id":43111620,"user":"dang","time":1740031491,"time_ago":"a year ago","type":"comment","content":"

In this case I think the answer is probably yes, it's worth it. This thread turned out to be better than the median for political threads these days, which of course is a low bar. (I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43103830 is the opposite of what we want here).

HN is split between users who passionately want more political discussion and users who don't want HN to be overrun with politics (or flamewars). The former are more vocal but the latter are more numerous. (How do I know that? Because if it weren't the case, i.e. if the majority of HN wanted all these political threads on the front page, the pressure to do this would be far greater than it is, intense though it has been.)

The community is always split between readers who feel like "all stories on $Topic are being suppressed, this site is censored!" and readers who feel like "Hacker News is overrun with $Topic! This site should change its name to $Topic News!". How to balance out these conflicting vectors is an interesting optimization problem. I say interesting because the obvious solutions don't work. For example, some people feel like the moderators should just declare politics off-topic on HN—but that would actually politicize the site even more (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637).

Fortunately we worked out a strategy that has held up well over the years. Here are a couple recent posts that cover it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614703

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

... and there's lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"url":"item?id=43111620"}

Comment by dang