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Question for the mods: In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.

by awb 5y ago

Question for the mods: In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > 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. But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc. Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways? P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
It's very hard to define specific political content as separate from technology. I remember a single Covid scientific paper turning into a 500 post political discussion. Or tech giants and censorship and privacy. How does one separate tech from politics in this sense? Maybe society has become more political and it's making it's way to link aggregator sites?
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  I think it is more that tech (and tech companies) become more subjects of political debate.
  - iqanq 5y ago
    People want to debate politics, but submissions about politics get killed. Therefore people end up using any excuse to debate politics in any thread.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      Still better than being unregulated. I don't come here to have political discussion, I want to find out what's interesting in tech, not to engage in flame wars (except the vim/emacs kind, that I fight).
    - edmcnulty101 5y ago
      I see tons of threads without political debate. I actually think the majority of threads are not political.
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    Are there subjects of political debate that aren't political?
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  the reality is that almost everything has an element of politics and it is good to understand the relationship between politics and technology in particular. Tech, in many ways, has been adept at skirting existing laws because tech transcends barriers that were show-stoppers in the past. AirBnB, Uber are good examples. Google, facebook and spying. Clearview and their immoral data gathering. There is the additional issue that tech has crept into everything and the internet is where modern state-sponsored disinformation and misinformation campaigns are being fought. Tech is maturing and a consequence of that process is that politics develops. It's not necessarily a bad thing as the cynics say.
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    I think it makes sense that more political discussions occur on hacker News because tech and the world in general possibly is becoming more political.
- loceng 5y ago
  Technology is used as political tools/weapons to drive and manufacture consent, through promoting hate and creating divisiveness - and through captured mainstream media channels, and online platforms; this couldn't be any more obvious with Trudeau's behaviours and observing the mainstream landscape of what the majority of Canadians are seeing. And so you're correct - politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions. The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    You're preaching to the choir here about mainstream media being super corrupt. Puts a lot of pressure on one or two hacker news mods to be the purveyors of neutrality for the entire media landscape if that's what's expected.
- kenjackson 5y ago
  Tech and political ideologies have collapsed, and especially in areas of interest to HN. Climate change, when a fetus is a baby, etc... these are areas where science has intersected politics before HN existed, but they also don't intersect HN regularly. But now some of the hot topics in tech are also hot topics in politics-- privacy and mass surveillance, platform censorship, vaccinations/medicine(which were a little political, became super political), affirmitive action in the tech industry, etc... I don't know if we'll ever go back to where we were as tech plays a larger and larger role. And if you think we're intertwined now, just wait until the metaverse!
fartcannon 5y ago
Eternal September maybe?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bin_bash 5y ago
As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result. I distinctly remember reading articles about major world events in the beginning as well so it's not entirely new, but it has grown a little. I don't think it's a problem, and this is coming from a centrist that typically doesn't care for political discussion on any medium.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result. As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit not impossible!) to disambiguate what is "tech" versus what is "politics" when it comes to things like the discussions around, eg "social media's affect on society" and etc. And to be fair, talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc. So even I wouldn't try to say we should have zero political content here. But it does seem like it's grown a bit more prevalent than I'd prefer.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy. History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/ https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology. A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.
loceng 5y ago
I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility; and also is a sign of how much users here aren't able to emotionally regulate to have civil conversation [which is a signal of strength, of health - physical and mental health, mastery of oneself, self-control] - so much practically everything important - including the Emergency Act (war measures act aka martial law) being initiated in Canada for the first time ever by our Prime Minister who is more and more clearly acting as a fascist. When I tried posting a technology angle to this - "Ask HN: Do we care about our captured systems?" - to point out that it's the design of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. that's allowing propaganda and ideology to easily get to the top, while easily suppressing the truth - and where on HN it's easy to suppress perfectly valid, well-written, articulate comments to prevent the majority from seeing ideas that may actually be the truth. It's a problem. Edit to add: Thanks for all the fish, enjoy your lazy dopamine hit.
