This is a common enough misconception that I put some effort into writing a standard post for it some years ago—maybe we should put it in the FAQ, I don't know:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
One has to be careful not to fall prey to whatever bias it is that always makes it feel like things are getting worse.
However, the effects on the QoL of many humans is not a concern to those of us who have the privilege to simply look away and not notice a difference to our own quality of life. This privileged demo has drastically shrunk (ie, politics directly and noticeably impacts the QoL of far more people) today, mostly because the rest of the people have deservedly been given more of a voice. Policy in its present state can mean the difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago, and talking about it is an option for people who were silenced and closeted 10 years ago.
Even those of us who wilfully try to plug their ears and come up a system of rules and restricted topics that are "political" and "to be avoided" will find it incredibly hard to enforce, because someone or other will break the rule, and it's physically impossible for everyone else to keep their peace until a moderator brings the banhammer.
The world is going through shared turmoil right now and politics is naturally a first stop to look for society-level resolutions, or at least adjustments to existing rules to improve QoL.
Everything is couched in terms of “with us or against us” extremist dichotomies much like the one hiding in the undertone of your post.
Of course everyone thinks their political views are critical to life the same way people think their religion is important. It’s still super rude to bring up religion in an orthogonal topic and it’s still super rude to do the same with politics.
I think this is generally true, but I also think HN is one of the more open minded places on most of the topics. I think the main problem I have seen in political debates on here are when someone automatically assumes a scientific finding should be policy. In reality, we as a society need to figure out how to apply that finding in a way that balances multiple concerns and fits with society's other rules and values.
With another voting system (CGP Grey YouTube has great videos on this) you'll have more parties meaning you're not put against one "opponent" that you'll always hate.
Your voting system is not democratic (if you're from the US) and I see it as weird how this isn't mentioned more often.
Critical thinking skills generally didn't vanish over the past 5, 10, 20, 30 years. That still exists and you can see it in numerous other topics of discussion that don't get so heated. In some spheres of discourse such skills have been overridden by emotion, feelings, however. People are being taught to suppress rational thought and to unleash emotional reaction instead.
What has happened is a cultural shift in which outrage behavior, reaction-to-whatever, being triggered, feelings-as-all-important, et al. has become acceptable and primary. Virtue signaling - which is a resulting disease of this shift - is omnipresent today. That all started to build notably throughout the prior decade and accelerated during the Trump years. Emotional reaction and how strong that reaction is, became a way to win contests intellectually. This primacy of feelings is now being taught throughout the US at all levels and at all times. It's an intellectual disaster, it turns adults into infants emotionally and intellectually. It stunts their growth mentally and it makes them fragile, weak, unable to partake in rigourous debate without shattering down to emotionally acting out (if you're losing in a debate, throw a culturally potent accusation card to end the debate). For a masterclass in this behavior observe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she does something stupid or ignorant, or when she is caught lying, and watch how she avoids responsibility (she acts out very emotionally and immediately begins throwing any and all accusation cards to deflect and shut down discussion); or observe her approach to argumentation generally, she always argues from feelings-as-primary (watch how she uses her hands as she speaks, it's a tip-off); she's out on the tip of the intellectual spear for the US cultural implosion and the impending rise of violent tribalism and highly dysfunctional statism in the US culturally (and it's no coincidence she's an avowed Socialist; 20 years from now if you disagree with her emotions, her brown shirts equivalent - Antifa & Co. - will burn your house down; we're nearly at that level of primative cultural behavior now).
People have gradually come to tolerate outrageous emotional behavior. It's conceptually no different than the broken window theory. Bit by bit more and more emotional, acting-out behavior has become tolerated in the culture. Now it's widespread and the US culture is increasingly a cultural ghetto. When feelings become supreme in the intellectual realm, reason and reasonable behavior loses out every time. The culture that behaves that way will collapse rapidly into tribalism and conflict, lacking the approach necessary to resolve intellectual conflict (turning to feelings and emotion as primary can only end in violent conflict in an intellectual contest, there's no way then to determine right from wrong culturally other than who can shriek the loudest or hit the hardest).
Virtue signaling is a behavior or type of speech that is intended to communicate a political allegiance, or adherence to a specific school of thought.
GP effectively provided a critique of modern political discourse.
What does that have to do with virtue signaling?
One way is to focus on difficult questions, on the inevitable trade-offs and on interesting, perhaps less conventional solutions. These debates are supposed to make people think.
