examples of cancellation on the left, it also devotes significant focus to legislation by Republicans attacking the freedom of speech in academia. But, sadly, it appears that most of the commenters here are responding to what they expect from the title.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 5y agoIt is very obviously conservative in language and origin; you only have to read French's bio or about where The Dispatch's come sfrom. Their tag line is, "Fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture -- informed by conservative principles". 5 years ago this would have no question passed for a conservative piece. What has shifted here is the rapid Republican/Trumpist slide toward authoritarianism. So I read this as a conservative who is shocked by the monster he helped unleash. I also don't think it's particularly well thought through, in that it tries to both-sides the problem with a false equivalency between "cancel culture" (that is, people using their free speech and free association) and right-wing attempts to use the power of the state to win a culture war (which clearly violates free speech). And the fundamental premise in the title is nonsensical. It's like saying, "Having bouncers can't make a bar popular." Yes, duh, and nobody thinks otherwise.
- ianai 5y agoBut aren’t bouncers a sign of a very popular bar? I don’t think that makes the point they’re targeting as an analogy. Good comment though.
- wpietri 5y agoBouncers aren't there to create a healthy bar. They're there to set a minimum standard for behavior. E.g.: https://twitter.com/iamragesparkle/status/1280891537451343873?lang=en https://twitter.com/iamragesparkle/status/128089153745134387...
- dang 5y agoThe article seems thoughtful and within the range of what we treat as on topic. "Opinion piece" can cover a lot of different genres—for example, blog posts are mostly opinion pieces. We don't want shallow articles on garden-variety political ups and downs, but thoughtful ones on deeper topics are occasionally ok. They don't cover those on TV news. How to handle political topics on HN has been a hard problem over the years, but we've converged on a set of principles that have proven to work pretty well. I've written various explanations of this—here are two, which contain links to many others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490
- gutitout 5y agoYour thoughtfulness and moderation is one of the reasons this is a safe intellectual space. Thank you for your generosity.
- tomlockwood 5y agoI actually think this article is a pretty standard and trivial reading of the situation. I don't think its particularly thoughtful, and is probably upvoted because it conforms to the already-held views of many of the upvoters. Oh? So you were warning the left about censorship, for its own good? I *have* heard that one before. I'd prefer it stays flagged.
- dang 5y agoThat could be. I didn't read it closely (I rarely do). On the other hand, if you're going to make a case like this, it really helps to make it without reverting to the key of ideological battle yourself. Otherwise the comment pattern-matches, in my sandblasted moderator brain, to the automatic dislike of one ideological side for any information they perceive as favoring the opposite side. Conformance to already-held views, as you aptly describe this, is not interesting. It's a reflexive rather than a reflective reaction (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Long, tedious experience has driven into me how mechanical such reactions are, and also that they amount to well over 90% (if not well over 99%) of the things that internet commenters have to say about disivive stuff. As moderators trying to look through the lens of 'what's interesting', as opposed to 'who does this favor', we're conditioned to perceive such comments as more noise than signal. Especially when accompanied by snark or other markers of aggression. I mention this here because your post was an interesting case of starting out on the one foot and ending on the other. Perhaps that is helpful, or interesting, or neither.