- fuck_dang_2 5y ago
- mindcrime 5y ago
  I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility; Presumably every single member of this community is also a member of one or more other communities, some of which have an overt intention to be "more political". Given that, no one is being denied an outlet to share their views, give input, discuss, influence, vote, etc. when it comes to political events. So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)? Personally I come here (mainly) to hear about / discuss obscure programming libraries, new programming languages, startup strategies, new scientific breakthroughs, etc. I get enough of "general politics" and "world news" elsewhere... I'd really rather not see it here as well. But, that's just me.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)? My opinion: because here you can find arguably the highest concentration of powerful and knowledgeable minds, and this is the sort of thing that the world needs working on these hard problems. I find the concern over serious issues that is often expressed here to be rather disingenuous, as people love to engage in bitch sessions about the bad behavior of the members of their outgroups, but the notion that we should consider rising above that level of behavior and think about trying to find actual solutions is somehow ~inappropriate, as this is a place only for "curious conversation" (except for the exceptions to that rule, of course).
stickfigure 5y ago
How far back do you consider the "old days"? In the decade-plus I've been around, there has always been a small but steady stream of nontech political content. Despite the policy. My perception is that hasn't increased or decreased, though it does have periodic surges (say, US election season). I personally think it adds to the appeal of HN - in moderation, of course. Political conversations here are generally better informed and more polite than they are in other places, and I tend to learn more than I would by solely reading formal news sources.
- dqv 5y ago
  Another thing people might not realize is that a lot of political comments die. With showdead enabled, you can see all sorts of junk that sounds more like the comment sections on political sites. Short comments that parrot the same talking points seen on TV die rather quickly.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  I don't see political posts here getting traction very often. The ones that do usually are angled towards the community (anytime censorship bills come up, you get 500+ comment HN threads). Meanwhile, browsing the new section I found that articles that are just blatantly political ("you won't believe what AOC did in Florida!" to make up a title), often linger with few comments and votes. And even in those rare political posts I find, the discourse is very different from other places. I think that boils down to the golden rule of comments: "thoughtful and substantive". I've noticed the culture of HN is to downvote any comment that does not adhere to this rule, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive. At the end of the day, you can have the most frought and divisive thread here and the comments are going to all be far more civil and thoughful than on Reddit or Facebook because even thought everyone might be up in arms, all of them are going "well I'll show them! types long thoughtful comment that addresses everyone's grievances"
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive. I think one issue with approach by up/down voters is that sometimes the "thoughtful and substantive" thing to say is inherently ideological, and I notice that being explicitly ideological (for example, making it clear that you regard a long term trend in the economy as serving the interests of a particular group of people) is viewed as counterproductive. This mirrors a dilemma out in the "real world" where people find it hard to bring up substantive political ideas because just doing that is viewed as divisive and antagonistic. Unfortunately, sometimes (maybe even often) this is actually what is required to have "thoughtful and substantive" discussions.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I don't mind the political discussions coming through as long as they don't dominate the front page. However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very long, if at all. The comments occasionally yield some fun further discussions, but not like they did 5+ years ago on HN. It seems the interests of the average HN upvoter (who ultimately shapes what we see on the front page) are shifting more toward the political and controversy type pieces.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  This is an interesting point, it would be cool if HN allowed arbitrary hidden tags to be added by users. By definition, as the site becomes more popular, more obscure technologies/projects will be pushed to the edges, especially when it comes to the front page. Having a more robust search and tagging system would help with that, it’s analogous to how Reddit had to move to a vast number of sub-Reddit‘s once it got popular.
- tacitusarc 5y ago
  Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen. But it’s pretty obvious on “hard tech stories” that few people have the knowledge to meaningfully contribute. As I get older, the saying “it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” resonates more and more.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    On the other hand, it is difficult to learn anything if you are unwilling to make mistakes, that is, to be thought a fool sometimes. And on the gripping hand, I find that intentionally asserting something you think might be wrong in an effort to provoke someone into correcting you is often much more effective than asking a question.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  You can use the classic frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc). EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker-news-classic https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
avgcorrection 5y ago
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics Good luck with that. One person’s apolitical feel good story is a nefarious propaganda piece in another person’s eyes. (Interpreting “about politics” to also encompass “political”.)
