All this political talk has poisoned Hacker News for me. It has been a constant onslaught. Instead of a focus on building cool stuff, Hacker News is becoming a location for internet activism.

Waaait a minute.. Now I get it. These sly HN activists are forcing you to go into political threads, read them and participate in the discussion and you don't have time left for reading about cool stuff. Damn these poisonous activists!

It's almost like, people come here, see the front-page at a point in time, and use that to make a snap judgment about the character and tone of the site. So if random new user A comes along and the front-page is all Erlang, Javascript, Groovy, "Foo acquired Bar for $123MM" and "Google IO tickets go on sale today" and "New advance in 3D printing", etc., they will reach a certain conclusion which will - in my theory - influence their behavior and manner from then on. OTOH, if the front-page is about Condelezza Rice, minimum-wage controversy, environmental issues, etc., that same user comes in with a whole different mindset.

Or maybe more to the point, those different front-pages attract a different category of people who stick around and become regulars. In either case, you get "scope drift".

Honestly, what this reminds me of is when Slashdot took a pronounced turn towards a more openly political "flavor" and developed a much stronger leftist bias and became what people were calling "SlashKos".

Can't you folks that want to talk politics just go somewhere else? There are tons of sites on the internet for that kind of discussion. Don't wreck one of the few that's good for tech and startups.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530

Don't get me wrong... the NSA story is absolutely important and the overall issue is something I'm passionate about. My question now (and should have been before) is "is this a good topic for HN"?

Edit: you piqued my curiosity, so I went back through my submissions for the past year or so. And yes, I did submit a few Snowden/NSA stories (I count around 10-12 depending on what you include as "Snowden/NSA related"), and some of those I would look back and say "Nah, not worthy". But by the same token, I think most people who bothered to go through my history[1] would say that a small percentage of my submission are political or clearly off-topic.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mindcrime

Heck, the only Knuth related thing to hit Hacker News front page in months is only based on some political plea he sent to Condoleezza Rice.

It's way too easy to argue about politics on the net without any real effect--too fun, too easy, and too useless.

I do, and I like lobste.rs, but it's a little bit of a catch-22. Lobste.rs is more "ideologically pure" because the userbase is smaller, but that smaller userbase also means there is a lot less discussion going on at any given time. But I think we're clearly starting to see aspects of the "Eternal September" effect here, due to the user growth over the years. So what can ya do? sigh

It's way to easy to argue about politics on the net without any real effect--too fun, too easy, and too useless.

So very true. :-(

An article on some sort of political theory, on some philosophy of governance, etc. can lead to useful discussion. Having more systems articles on politics is something I wouldn't mind seeing on HN at all.

But, most articles posted (I believe--haven't run a report on it) do not seem to lend themselves to that sort of thoughtful analysis.

No, but it's pretty much bound to wind up that way. The effort to put forth a well-considered, nuanced, reasoned point of view is an order of magnitude more than that required for a snarky one-liner about "dude, like, the US is, like, totally not a democracy and stuff". Which means that the latter out-competes the former.