The other is to declare all questions settled and focus on rhetorical tactics to suppress the enemy. Stop thinking, start acting, crush the evil enemy, it's about life and death!
In my opinion, this latter form of politics should be kept off HN. Thinking is not a luxury that we can no longer afford once decisions become important to people's lives. It's a necessity at all times and it needs space.
I agree that if it's related like these topics, that it has a place here. One thing that is on here often is the talk about housing density and zoning. I don't think that has a technical tie-in to entrepreneurship or hacking.
That said, I don't really mind as long as the conversation occurs with an open mind and people are bringing new ideas to the table and not just parroting the mainstream takes.
> difference between life and death for many people who happily steered clear of "politics" 5 years ago
> The world is going through shared turmoil right now
You seem to be implying that the political situation has deteriorated and become more violent. Is that so?
In 1968, several students were killed during protests against the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights movement sparked demonstrations and riots during which many people were killed (eg 34 at the Watts riots). The 1992 Los Angeles riots resulted in 63 deaths.
And that's only in the US. In China, you had TianAnMen in 1989. In Germany, you had the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhoff) terror until 1998 with scores of deaths. The Irish Troubles also lasted until 1998 and killed over 3000 people.
So, I'd say it is not worse now than, say, five decades ago. It could be that we have had one or two particularly peaceful decades, but I wonder how much bias there is in that assessment. How could one quantify it, or otherwise try to capture it objectively?
Perhaps not more violent, but there does seem to be more polarization, which is not a good path to be going down. Ezra Klein's 2020 book is an interesting look of the phenomenon in the US:
GP comment posits a deterioration over the last 5 to 10 years.
1. That deterioration might be imaginary, due to recency bias. One would need to examine it carefully.
2. That recent deterioration is most certainly embedded within a massive improvement over a longer horizon.
The point was that political discussion became more common on this board in the last five years due to this "deterioration." So whether things are better now than 60 years ago isn't relevant to that point.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
Adding willful seems to violate these. The first, maybe a stretch, as willful applies to the author and not the argument. But more the second as it does not assume good faith. I think the comment holds the same value without adding willful.
No, this was not my intended implication at all.
The point was that when PoC raise their voices for BLM, refugee & immigrant rights, or when trans folk rally and protest for trans rights and against transphobic laws, or when anti-vaxxers/maskers force governments to impose mandates and reinstate lockdowns during COVID spikes, or when rural car owners demand lower gas prices forcing nations to conduct business with a war-perpetrator like Russia, it directly affects the quality of life of people who probably don't consider themselves part of these movements -- often mildly disruptive, sometimes largely disruptive, sometimes net positive.
And the implication was that with the internet in general and social media in particular dictating the rhetoric and pace of these movements gaining traction, it happens at a scale and polarization in months that used to take generations.
Regardless, state sanctioned violence is still rampant in many parts of the world, though not on the scale of Tiananmen or post-colonial freedom struggles unless you count the war in Ukraine. Often these are countries that western media pays less close attention to, and is a case in point of politics many in the west can still conveniently ignore -- the never-ending violence in the Gaza strip, Palestinians being de-homed in Israel, continued ISIS activity across the subcontinent, Venezuelan riots and suppression, Chinese suppression of Uyghurs and Tibetans, the Indian farmer protest response and anti-Muslim crackdowns, Malaysia, Philippines, the list goes on...
Likewise the debate in the comments herein is a manifestation of politics. Is technology entrepreneurship and science better served by having a politics-free zone, like the Olympics? Or is society worse served by having a class of people and an industry operate as if politics is orthogonal to it, as if the whole nature of the enterprise isn't built upon a particular political ethos and system that sustains its current incarnation, possibly at the expense of other classes of people or society as a whole?
Is HN the Galt's Gulch of the social media world, where techies can withdraw from the rest of society because they can?
At the same time, not all political stories are on topic. If anyone wants to read about how we draw that line, there are past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
While politics often appeals to morality, I'd argue these are moral and social discussions.
Of course on some level it always was, "everything is political" etc, but a decade ago most participants saw tech as broadly neutral. What was the political valence of Etherpad or Foursquare?
Today, engineers are asked to implement things like the "inclusivity warnings" that just shipped in Google Docs. The scope of "content moderation" has expanded dramatically. Founders are often explicitly partisan in one direction or another.
And the new engagement goes in both directions. The five most valuable companies on earth are all West Coast tech cos now. Political actors of all types are watching and trying to harness or control tech to a much greater extent than last decade.
