https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you think it's disruptive, then please email us at [email protected]. We read all of those, and we routinely penalize stories that are off-topic for Hacker News.
I find that HN's community and mods are pretty good at policing flamebait content in general, inflammatory topics don't last long on the frontpage in my experience.
I'd sooner ban politics entirely from HN (as has been attempted before) than create a sub-forum for it.
I also find that political talk doesn't tend to contaminate other threads the way it does in other communities. If you want to avoid political threads it's fairly easy to do so in general. So it's really not that bad from my point of view, and I don't really like political stuff either.
What should be unified is the rules for contributing to HN.
To avoid bubbles, users should not be allowed to save their tag based selections.
edit: added some more ideas.
Look at the current frontpage for instance:
>Germany bans children's smartwatches
>TechShop shuts down all U.S. locations, declares bankruptcy
>Termination of the certificates business of StartCom
>There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It
>Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers
Which ones of these deserve to be tagged "politics"? And for those you'd tag that way, which ones are those you'd consider not part of "core" HN subjects? For instance the smartwatch ban one is objectively political, yet it's probably of interest for the crowd here since it's obviously also about tech.
Both tags and better sorts for threads and comments would be ideal. "Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?" already had several hundred comments when I first saw it, and it's now at 800. Having the only choices to view that thread be by karma or whatever latest comments appear on /newcomments makes it difficult to browse, although I do appreciate long threads being paginated. This one feature Reddit gets more right than HN.
And to counter the likely argument that adding tags would make the UI noiser, and somehow reduce the intellectual quality of comments by attracting mainstream users, lobste.rs uses tags and they don't seem to have fallen down either slippery slope.
And, HN already has pseudo-tags in the form of "Ask HN", "Show HN", and "Tell HN". Might as well just make those #ask, #show, and #tell and turn the ask and show pages (and maybe jobs) into tag feeds.
As for lobste.rs, a website I didn't know existed before your comment, looking at the frontpage I see that the "politics" tag is conspicuously absent, and instead all tags are about rather objective things like technologies being used (with maybe the exception of a lone "philosophy" tag).
I'd also point out that if I had up all the number of comments of all the stories on the front page currently I end up at a whopping 42 comments with most stories having none. I'm sure it's a very nice community but it's really too small to use as a reference.
Of course, the answer for that is for HN to bite the bullet and actually integrate a relational database, if only to improve performance and scalability.
And as far as lobste.rs goes, the culture there seems to be more restrictive due to being invite only, and having a policy of banning not only offending users, but the users who invited them, and the users who invited them, as far up the (publicly viewable) graph as deemed necessary. This inevitably leads to far more posts than comments, and less diversity of thought or critical discussion, by design. Nevertheless, using tags doesn't seem to have interfered with any of that, so it shouldn't necessarily interfere with Hacker News' culture either.
HN, however, has open membership, and any tag system employed here would need to take the heterogenous nature of the community into account. Since politics is one of the more divisive topics here, a politics tag would probably be inevitable. Lobste.rs would just not allow anyone they consider too political to join in the first place.
The guidelines specifically state that this would be an "off-topic" submission. If these types of topics are wanted then the guidelines should be modified or a separate section should be created.
Commerce, communications, privacy, speech, expression, lifestyle, journalism, entertainment & culture, knowledge, societal debate, government, money, wealth - it all increasingly flows through technology/platforms that techies, nerds, geeks (whatever term you prefer) now heavily influence or directly control.
There's no going back, it's all going to get more political rather than less as governments gets deeper into assigning regulations to the Internet.
The people who only want to discuss, for example, Android from technical merits and completely leave out any privacy aspect are the ones who have an agenda. They're trying to silence our concerns. We should downvote their opinion as its akin to complains about moderation.
It should be obvious that we can have a conversation about, say, the Android low memory killer's process ordering strategy without having to talk about the social implications of website cookie tracking or whatever.
Yes, mobile technology as a whole is connected to privacy. That doesn't mean that any particular detail of that technology is relevant to any particular political cause, and it doesn't give people the right to inject social issues into discussions into technical matters. You can't be intellectually honest, keep a straight face, and claim that malloc chunking is "deeply intertwined" with some pet political cause.
One reason the West has gone mad the past few years is this bizarre emphasis on the old, bad "the personal is the political" idea. No, it isn't.
