Comment by drewbug01
2 days ago
The reason for the flag is always the same: because they don’t want to talk about it here.
The real question is: why don’t people want to talk about it? I’ve found it typically falls into three camps:
One group flags these kinds of stories because they’re exhausted, and can’t stomach any more. I feel bad for this group, and I understand the impulse.
Another group flags because suppressing information about what the administration is up to aligns with their personal ideology. This is the more dangerous group, and I’m always sad to see people coming out in support of awful stuff like this.
The last group flags it because it annoys them, and they don’t want to engage with it. It makes them uncomfortable and they feel it doesn’t impact them. They point to the HN guidelines and say it’s not relevant. It is, they’re just lucky enough to have not been affected personally by anything yet.
I pity the last group, honestly.
There are obviously N groups but one you're missing might be the people that just don't think it's a topic that fits the purpose of this space, at least how it's stated in the guidelines.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I can't help but feel that stories like these fall under "off-topic".
How can a story about US visas be off topic when YC itself posts a visa AMA with their immigration lawyer several times a year?
> How can a story about US visas be off topic
It's extensively covered by mainstream media and it's unrelated to tech other than the few individuals that have a visa that's relevant here. Does this article really "gratify one's intellectual curiosity"?
1 reply →
You have to have some sort of cut off since anything can relevant to people in tech.
The story about the British Queen dying wasn’t flagged as off topic and that was exhaustively covered by media world wide
Possibly a fourth group of startup founders and investors that don't want H1B pipelines to dry up as a result of constant bad news.
> Possibly a fourth group of startup founders and investors that don't want H1B pipelines to dry up as a result of constant bad news.
Seems far fetched, if anything H1B are limited BECAUSE of the H1B cap/lottery system