While it's quite probably that most participants _saw_ it as mostly-neutral, I would claim that was obviously a mis-conception. In 2012, the popularity of smartphones was already having significant cultural effects, effects on alienation and isolation vs interaction of people in public spaces, etc. And that's just one of innumerable examples. FOSS vs. commercial software - definitely a political question, already 40 years ago and even earlier. Energy production and conversion technology - lots of geopolitics depends on who needs how much fossil fuel energy. etc. etc. And when a tech issue has significant political ramifications, you also have interest-holders involved in promoting or trying to block it, making an effort to inculcate the public with certain ideological views on the issue etc.
Tech is a big part of the escalation. It was much harder and weirder to yell at strangers before social media existed.
I honestly don't know how we get back to normal. I hope we do because I prefer being able to have discussions not heated arguments about politics.
There are billions of people who do not want to "get back to normal".
The contention between those who support and preserve the status quo and those who want to evolve or overturn it is the essence of politics.
Agreed. And I am one of them. People are here thinking this is about "politics", but really it is about economics. And it is probably why they see more "politics" on Hacker News, because it is a VC organization.
There is tribalism because people are suffering. The fact that someone does not see these people in their day to day life conflicts with a reality that billions of others live with everyday. And the people who are starting to feel it more are an ever growing number of people who thought they were well off.
The idea that we should compartmentalize things is really a human malady, a disorder stemming from our discomfort when we see this truth. That somehow we can separate tech from politics from money is delusional.
You’re forgetting saudi aramco.
The true top five each created valuables businesses based on 0-to-1 products.
Aramco didn't create much, certainly nothing worth close to $2T. The Saudi autocrats just list their country's oil reserves (preexisting value, created by nobody) on this state-owned enterprise's balance sheet in order to flex on most-valuable lists.
Technology is political. Whether it's the nature of architecture (centralised Vs decentralised), or the nature of transparency (proprietary Vs FOSS).
It's all political, imagining that we can fully pretend it's not would be a challenge.
The key is to keep the debate civil, reasoned, rational, respectful.
If you squint hard enough, sure, you can apply the adjective you want to just about anything you want. That doesn’t mean that the adjective has no meaning.
I ran a cycling forum and thought it could be without politics, but cyclists died in road traffic incident in London that turned out to be predominantly female cyclists due to heavy goods vehicles, and over time I had to relent... it is policies that shape the city planning, the construction industry regulations (trucks with significant blind spots)... and that these deaths were preventable, people were right to be angry, and that a cycling forum couldn't exist without a political element.
I ran a music forum and thought it could be without politics, but music is art and art reflects the feelings of those on council estates and in poverty, with hard backgrounds, and addictions. They are shaped by their environment and through the art attempt to document and also shape those environments. Even for a mostly apolitical band a single song touched upon rape and opened the door to debates on rape culture and the low prosecution rate and the even lower reporting rate. A music forum that tried it's best to avoid politics couldn't exist without a political element.
And here on hacker news, that new app that is in the YC batch that allows someone to sofa surf... that's political but you just didn't know it at the time. AirBnB and so many other companies, apps, tools... have leveraged the gaps in local policies and law to fuel their margins and stock value. It is very difficult to say that even this site could exist without a political element when a lot of the technology and companies that have come about it impact so many people globally in ways that only political and legal tools can protect. I don't really believe this site can exist without a political element.
The only question (IMHO) is whether those discussions can be conducted civilly, with respect and openness, non-adversarially, and with empathy as much as possible.
No you get it! You know, in Buddhism, while progressing on the path, they say, first when you see mountains, they are just mountains. Then suddenly you see mountains and they are not mountains anymore. Then slowly you see mountains as mountains again.
Squinting! Yes good word, more squinting!
Hey Siri, define squinting: to look at someone or something with one or both eyes partly closed in an attempt to see more clearly or as a reaction to strong light.
Now I haven't read the announcement or looked into this feature myself so hopefully I'm misinformed, but the idea is so reasonable and in line with the sort of thing Google would attempt to do that it is easy to believe. They've already made active attempts to swing elections with their YouTube censorship programs; their actions around the Hunter Biden thing look terrible in hindsight. This is politics in a way that most other domains aren't. It is up there with newspapers and news media for having a political slant.
In fact, I could easily see one forum discussing the product's language policing and another one discussing its engineering. Yet a different forum might focus on its various successes and failures in gaining market share.
Context absolutely matters. And "some grey area" is really a massive grey area.
Suppose that story - hypothetically - is about an IDE that continuously logs developer activity potentially giving employers more control over workers, well, that's political. Because now that story isn't about the IDE itself, it's actually about worker rights.
