Comment by haunter

3 days ago

Doesn’t mean anything when even one of the first rule is not enforced at all

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

7 comments

haunter

Reply
frm88  2 days ago

Politicisation has increased dramatically since the early 2000's in about every field imaginable, from intelligence analysis to technical inventions. The fact that we cannot have an electric car without the owner of the corporation expressing political opinions on twitter is a prime example of how there is politicisation creep in almost everything [0].

One particularly egregious example (to me) of this is the politicisation of science [1] by various factions like governments, advocacy groups etc. because if we lose the integrity of science bad things will happen.

All that to say, the line has blurred so much, I highly doubt you can separate these topics again. HN reflects that as much as any other site.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicisation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science

minimaxir  3 days ago

"Most" is not "All". Hacker News has always had an exception for extremely significant politics.

  • Karrot_Kream  2 days ago

    My bar for "extremely significant" is much higher than it appears to be here. Apparently most events in the US/Iran involvement is "extremely significant" if we judge the votes on this site to offer guidance on how this rule is interpreted.

    This forum was founded in 2007. The US was very much involved in Iraq and Afghanistan at that time. If the same bar for coverage was in place at the time, HN would have been flooded with US Military content the way it is now. So yeah, obviously the bar has moved lower for this particular matter and it's because the current community on the site wants it to. Likewise the "generated/AI-edited comments" guideline seems equally squishy to me. And despite a rule about being "curmudgeonly", I'm pretty sure 80% of this site's content is curmudgeonly rants.

    IMO at this scale dang, tomhow, and other mods need to be much stricter. When HN was 1/10 the size a shaming comment would often set a poster in place. Now they just sneer back in another comment and post 20 other guideline breaking things.

  • haunter  3 days ago

    Well it’s up to interpretation

    “most”

    “extremely significant”

    What’s extremely significant for someone is an offtopic for someone else and vice versa