And I think this probably is a byproduct of the "attention economy" where there has been an arms race for mindshare (I'd like to find a way to put that better but hopefully it's clear)
I think politics are work, when you're company is anything but small is nasty and taboo. And IMO a fireable offence when it gets to any level of harassing others for not sharing your opinion.
There are times and places for certain things and I strongly believe work isn't one for politics. Unless the work itself is directly political.
I've shared this opinion before on HN and had strong support, so I know I'm not alone. Especially among the introverts.
Another is that it's another moderation headache. Anyone can insert a hashtag for any reason, so anyone will. If you don't police it, it becomes useless; if you do police it, it becomes heavy.
It's not perfect, but muting key words like the names of a few popular political figures, names of political parties, and names of hotbutton issues will drastically decrease the amount of political content in your timeline.
I shouldn't have made it a hashtag.
there is no such thing
(:
Its not apolitical, just pettier politics
The sense in which people flame each other on HN about programming language opinions can be described as 'political', but it's also not directly related to e.g. current US politics.
Sometimes people like starting one with warning, I see it all the time. I don't see how Twitter can't create a simple filter like that.
I could go through all my tweets and instantly choose which category it goes in.
I remember one case in particular where the guy was a genius at posting niche Middle Ages history and then every other tweet became political and I was so sad, because I absolutely loved his content.
As an a-political person who tried hard (but failed occasionally) at keeping my stuff a-political or othwise I’d start a new account to be political because my main one was tech stuff.
Twitters biggest failure was the lack of tagging and filtering options it provided. The History Genius could have tagged his polical tweets as #political and Twitter could have an option to follow someone except their #political ones. Just like following without retweets.
The solution is obvious to me. But clearly Twitter founders love the political stuff or something. So I just chose to avoid Twitter at all costs unless linked to it or researching a topic, with the odd time I got dragged into it.