Even if that same hypothetical story was really a blogpost by the makers of the IDE outlining the technical details behind such a feature... then it's still a story that fits in a wider debate regarding worker rights. One side will definitely argue that the makers are tone deaf for only providing a "technical solution" without considering it's wider impact.
> A story about the stand of the US government in the Ukranian war is political.
Well, in the same vain, a story got posted this week about SpaceX warding off a Russian attack against it's Starlink constellation over Ukraine. One could focus on the technical details of how that happened and argue that, as such, it's fitting to discuss this on this particular forum.
However, a strict "no politics" rule would be hard to enforce since the story fits into current affairs that affect public opinion regardless. Inevitably, people will expand the discussion by asking questions regarding the involvement of the U.S. in the war.
It's not just the stories that gets posted, but also the intent with which they are posted that matters, the kind of debate that posters try to elicit, and how other commenters try to bend the direction of the debate below different posts.
That's why moderation and curation are important and labor intensive. Voting comments/posts up/down doesn't improve quality of content towards an optimum level. Instead, it's a reflection of the emergent sentiment of the audience of HN, which isn't always based on reason or objective facts. Nor should it be. At the end of the day, every comment / post hides a complex human being raising their voice from their own particular bubble of perception. All one can do is acknowledge that reality and deal with it without falling into fallacies regarding absolute truths or maxims about how reality ideally ought to be.
How about "almost everything can be mapped onto a Bell curve" instead? So whereas almost everything can be remotely connected to something else if you look hard enough, there are outliers where the connection is more evident and other outliers where it get's really strained to find a connection. Politics is certainly like that.
But if the politics in everything is all that catches one's attention, then sure. But that doesn't seem all that healthy, and could be one of the reasons young people seem to struggle with more mental health issues nowadays: the demonizing of the other (party) is increasingly venturing into personality traits and identity, instead of focusing on questions of policy.
Only if you’re a politician. Hammers see nails.
As long as there are limited resources relative to demand, the distribution of those resources is politics.
It can be spending money in a household, sharing TV time with your siblings if you only have 1 TV, and it can be copyright and patent law, which gets into how the limited resource of a society’s adjudication system should be used, which can touch on using it for enforcing laws on banned plants, etc and etc.
Land use, public schools, clean air and water, and the most direct political subject of all: income/wealth distribution.
And since income/wealth gap has rapidly increased, far quicker than resources per person in the world has increased, there will be more conflict. Which manifests as politics (before physical violence).
The question is, how will we treat each other?
It stated in ~2015.
I used think politics in itself should be avoided, unless it is related to Tech. So the best place to start would be to flag any submission that has nothing to do with Tech.
We cant avoid politics that has to do with Tech though, App Store guidelines and regulation, Social Media and Internet, China and Russia usage of Tech.
That's everything then. Tech platforms have become the primary channels for the discussion of everything, particularly politics, which makes all political issues tech issues.
We got a mini version of this more recently in the Net Neutrality wars.
It’s funny how both of those stories turned out in the long run.
> The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power.
- Antonio Gramsci
Not making a decision is, in itself, a decision with consequences. Indifference is a powerful choice with real consequences to society, just like delaying an important decision can take it out of your hands etc. The side doesn't have to be red or blue, but anything is better than "who cares"
And this is why so much energy is spent convincing you that your vote doesn't matter or that both sides are the same, etc.
I say effectively because they are very much in favor of a particular political and economic system, but because that political and economic system is the status quo and, if anything, is getting further entrenched, they can effectively not worry about it.
It's not a coincidence that this same political and economic system has enabled the tech world to accumulate so much wealth and social power. It's not a coincidence that the HN readers are the upper caste within the tech world, not the assembly-line workers, the warehouse workers, the delivery workers upon, the restaurant workers, and the many other kinds of workers who work for a tech company or service tech workers, for minimum or close to minimum wage.
What I want to discuss and engage with on HN is usually very different (and way less political) compared to what I engage with in other social media. So you can't draw any conclusions about me based on my HN behavior alone.
It's sort of hinting at a false dichotomy here. You don't have to be partisan to be engaged. There are many nuanced positions and ideas. Perhaps the author lived in a different time or place that doesn't have two main parties acting the way they do today.
Indifferent people are not moderating influence. They easily end up enablers of whoever is the most aggressive one.
Are you suggesting arguing against indifference is "radical"?
Aren't you in your characterization labeling someone the Enemy?