Furthermore, we don't always discuss Android's low memory killer's process or malloc chunking; we also discuss iPhone's latest authentication measure FaceID or we discuss the latest inclusions of the Linux kernel. Both of which are more easily related to politics.
> One reason the West has gone mad the past few years [...]
What? Nice political comment.
Which would be when our ancestors first began making hand tools and using fire, right?
However it has become increasingly dominant over our lives with the invention of things like the Internet, computer, car, smartphone, magnetron, and a whole plethora of inventions which I cannot even fathom.
Take for example a very obvious example: electronic voting. It has to do with technology and politics. Should we avoid discussing that? Should we avoid discussing the privacy topics of Facebook? Google? Should we avoid all the topics brought up by a series such as Black Mirror? [1]
And why is it that with non-political topics (as for as these exist) we should be allowed to vote on them, whereas as soon as politics get somehow involved it should be avoided on HN? And, since politics isn't a clear proposition, where do we draw the line?
Can we come to terms that if stories are getting voted up, it means people want these? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it's complementary to the technical, scientific, and business side of the site.
See how that works? Don't like it? down vote it? :)
Only if you can come to terms that if comments like the parent are getting upvoted it means a large chunk of people don't want these stories?
> See how that works? Don't like it? down vote it? :)
Most users do not have the ability to downvote and so their voice is represented by up-voting the parent.
Stories which are obviously off topic or spam should be flagged, but stories you simply don't care for should just be hidden. If you flag stories because you don't like them, you're making it more difficult for everyone else to participate in that thread.
When software eats the world that means politics and software are only going to intersect even more.
- Health (bad service in the US and nutrition), body hacks
- University/education (decline / loan in the US, do I need a university degree to be a developer, Google/Amazon/Facebook favoring same top universities)
- Government surveillance and other threads to freedom
- What I like/disliked or how I moved from language A to B
- Tesla / electric cars, renewable energies
- Online scams, phishing etc
- drugs, war on drugs
- how broken are programmer interviews
- wealth distribution/inequality
HN does not have any unique angle or personalities that can comment on these topics, and it basically devolves into a "blue team good, red team bad" and a few -50 libertarians in every single article. A Markov chain could write the comment threads.
- Ignore the article.
- Ignore the comments.
- Participate but try to raise the level of discourse.
Note how complaining in the comments about how political stories are a problem is not a solution. That's because it's at best being ignored, but more likely adding noise to the discussion or starting an obfuscating thread about it, like this whole thread.
The only thing complaining does is possibly make the comment writer feel slightly better by being able to vent, but at the expense of everyone else. I hope you and the others at least got that little bit out of your comments, because at least there's some small benefit to this thread then (that's not meant to be snide, I truly do think it's a better outcome than this being a complete waste of time).
For this article, I'd say, it does qualify +5 on informative, and 0.5 on flamebait. It clearly worth attention
One wonders if one could construct a quality system for message boards that uses markov chains to predict common comment patterns and then reduce their visibility.
This would create a system similar to Amazon's "statistically unique phrases" view of books. Might be interesting to play around with.
> Rather than critically discussing why you don't want the feature you deflect from the idea.
The argument, as far as it exists, is constructed as follows:
1) I do not like content X.
2) Observes content X is being upvoted.
3) We should get rid of content X.
4) There are a lot of people who agree with me (= argumentum ad populum, and furthermore lacks data).
It is basically the same as arguing with the mod system (which is on every website a big fat no-no), but then under a guise of not getting the candy you want (apparently then its OK).
You know there's a much simpler solution than complaining about it? You can work around content you dislike by submitting and upvoting content you do enjoy. Or another option is leaving, going to another website, or getting something useful done.
The top reply at the time was a low level deflection of the idea rather than a constructive feedback of the idea / feature as others did above. Deflections don't constructively argue for one side or the other. It is merely to shut down an idea and stop discussion.
My simple solution to upvote articles you find interesting stands. That way, you're able to vote on this website, and every unique visitor has a say on the matter here. Its not unique to HN, a lot of websites work like this (Reddit and lobste.rs for example).