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways? There was a change a while back that made the front page less volatile, around that time you started seeing stories merged more often, and traditional news creeping in a bit more. I think it is sort of like a lightning rod to keep the rest of the front page pure. Before that stories would show up and get flagged constantly, and the front page would change multiple times an hour. One thing that I have noticed is that 2020 was a bit of an eternal september for hn. Many times I see people posting things that don't really seem to work with the hn style, but they have a fairly high karma count and an account that was created in or after 2020. I think maybe a bunch of people suddenly working from home felt safe to use the internet without a boss over their shoulder, and needed a bit of community they were missing from not going in the office. This influx has watered down the ability of hn to aggressively flag/downvote politics, dumb jokes, etc. Though, all in all it's still mostly the same it has been in the last 10 years or so.
- codewithcheese 5y ago
  I think it's quite different now, the gap between HN and lobste.rs content is growing wider and wider, lobste.rs to me represents more closely what "old" HN was like
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    I'm still annoyed I couldn't find someone I knew to give me an invite to lobste.rs 9 years ago. I remember asking former coworkers, and people at local tech meetups, and getting blank stares like I was making something up. Though I suppose that is how they managed to keep things under control
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- vikingerik 5y ago
optimalsolver 5y ago
Would you consider, for example, Musk moving to Texas, or that same state's power grid failing to be political stories? Both these ostensibly tech-related stories have strong political undercurrents.
hammock 5y ago
>In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. In the old days, politics and world news were not as intertwined with technology as they are today.
danso 5y ago
If there is a greater incidence of seemingly off-topic (politics, crime, or sports) submissions, it's likely correlated to the fact that tech is more and more inseparable from everyday life and policy decisions, and vice versa. One of my favorite memories from early 2020 HN was someone angrily asking why stories about Covid-19 were making the front page, as if they couldn't imagine how a potential pandemic might deeply affect the tech sector.
ksec 5y ago
I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another. Say Joe Rogan's issue may not have been allowed on HN if it wasn't for Spotify. And more broadly speaking, what are the roles of technology in an extremely political sensitive climate. Should Telegram do A or B, and what about Whatsapp, Facebook moderation, Apple App Store disallow certain group, is that a curation problem or a political problem? Fake News, Yellow Journalism, none of these are "new". But now they happen on Tech rather than traditional media, is that a tech problem or a political problem? We just dont have any concrete answer. There are other Geopolitics issues. I mean if WW3 did start surely that is important enough for HN submission. Or China decide to invade Taiwan, so to speak. Surely the threat of TSMC Foundry supply is important enough for submission even if the article itself doesn't mention TSMC. So while the rule is not black and white as zero politics discussions. I think the moderation is fairly consistent. Still dont know how Dang manages it. To the point I sometimes worry about him leaving YC, and HN may never be the same again.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  inb4 HN stories about Canadian truckers are just gorilla advertising for self-driving trucks! New marketing slogan: "Self-driving truck don't need to get vaccine" /s
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Canadas moves on bank accounts and how that ties to crypto robustness is already being discussed :)
  - barbacoa 5y ago
    Even there many of the stories have been about tech company involvement; GoFundMe, data leaks, social media bans, etc.
  - fennecfoxy 5y ago
    Guerrilla.
    - 5y ago
netcan 5y ago
I almost think this is a moot question, though interesting to think about. The world, technology & online culture have changed so much over these years. I don't think submission/curation standards could have remained consistent throughout. Google, FB and internet companies becoming $>trn companies happened in that time period. Crime, sports & politics have become intertwined with the stuff that was on topic back in the day. FB or Twitter's policies are a major factor in elections worldwide. That's inevitably political. Cybersecurity, infosecurity and even (silly as it sounds) meme-wars are playing a big role in the current eastern european affair. TV news came to us, moreso than we went to it...I think.
dspillett 5y ago
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics A key problem is that these days a lot of techie/nerdy/geeky/hackery news has a potential political angle. Advances in cryptography, drones, medical matters, and many other things, increasingly touch on politics because they touch the wider world not just techie people and often do so in decisive ways. Take face recognition and similar tech: all cool as the tech on its own, but there are scary implications that we see forming already so even if the original post is a purely technical & politics free look at a new development the comment threads resulting from it often won't be. Conversely, political issues affect technical ones: free speech or the lack there of both has an impact on the use of current tech and drives ideas for future systems, so while seen as a political matter by some (a philosophical matter or both by others) there are valid interesting technical discussions that can be had relating to changes in those issues around the globe. > In the old days I think some of that is that in the old days the connection wasn't as “real” because the tech