> Aren't you in your characterization labeling someone the Enemy?
Those who promote this ideology are enemies of us all.
Edit: The discussion of politics is now the parroting of endorsed talking points. There is no unique or independent thought and it isn't interesting.
And, on the content, HN isn’t filled with indifferent people. But we need to have places for politics and places to avoid politics. Indifference is different from deference—deference to the context.
As far as hacker politics goes, it applies well to the intellectual sloth of technological determinism, which Veblem and McLuhan criticised in different ways, and Postman called the most abject form of surrender.
I assume that readers here do not fall into such ambivalence, since the very nature of a hacker is to believe in the ability to meaningfully create and change technology.
I consider it part of our mission to help others overcome the shrugging, cargo-cult acceptance of whatever tech falls into our laps and take the active path to designing and using technology toward a better future for humans. Inescapably, a part of holding values must be stopping some people from using tech in disagreeable ways. And since people are guaranteed to disagree on matters, technology is a new arena of politics and not something that can exist separately from it.
This includes tech-related politics.
Technology is a crucial development impacting society. Of course discussing tech is political. How could it not be?
What I don’t personally think is interesting is American politics. The sort of thing where there are two sides, or anything where anyone might write “liberal”. As a European, where we have multiple parties work together, and where many what Americans consider “liberal” is basically the ultra Christian Right wing, is sort weird and uninteresting. Not that I don’t think things like identity politics and what not aren’t important, but maybe not something to be discussed here on HN.
You accidentally signal to them republican or democrat group membership, and with it enemy or in-group status. The ill fitting political box you are then placed in colours all further interactions with that person and all your political opinions are then taken as read.
0therwise your definition makes everything political, thus is useless
I think you’re missing the point that everything is political. The definition isn’t useless, it’s just forcing people to think about the consequences of their actions rather than purely thinking about the technology they’re working on.
I’ve taken to trying to just immediately click “hide” on any article I see on the homepage that sounds like it might get anywhere near anything controversial - removing the temptation to engage unconstructively completely. And the same with comments to some extent - if there’s a culture-war trigger-phrase in a comment, just hide the tree and move on.
That’s getting harder though - I wouldn’t have expected an article about Netflix subscriber growth to end up with a bunch of top-level comments about “woke politics ruining tech”, for example. It’s often kind for hard to avoid even if you are trying.
And it’s not like “politics” as a subject could be dismissed either. The thing is that articles about Musk buying Twitter or Google making controversial auto-correct suggestions or whatever are inherently both tech and politics. I don’t know how you avoid that - but the atmosphere definitely makes me want to avoid participating all together.
Off-topic: partisan politics
Almost everything is political. For example, the very existence of large tech monopolies is political. What they do or don't do is political. There are plenty of things related to this we can talk about that are political, but the real problem is being partisan about it.
edit:
If you want to up/down vote in a non-partisan way, up vote comments as to whether they are interesting or likely to lead to interesting discussion rather than just because you agree with them. Reserve downvotes for comments that are uninteresting, diversionary, partisan, etc.
I often post articles that I personally disagree with, but which are interesting and I am interested in what the HN community might have to say about them.
I don't think this is true, take a look at the top posts a decade and so ago:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1325376000&dateRange=custom&...
A few examples:
- Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day (1716 points)
- A new approach to China (1145 points)
- GoDaddy supports SOPA, redditor proposes "Move your Domain Day" (1103 points)
- Enough Is Enough (1019 points)
So, it makes sense that politics come up more often because they now intersect more often with technology (or at least much more visibly) than they have previously. Unfortunately a lot of people don't engage constructively in conversations like that, ones where two different viewpoints may come down to core values that are taken as axiomatic. I think HN does a lot better than other venues when discussing these things but I also see a heck of a lot more comments flagged dead with awful, insulting and vile language that are every bit as bad as the worst you'd find anywhere on Reddit.
HN provides a way to escape that. The discussion is not always partisan; many people point out hypocrisy and greed of people who pretend to have pure motives. Those are facts if you follow the money, power structures and inaction on real issues that are obscured by beautiful words.
I wish this was still the case. Talking about politics used to be avoided here, and certainly engaging in reddit-tier partisan arguing was extremely rare. Now there are political posts almost every day that have comment sections full of mud slinging. I'm guilty of it too, even as recently as today, so I'm not taking a holier than thou position, but man those threads are just incredibly strong flamebait.
There has been a noticeable shift in the way HN engages with political topics over the last couple of years, and more recently in particular.