4 ms·
I can understand, but honestly it was a mistake. I just scrolled down to get here, and there are no curious perspectives being shared or interesting questions b
by lolinder 2y ago
I can understand, but honestly it was a mistake. I just scrolled down to get here, and there are no curious perspectives being shared or interesting questions being asked, just the entirely understandable and expected mass anger and frustration.
In an ideal world we could have a threat or two like this that would serve as outlets, but what I've actually seen is that having these discussions leads to them bleeding out into other threads that should have been unrelated. HN is going to need to more aggressively enforce its rules about political news if it's going to stay a haven for curiosity and not descend into just another place for angry politics.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoSometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And this is a pivotal moment in US history, the moment where the world realizes the emperor has no clothes.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoAgreed. These are potentially historic moments worthy of discussion amongst rational and educated folks. Hopefully, however, these are not historic moments...
- voidhorse 2y agoWhether we like it or not, politics pervades everything. Attempting to keep certain forums sanitized and "apolitical" while a regime shift is occurring and people's civil liberties face very real threats is to live in an amoral and ahistorical fashion. Desperate times...
- mongol 2y agoI have found myself lately to feel indifferent to many threads on HN that would otherwise have exicted me because of the insane world politics events which were occuring simulatenously but without mention. There is an intelligent crowd here, and important topics ought to be discussed, not just the latest hacker news.
- lolinder 2y agoI disagree. There are lots of interesting things happening in the world, and the HN crowd does a good job talking about them. Those topics—the ones where HN has high quality conversation—are why I come to HN. Since the inauguration the HN crowd has not done a good job talking about politics. Where we used to be able to have some of the best discussions and comments on political issues I've seen on the internet, the last month or two has consisted primarily of hot takes and aggression, and I can get my dose of that anywhere else, I don't need it here.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoThe crowd isn't some invariant. The people here and quality of their responses is a function of the kind of topics that get discussed here, the repetition these topics receive, and the grace others have in receiving those comments. You can't just neatly swap in the HN community and say "okay you used to discuss Elixr tooling now it's time to discuss US politics." What happens instead is, people start getting heated at each other and vitriol across the site increases. Folks who don't find that grace anymore exit the site and folks who are heated stay. This attracts other people who want to be heated. This creates a downward spiral across the community. This isn't HN specific, it's the same thing that happened to pretty much every other public internet community once they started featuring lots of discussion on polarizing politics. The entire reason HN used to be high quality open internet forum is because politics wasn't a huge part of its contents. But the site has been under quality pressure for some time now and ever since the start of Trump 2024 it's started going downhill faster than it was before. That's fine of course, if folks just want to battle out politics and shout at each other or cry out in anger they can go ahead. But it won't be the "intelligent crowd here" doing it. Those folks will go elsewhere. As an example, this thread is ridiculously large (2818 comments as of this writing.) There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms. The only sense I can make of it is throwing the thread into Gemini and asking it to summarize it for me. The summary tells me nothing that my own thoughts and some social media comments I've read don't already tell me. So what has the "intelligent crowd here" really given us? I'm waiting for op-eds from the MSM and blog authors I follow to give me literally anything more rigorous than the slop in this thread.
- insane_dreamer 2y agodisagree. I’m here and not Reddit because I’m interested in the perspectives of people on this site and the information that is shared including on events as unprecedented and impactful as this one.
- lolinder 2y agoCan you point me to a comment on this thread that you found to be more substantive than what you'd find on a typical subreddit? I sure couldn't find one in the deluge of low quality hot takes, so if you have one I'd love to see it.
- ActorNightly 2y ago>and there are no curious perspectives being shared or interesting questions being aske There is only one right perspective, and really no interesting questions to be asked. Please stop pretending otherwise.
- lolinder 2y agoI don't disagree (in that I can't think of one either), but that makes this a terrible subject for an HN thread. We have other forums for collectively bemoaning the state of the world, we don't need that to spread to here. It's poisoning other threads in a really toxic way.
- trickstra 2y agoCuriosity and interesting questions won't have any future in the trump world. So yes, this is very relevant to the HN community. Doing nothing is also a choice which has consequences.
- b2w 2y agoDismissing this event though when the toxicity is right there on display feels like a passive response for a community as active as HN.