being discussed was not widely used, or was in fact still only theoretical. Now the tech is out there, and many are using it including many who have no specific technical bent because these things are becoming part of normal life. Once tech touches real life, it touches the sticky subjective messy aspects of real life: politics & morality. Also even when things are still theoretical, the developments are more open to the general public for better or worse because access to information (and, of course, misinformation) continues to become increasingly ubiquitous. Take cryptocurrency as an example. A decade or so ago it was just a techie plaything really. People were talking about what wider impacts it could have, but it wasn't having them yet and it wasn't clear that it actually would in the end. It is easy to be dispassionate and unpolitical at that point. Now though some of those impacts have happened and continue to happen, and can affect lives in significant ways, so new stories on the subject can't help but attract some political discussion as well as going over the technical developments, or in fact are news stories about developments that are happening because of (to aid or circumvent) political concerns. For another collection of subject matter that has seen a massive change in public and political interest, you only have to look at the last couple of years development in certain fields of biology. There is little moderation here or elsewhere can do about this significant set of changes & movements. The mods and the community can nudge things in a certain direction, but they can't fully control them.
paulpauper 5y ago
I think there are too many: -posts about nostalgia, how the 'old' world wide web was better, retro computing, reliving the past, etc. -quanta magazine math articles, because the concepts are too difficult or abstract for anyone to debate or discuss them -posts about privacy, big tech bashing (gets tired, repetitive after while) I would like to see fewer of those kind of posts. I would like to see more: -personal blog posts -posts about economics findings (instead of just the 'hard' sciences)
mbesto 5y ago
I've noticed they (TV news stuff) get upvoted pretty quickly, but also they get eliminated pretty quickly when flagged.
walterbell 5y ago
Software (some made by HN contributors) ate the world.
- tasha0663 5y ago
  Seriously, it's all on-topic. That's why I went into software. It appealed to my cross-disciplinary interests.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Modern information technology provides the enabling basis of the current turnkey infrastructure for a total information awareness-enabled authoritarian regime in the US. As in, it exists now. All of it. Already in the three letter agencies and social networks, you know or can extrapolate what everyone's opinion and views and compliance and "danger" to the regime. Right now. All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key. So the political stakes are being reflected in the current capabilities of authoritarian large scale information technology for tracking. Your web3 crypto blockchain will not help, they will own all the entry/exit points, and use of crypto will mark you as noncompliant and destined for the gulag. I remember back when Carnivore was dismissed as conspiracy talk and I mostly agreed. And then came Snowden, and I remember the revelation of "wow I wasn't nearly paranoid enough". Right now I will be gulag'd if the wrong party turns the key. Even if I don't make another political comment anywhere on the internet, I have decades of easily breadcrumbed data hoovered up that will lead straight to labor camps. The fragile state of our government means that the existing authoritarian abilities of the NSA/CIA/etc are a far bigger existential threat to me than nuclear weapons, COVID, war, and maybe even on par with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes.
- mistermann 5y ago
  > All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key. An alternate theory: they have cooperatively turned that key together, although I wouldn't expect everyone is in on it, or that "the key" is something in particular, other than a "general methodology" of how politics is performed, in the theatrical sense of the word.
dang 5y ago
I spent a few hours a while back writing up a reusable answer for this question, with lots of links from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.) If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN, here are some links: 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 or you can look at these past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... p.s. In case anyone's worried, no, we're not letting (or going to let) HN be taken over by politics. The proportions are stable and carefully regulated, although there is fluctuation, as with any stochastic process.
- lgregg 5y ago
  how do you manage all these replies? is it just bookmarked or do you keep a spreadsheet? I see you do this often.
  - dang 5y ago
    I guess they're engraved into my brain like a wax recording by now. I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones, but otherwise I just go find them in HN Search.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      For those not familiar with it, HN's search, provided by Algolia, has syntax for searching posts, comments, by author, within date ranges, and (for posts) above or below thresholds, and more. See: https://hn.algolia.com/help https://hn.algolia.com/help It's also accessible as a DDG bang, !hn I also make heavy use of search. Often searching for dang's comments ;-)
    - 5y ago
grujicd 5y ago
We come here not for the news, but for the comments. This kind of high quality community can't be found anywhere else, and that also applies to world/politics themes. Yes, you can read about that stuff elsewhere, but you won't find balanced views and rational arguments without ad hominem attacks. There are traces of that on HN too, but in vast majority of cases it's very civilized, opposed views are discussed and not downvoted to death. At least not as much as on other platforms.
awb 5y ago
> It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation. Without fail :) Thanks @dang!

