What services would the perfect government provide?

Re:What services would the perfect government provide? by rms on Monday August 20, 2007 @01:56AM (#44239)

I don't see the problem. We all have broad interests. Hackers do things other than hack. If a discussion doesn't interest you, don't participate. You say that politics will pollute the site but you give nothing to back this up. Certainly there is a big difference between day to day USA politics and questions about optimal governance. One is explicitly off-topic and the other isn't.

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Re:What services would the perfect government provide? by davidw on Monday August 20, 2007 @03:25AM (#44251)

> You say that politics will pollute the site but you give nothing to back this up.

reddit.com

The problem is that the average quality of the politics discussions so far is much lower than that about startups. It's not "hacker-worthy".

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Re:What services would the perfect government provide? by rms on Monday August 20, 2007 @05:12AM (#44263)

Of course the politics discussion is going to be lower quality than the startup discussion. We have practical experience with startups. That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to discuss things other than hacking and startups.

Social news has been around for two years. Giving one example doesn't mean a whole lot, especially when the community of reddit is fundamentally different from the community of news.ycombinator. The editors of reddit believe in non-intervention. The editors of news.yc believe in active and regular intervention, which means that news.yc won't turn into reddit.

The discussion in this thread isn't anywhere close to what you see on reddit. We have a problem when discussions start actually polluting the site. But they haven't yet, so I don't understand what the problem is.

We need to consider exactly what we don't want to allow on this site. See my new thread.

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