Comment by itsangaris
7 days ago
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
Only if you twist the definition of politics so much it becomes a pretzel, but sure.
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What about AI slop causing the Iranian school-children strike ? US military confirmed that they are using AI to identify targets and provide coordinates. Will you ban that because its "politics" ?
bingo
[dead]
From the guidelines:
What to Submit 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. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
It's not just these articles. Having any differing opinions on basically anything now.
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
This is IMHO the most unfortunate thing about how HN has changed in the last 10 years or so. People downvote now as a form of disagreement, rather than using it as a form of collective moderation. The net result is that the popular opinions rise, while unpopular opinions tend to fall or die out.
On the plus side, it does make for an interesting barely scientific way to poll for popularity of a topic on HN. Absolutely not worth it IMHO, but it is at least a bit interesting.
FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on “showdead” in your profile.
IMHO showdead often surfaces a lot of interesting info. It's one of my favorite things about HN, and I love and appreciate that HN has that feature.
One example: If you want to see how bad the LLM slop commenting is, showdead is very helpful. It's not as bad as some people think, but it's certainly non-zero. On the plus side, those comments do seem to get identified and flagged/killed pretty quickly.
News not connected to technology or VC doesn't belong on HN.
is that an opinion or a consistently enforced policy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
I wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
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this article is about the west bank
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I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
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Nothing exists in total isolation, you have to draw lines anyway.