by awb 5y ago

edmcnulty101 5y ago

It's very hard to define specific political content as separate from technology. I remember a single Covid scientific paper turning into a 500 post political discussion. Or tech giants and censorship and privacy. How does one separate tech from politics in this sense? Maybe society has become more political and it's making it's way to link aggregator sites?

johannes1234321 5y ago
I think it is more that tech (and tech companies) become more subjects of political debate.
- iqanq 5y ago
  People want to debate politics, but submissions about politics get killed. Therefore people end up using any excuse to debate politics in any thread.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    Still better than being unregulated. I don't come here to have political discussion, I want to find out what's interesting in tech, not to engage in flame wars (except the vim/emacs kind, that I fight).
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    I see tons of threads without political debate. I actually think the majority of threads are not political.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  Are there subjects of political debate that aren't political?
eldaisfish 5y ago
the reality is that almost everything has an element of politics and it is good to understand the relationship between politics and technology in particular. Tech, in many ways, has been adept at skirting existing laws because tech transcends barriers that were show-stoppers in the past. AirBnB, Uber are good examples. Google, facebook and spying. Clearview and their immoral data gathering. There is the additional issue that tech has crept into everything and the internet is where modern state-sponsored disinformation and misinformation campaigns are being fought. Tech is maturing and a consequence of that process is that politics develops. It's not necessarily a bad thing as the cynics say.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  I think it makes sense that more political discussions occur on hacker News because tech and the world in general possibly is becoming more political.
loceng 5y ago
Technology is used as political tools/weapons to drive and manufacture consent, through promoting hate and creating divisiveness - and through captured mainstream media channels, and online platforms; this couldn't be any more obvious with Trudeau's behaviours and observing the mainstream landscape of what the majority of Canadians are seeing. And so you're correct - politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions. The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  You're preaching to the choir here about mainstream media being super corrupt. Puts a lot of pressure on one or two hacker news mods to be the purveyors of neutrality for the entire media landscape if that's what's expected.
kenjackson 5y ago
Tech and political ideologies have collapsed, and especially in areas of interest to HN. Climate change, when a fetus is a baby, etc... these are areas where science has intersected politics before HN existed, but they also don't intersect HN regularly. But now some of the hot topics in tech are also hot topics in politics-- privacy and mass surveillance, platform censorship, vaccinations/medicine(which were a little political, became super political), affirmitive action in the tech industry, etc... I don't know if we'll ever go back to where we were as tech plays a larger and larger role. And if you think we're intertwined now, just wait until the metaverse!

fartcannon 5y ago

Eternal September maybe?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bin_bash 5y ago

As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result. I distinctly remember reading articles about major world events in the beginning as well so it's not entirely new, but it has grown a little. I don't think it's a problem, and this is coming from a centrist that typically doesn't care for political discussion on any medium.

mindcrime 5y ago
As someone that's been here since the very beginning I think that tech has begun to be responsible for a larger portion of the world as a whole and this community has moved a small amount towards that direction as a result. As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit not impossible!) to disambiguate what is "tech" versus what is "politics" when it comes to things like the discussions around, eg "social media's affect on society" and etc. And to be fair, talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc. So even I wouldn't try to say we should have zero political content here. But it does seem like it's grown a bit more prevalent than I'd prefer.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I personally don't mind (and, in fact, encourage with my upvote) political discussion when relevant because I believe the attempt to pretend technology is divorced from the social dimensions of its use is a dangerous philosophy. History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/ https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology. A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.

loceng 5y ago

I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility; and also is a sign of how much users here aren't able to emotionally regulate to have civil conversation [which is a signal of strength, of health - physical and mental health, mastery of oneself, self-control] - so much practically everything important - including the Emergency Act (war measures act aka martial law) being initiated in Canada for the first time ever by our Prime Minister who is more and more clearly acting as a fascist. When I tried posting a technology angle to this - "Ask HN: Do we care about our captured systems?" - to point out that it's the design of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. that's allowing propaganda and ideology to easily get to the top, while easily suppressing the truth - and where on HN it's easy to suppress perfectly valid, well-written, articulate comments to prevent the majority from seeing ideas that may actually be the truth. It's a problem. Edit to add: Thanks for all the fish, enjoy your lazy dopamine hit.

