Comment by tptacek
9 years ago
Another intrinsic problem with politics on HN:
A lot of the best posts on HN are narrowly specialized, so that apart from maybe asking questions, most HN commenters can't contribute much (but benefit from reading!).
But political arguments are available to every member of the site, no matter how specialized the story might be.
So we get situations like Amazon announcing Route 53, and the thread being hijacked with comments about how Amazon handled Wikileaks, or a new paper on measuring and mitigating statistical bias in machine learning algorithms hijacked with comments about political correctness.
Politics often literally prevents us from discussing technical stories, by forcing us to wade through banal political detritus to get to the comments that have anything to do with the technical issues.
We also inevitably get technical threads being derailed by people complaining that the posted site blocks their ad-blockers, is behind a paywall or uses javascript, but for some reason those aren't considered as off-topic as tangential politics.
Those are in fact all off-topic, and get off-topic-detached by 'dang and 'sctb routinely!