Take for example myself. I am not from the USA, so I could say anything related to USA politics or US business or US hiring isn't of my concern. Reality is though that I'm not interested in quantum mechanics. Someone who's a JavaScript developer might not be interested in security. Someone who's interested in UNIX system administration might not be interested about Microsoft Office. And so on, and so forth. And someone who's living in a villa and bought all the villas around him might not be concerned with the privacy of the general population. That's everyone's fair right, and all of these individuals are going to have a certain signal to noise ratio on HN, as well as a vote (as explained above). There is not one single HN visitor who will enjoy each and every article on the FP. And blimey, be thankful of that, because every interesting article which doesn't exist means you got more time for something else.
You can already manually hide articles you are not interested in. Alternatively, if it really bothers you, you could write a simple blacklist with keywords which would then be hidden from the list. But don't make your problem someone else's problem. Don't make it appear that your apathy regarding politics should be the status quo. Just like we're not all into quantum mechanics, some of us are interested in politics.
What certainly doesn't help is complaining about it. Should I complain in threads about quantum mechanics how I find it boring, how I find it a waste of time, and how we shouldn't discuss or upvote it? I'd get grilled. And for good reason. It is disrespectful to those who do find quantum mechanics interesting. So I GTFO of discussions about quantum mechanics because it isn't my league. If you find politics boring, it probably isn't within your league either. So, sure, stay away from it. You got so many tools within grasp to use for that.
Also I agree and I enjoy seeing politics discussed. You are conflating my defending of someones discussion around the structure with the site / features or focus of the the sites content with me defending their argument. Two different things here.
You're not demonstrating how or why the solutions I have offered are not applicable. Why are these solutions I offered perfectly valid for someone who's not into quantum mechanics or JavaScript or Android or Windows, yet they somehow don't work for someone who's not into politics (however vague that definition might be)?
As for my argument being that people are not allowed to question the structure / content of a site: yes, they are allowed, just not in a thread which is about something else. This thread is about "The Paradise Papers: How Ridiculously Easy It Is for the Rich to Avoid Taxes" not about whether politics are allowed to be discussed on HN (which is itself a political argument by proponents of political apathy). Are you a proponent of moderation complaints ("downvoting", a form of argumentum ad misericordiam) in threads? No? Then why would you be a proponent of people who complain they find an article or bunch of articles irrelevant or offtopic?
I'm all for a meta forum where people can rant their ass off about how X or Y is ontopic on the website. A website I visit regularly (Tweakers.net) has such a subforum where people can submit things like spelling mistakes or complain about moderation. Let the complainers together enjoy their cesspit of complaints, being directed to it, while such complaints in the threads themselves are downvoted to offtopic (0) or troll (-1). GLHF wasting your time on that, having people vent their frustration already helps them with their problem.
Your solution was that I write a script to blacklist certain words? Is that really a viable solution vs a product implementation?
> Don't make it appear that your apathy regarding politics should be the status quo.
And nowhere in this discussion was I against the discussion of politics just that this immediate and visceral reaction to wanting to discuss a topic is my issue here.
If we had a meta forum as mentioned above I would love for discussions like this to be moved in that direction but we are where we are because the lack of structure.
Yes, that was one of my solutions. Only one human being has to write such a simple script, and share it for the rest of the world. The other solutions I provided require manual labour. It could also easily be implemented in the apps which use the API (f.e. I use Yarn).
> And nowhere in this discussion was I against the discussion of politics just that this immediate and visceral reaction to wanting to discuss a topic is my issue here.
Because it is offtopic, just like rants about quantum mechanics would easily be or become offtopic in a thread about Android security. We wouldn't accept that; why would be find rants about politics being on the website acceptable? The intolerance fundamentally starts when people go offtopic complaining about the substance of the topic which is disrespectful to those who do care about the topic. It does not need to be this way, if you just moved on, filtered, upvoted, read, and participated in what you find interesting. That's a way to positively reinforce instead of negatively.
> If we had a meta forum as mentioned above I would love for discussions like this to be moved in that direction but we are where we are because the lack of structure.
So the lack of that justifies graffiti in random threads until your demands are met?
Nope but it is the inevitable outcome as we see here.
I'll still stand my ground that the first reply that I replied to was a shit comment only wanting to deflect conversation. If it followed what you said here then the appropriate response is to ignore it and report.