fuck_dang_2 5y ago
mindcrime 5y ago
I think "political" content being so heavily suppressed is the community abdicating responsibility; Presumably every single member of this community is also a member of one or more other communities, some of which have an overt intention to be "more political". Given that, no one is being denied an outlet to share their views, give input, discuss, influence, vote, etc. when it comes to political events. So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)? Personally I come here (mainly) to hear about / discuss obscure programming libraries, new programming languages, startup strategies, new scientific breakthroughs, etc. I get enough of "general politics" and "world news" elsewhere... I'd really rather not see it here as well. But, that's just me.
- mistermann 5y ago
  > So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)? My opinion: because here you can find arguably the highest concentration of powerful and knowledgeable minds, and this is the sort of thing that the world needs working on these hard problems. I find the concern over serious issues that is often expressed here to be rather disingenuous, as people love to engage in bitch sessions about the bad behavior of the members of their outgroups, but the notion that we should consider rising above that level of behavior and think about trying to find actual solutions is somehow ~inappropriate, as this is a place only for "curious conversation" (except for the exceptions to that rule, of course).

stickfigure 5y ago

How far back do you consider the "old days"? In the decade-plus I've been around, there has always been a small but steady stream of nontech political content. Despite the policy. My perception is that hasn't increased or decreased, though it does have periodic surges (say, US election season). I personally think it adds to the appeal of HN - in moderation, of course. Political conversations here are generally better informed and more polite than they are in other places, and I tend to learn more than I would by solely reading formal news sources.

dqv 5y ago
Another thing people might not realize is that a lot of political comments die. With showdead enabled, you can see all sorts of junk that sounds more like the comment sections on political sites. Short comments that parrot the same talking points seen on TV die rather quickly.
_fat_santa 5y ago
I don't see political posts here getting traction very often. The ones that do usually are angled towards the community (anytime censorship bills come up, you get 500+ comment HN threads). Meanwhile, browsing the new section I found that articles that are just blatantly political ("you won't believe what AOC did in Florida!" to make up a title), often linger with few comments and votes. And even in those rare political posts I find, the discourse is very different from other places. I think that boils down to the golden rule of comments: "thoughtful and substantive". I've noticed the culture of HN is to downvote any comment that does not adhere to this rule, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive. At the end of the day, you can have the most frought and divisive thread here and the comments are going to all be far more civil and thoughful than on Reddit or Facebook because even thought everyone might be up in arms, all of them are going "well I'll show them! types long thoughtful comment that addresses everyone's grievances"
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive. I think one issue with approach by up/down voters is that sometimes the "thoughtful and substantive" thing to say is inherently ideological, and I notice that being explicitly ideological (for example, making it clear that you regard a long term trend in the economy as serving the interests of a particular group of people) is viewed as counterproductive. This mirrors a dilemma out in the "real world" where people find it hard to bring up substantive political ideas because just doing that is viewed as divisive and antagonistic. Unfortunately, sometimes (maybe even often) this is actually what is required to have "thoughtful and substantive" discussions.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I don't mind the political discussions coming through as long as they don't dominate the front page. However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very long, if at all. The comments occasionally yield some fun further discussions, but not like they did 5+ years ago on HN. It seems the interests of the average HN upvoter (who ultimately shapes what we see on the front page) are shifting more toward the political and controversy type pieces.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
This is an interesting point, it would be cool if HN allowed arbitrary hidden tags to be added by users. By definition, as the site becomes more popular, more obscure technologies/projects will be pushed to the edges, especially when it comes to the front page. Having a more robust search and tagging system would help with that, it’s analogous to how Reddit had to move to a vast number of sub-Reddit‘s once it got popular.
tacitusarc 5y ago
Everyone wants to talk, no one wants to listen. But it’s pretty obvious on “hard tech stories” that few people have the knowledge to meaningfully contribute. As I get older, the saying “it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” resonates more and more.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  On the other hand, it is difficult to learn anything if you are unwilling to make mistakes, that is, to be thought a fool sometimes. And on the gripping hand, I find that intentionally asserting something you think might be wrong in an effort to provoke someone into correcting you is often much more effective than asking a question.
Sebb767 5y ago
You can use the classic frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc). EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker-news-classic https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...

avgcorrection 5y ago

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics Good luck with that. One person’s apolitical feel good story is a nefarious propaganda piece in another person’s eyes. (Interpreting “about politics” to also encompass “political”.)

