Re:Why is Hacker News like that?
by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @10:02PM
(#49825292)
I seem to recall, at the time of the start of Trump's second term, some posts that were purely politics, and people flagging them as off topic, and you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics.
Now that you mention it, I remember the "no politics" week, and it's possible that I'm conflating the end of that experiment and "allowing more politics" and getting the time messed up. But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?
> But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?
Yes in the sense that we didn't change HN's standard or moderate differently. But of course there was a surge of that sort of content - this is what I mean by "macro trends" above.
> you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics
I don't think so! but if you can track down any post that sounded like that, it would be interesting to take a look.
That is inaccurate. The standard remained (and remains) the same as it had been long before then—ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and the focus of the site to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
[editing - bear with me...]