IMO, this topic has huge intersections with modern tech. From attitudes about US tax reform in the tech community, to means of creating transparency in wealth with tech, to means of aggregating and distributing investigative journalism about such large and complex matters with tech.
If we pay close enough attention, surely we could automate all this into a tax-avoidance-as-a-service app. Maybe turn it into smart contracts on a blockchain machine-learning cloud buzzword buzzword? And once you start making real money, you can eat your own dog food to keep more of it.
I guess I could see how some readers might let their primate fairness response generate an emotional reaction, but I think it's pretty cool how these people exploited vulnerabilities in the code--that typically go years or decades without getting patched--to improve their lives by a marginal amount at a relatively large cost to absolutely everyone else in their respective countries, in a way that strictly obeys the letter of the law while completely subverting its spirit. If that's not hacking, I don't know what is.
Why, that's no more political than attaching a RazPi and some 3D-printed plastic components to the optics and lower receiver of a sniper rifle, such that an attacker could successfully strike a moving target--as a completely hypothetical example--on the deck of a luxury yacht cruising more than a mile offshore through somewhat rough seas, somewhere between Malta and the Caymans.
And it isn't as though many of us are paid, sometimes very well, to eliminate jobs through automation, or to mine and reduce big data from the consumer population, or disrupt existing industries to the detriment of the people who built careers in them, or to create technologies that tend to increase the concentration of wealth and power in those who already have it. We're completely apolitical! We have no real need to consider the social ramifications of what we do!
~ (Poe's Law warning: satire)
News for hackers is intrinsically political.
China has to routinely purge extraordinary numbers of people from their political system (tens of thousands), because most of their corruption occurs behind closed doors, shadow dealings, hidden bribes, and so on. Is that better or worse than instead having a strictly defined system of public lobbying? For emphasis I'll point out that the US lobbying system is extremely tightly regulated, there are very well defined laws for it, they will put you in prison if you break those laws.
Systems without US-style open lobbying are not lacking in common corruption, there has always been plenty of that in nations such as Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, South Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, etc.
The world is flooded with political corruption practically everywhere, with most of that world not utilizing a system like US lobbying. It'd be easy to say that one would rather eg AT&T not try to influence politics at all, that's wildly unrealistic as it pertains to human nature and history. So is it better to have a public system that AT&T lobbies in, such that you know where they're lobbying and for how much. And if so, is there a better version of that than the US system (and what would that be).
So if you don't like it, just skip it. (Others have said that you can hide it, but you can also just scroll past it.) What does it matter to you if we discuss stuff you don't care about in thread that you don't bother to read? It's not like you can only look at articles on the first page. (Yes, I know, you have to scroll further than you otherwise would. That seems like a fairly small problem. I wonder if it deserves such a large solution...)
Perhaps a tagging system would help, but HN is allergic to features.
These are all very worth talking about. Not least because people are going to be talking about them whether we do or not, and the discourse benefits from people with actual technical knowledge contributing towards it.
On a serious note, most people don't vote. Keeping out of politics is not a luxury few have, it's the choice the majority makes.
Technically tax codes and laws are source code to Governmental society.
Which has turned HN from stuff-that-hackers-find-interesting to something closer to viewpoints-hackers-most-agree-with
And this is true for many other things aside from politics, politics is just where it's most obvious. (I think the format/process worked early on with a smaller, more startup-oriented crowd. Those days are long gone)
And this is one of the few places where I can do that.
I agree that political threads here have a lower signal-to-noise ratio than other articles. It's just that here is better than almost anywhere else these days.
That being said, it seems a little rich to complain about the intrusion of politics into this genteel little salon we've got here.
Tax avoidance, not so much.
Whether I express myself truthfully or joke around, my account's value seems to stay the same. I don't feel motivated to conform to any society which I suspect is systematically less than healthy. However I am glad that one of the popular kids here would take the time to discuss, rather than simply hide what they disagree with from view. Hello. =)
The substance of my comment was a call to questioning veiled as humor. When I wrote it, it was called for. With all the other suspicious replies, it is fine to be drowned out. Tax evasion is a subject I care deeply about.
There should still be standards, but the standard should be a combination of interesting, relevant, well-written, and professional.
Can we have a special politics section so we can keep it separate? I guarantee I'm not the only one who thinks it is becoming disruptive to the technical, scientific, and business side of the site.