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways? There was a change a while back that made the front page less volatile, around that time you started seeing stories merged more often, and traditional news creeping in a bit more. I think it is sort of like a lightning rod to keep the rest of the front page pure. Before that stories would show up and get flagged constantly, and the front page would change multiple times an hour. One thing that I have noticed is that 2020 was a bit of an eternal september for hn. Many times I see people posting things that don't really seem to work with the hn style, but they have a fairly high karma count and an account that was created in or after 2020. I think maybe a bunch of people suddenly working from home felt safe to use the internet without a boss over their shoulder, and needed a bit of community they were missing from not going in the office. This influx has watered down the ability of hn to aggressively flag/downvote politics, dumb jokes, etc. Though, all in all it's still mostly the same it has been in the last 10 years or so.

codewithcheese 5y ago
I think it's quite different now, the gap between HN and lobste.rs content is growing wider and wider, lobste.rs to me represents more closely what "old" HN was like
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I'm still annoyed I couldn't find someone I knew to give me an invite to lobste.rs 9 years ago. I remember asking former coworkers, and people at local tech meetups, and getting blank stares like I was making something up. Though I suppose that is how they managed to keep things under control
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
vikingerik 5y ago

optimalsolver 5y ago

Would you consider, for example, Musk moving to Texas, or that same state's power grid failing to be political stories? Both these ostensibly tech-related stories have strong political undercurrents.

hammock 5y ago

>In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed. In the old days, politics and world news were not as intertwined with technology as they are today.

danso 5y ago

If there is a greater incidence of seemingly off-topic (politics, crime, or sports) submissions, it's likely correlated to the fact that tech is more and more inseparable from everyday life and policy decisions, and vice versa. One of my favorite memories from early 2020 HN was someone angrily asking why stories about Covid-19 were making the front page, as if they couldn't imagine how a potential pandemic might deeply affect the tech sector.

ksec 5y ago

I "think", most of those debate ties with technology one way or another. Say Joe Rogan's issue may not have been allowed on HN if it wasn't for Spotify. And more broadly speaking, what are the roles of technology in an extremely political sensitive climate. Should Telegram do A or B, and what about Whatsapp, Facebook moderation, Apple App Store disallow certain group, is that a curation problem or a political problem? Fake News, Yellow Journalism, none of these are "new". But now they happen on Tech rather than traditional media, is that a tech problem or a political problem? We just dont have any concrete answer. There are other Geopolitics issues. I mean if WW3 did start surely that is important enough for HN submission. Or China decide to invade Taiwan, so to speak. Surely the threat of TSMC Foundry supply is important enough for submission even if the article itself doesn't mention TSMC. So while the rule is not black and white as zero politics discussions. I think the moderation is fairly consistent. Still dont know how Dang manages it. To the point I sometimes worry about him leaving YC, and HN may never be the same again.

zozbot234 5y ago
inb4 HN stories about Canadian truckers are just gorilla advertising for self-driving trucks! New marketing slogan: "Self-driving truck don't need to get vaccine" /s
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Canadas moves on bank accounts and how that ties to crypto robustness is already being discussed :)
- barbacoa 5y ago
  Even there many of the stories have been about tech company involvement; GoFundMe, data leaks, social media bans, etc.
- fennecfoxy 5y ago
  Guerrilla.
  - 5y ago

netcan 5y ago

I almost think this is a moot question, though interesting to think about. The world, technology & online culture have changed so much over these years. I don't think submission/curation standards could have remained consistent throughout. Google, FB and internet companies becoming $>trn companies happened in that time period. Crime, sports & politics have become intertwined with the stuff that was on topic back in the day. FB or Twitter's policies are a major factor in elections worldwide. That's inevitably political. Cybersecurity, infosecurity and even (silly as it sounds) meme-wars are playing a big role in the current eastern european affair. TV news came to us, moreso than we went to it...I think.

dspillett 5y ago

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics A key problem is that these days a lot of techie/nerdy/geeky/hackery news has a potential political angle. Advances in cryptography, drones, medical matters, and many other things, increasingly touch on politics because they touch the wider world not just techie people and often do so in decisive ways. Take face recognition and similar tech: all cool as the tech on its own, but there are scary implications that we see forming already so even if the original post is a purely technical & politics free look at a new development the comment threads resulting from it often won't be. Conversely, political issues affect technical ones: free speech or the lack there of both has an impact on the use of current tech and drives ideas for future systems, so while seen as a political matter by some (a philosophical matter or both by others) there are valid interesting technical discussions that can be had relating to changes in those issues around the globe. > In the old days I think some of that is that in the old days the connection wasn't as “real” because the tech being discussed was not widely used, or was in fact still only theoretical. Now the tech is out there, and many are using it including many who have no specific technical bent because these things are becoming part of normal life. Once tech touches real life, it touches the sticky subjective messy aspects of real life: politics & morality. Also even when things are still theoretical, the developments are more open to the general public for better or worse because access to information (and, of course, misinformation) continues to become increasingly ubiquitous. Take cryptocurrency as an example. A decade or so ago it was just a techie plaything really. People were talking about what wider impacts it could have, but it wasn't having them yet and it wasn't clear that it actually would in the end. It is easy to be dispassionate and unpolitical at that point. Now though some of those impacts have happened and continue to happen, and can affect lives in significant ways, so new stories on the subject can't help but attract some political discussion as well as going over the technical developments, or in fact are news stories about developments that are happening because of (to aid or circumvent) political concerns. For another collection of subject matter that has seen a massive change in public and political interest, you only have to look at the last couple of years development in certain fields of biology. There is little moderation here or elsewhere can do about this significant set of changes & movements. The mods and the community can nudge things in a certain direction, but they can't fully control them.

paulpauper 5y ago

I think there are too many: -posts about nostalgia, how the 'old' world wide web was better, retro computing, reliving the past, etc. -quanta magazine math articles, because the concepts are too difficult or abstract for anyone to debate or discuss them -posts about privacy, big tech bashing (gets tired, repetitive after while) I would like to see fewer of those kind of posts. I would like to see more: -personal blog posts -posts about economics findings (instead of just the 'hard' sciences)

mbesto 5y ago

I've noticed they (TV news stuff) get upvoted pretty quickly, but also they get eliminated pretty quickly when flagged.

walterbell 5y ago

Software (some made by HN contributors) ate the world.

tasha0663 5y ago
Seriously, it's all on-topic. That's why I went into software. It appealed to my cross-disciplinary interests.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Modern information technology provides the enabling basis of the current turnkey infrastructure for a total information awareness-enabled authoritarian regime in the US. As in, it exists now. All of it. Already in the three letter agencies and social networks, you know or can extrapolate what everyone's opinion and views and compliance and "danger" to the regime. Right now. All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key. So the political stakes are being reflected in the current capabilities of authoritarian large scale information technology for tracking. Your web3 crypto blockchain will not help, they will own all the entry/exit points, and use of crypto will mark you as noncompliant and destined for the gulag. I remember back when Carnivore was dismissed as conspiracy talk and I mostly agreed. And then came Snowden, and I remember the revelation of "wow I wasn't nearly paranoid enough". Right now I will be gulag'd if the wrong party turns the key. Even if I don't make another political comment anywhere on the internet, I have decades of easily breadcrumbed data hoovered up that will lead straight to labor camps. The fragile state of our government means that the existing authoritarian abilities of the NSA/CIA/etc are a far bigger existential threat to me than nuclear weapons, COVID, war, and maybe even on par with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes.

mistermann 5y ago
> All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key. An alternate theory: they have cooperatively turned that key together, although I wouldn't expect everyone is in on it, or that "the key" is something in particular, other than a "general methodology" of how politics is performed, in the theatrical sense of the word.

dang 5y ago

I spent a few hours a while back writing up a reusable answer for this question, with lots of links from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.) If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN, here are some links: 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 or you can look at these past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... p.s. In case anyone's worried, no, we're not letting (or going to let) HN be taken over by politics. The proportions are stable and carefully regulated, although there is fluctuation, as with any stochastic process.

lgregg 5y ago
how do you manage all these replies? is it just bookmarked or do you keep a spreadsheet? I see you do this often.
- dang 5y ago
  I guess they're engraved into my brain like a wax recording by now. I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones, but otherwise I just go find them in HN Search.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    For those not familiar with it, HN's search, provided by Algolia, has syntax for searching posts, comments, by author, within date ranges, and (for posts) above or below thresholds, and more. See: https://hn.algolia.com/help https://hn.algolia.com/help It's also accessible as a DDG bang, !hn I also make heavy use of search. Often searching for dang's comments ;-)
  - 5y ago

grujicd 5y ago

We come here not for the news, but for the comments. This kind of high quality community can't be found anywhere else, and that also applies to world/politics themes. Yes, you can read about that stuff elsewhere, but you won't find balanced views and rational arguments without ad hominem attacks. There are traces of that on HN too, but in vast majority of cases it's very civilized, opposed views are discussed and not downvoted to death. At least not as much as on other platforms.

awb 5y ago

> It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation. Without fail :) Thanks @dang!