Comment by tptacek
13 years ago
Respectfully, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. The people who are saying that HN "isn't for politics" aren't making that up; it's right there in the site guidelines.
The cognitive dissonance you have here comes from three things, I think:
* The moderators on HN take an extremely light touch with moderation; most of the stories that get "dead'd" on HN are killed by user flags, not directly by moderators. I think this is even more the case now that the "flamewar detector" is in place; stories that might have earned a moderator intervention 3 years ago are now left to be auto-buried by the flamewar detector. Buried != dead.
* The "no politics" guideline on HN takes a back seat to the politics of the people who run HN. All signs point to Paul Graham being on your side of the Snowden and Manning cases; for instance, if you follow him on Twitter, he has posted supportive links. Similarly, Graham chimed in on a gun control thread in (IIRC) favor of gun control.
* Many of the NSA stories that have appeared in the last few weeks have also been highly technical. There's a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that gets played to try to connect the dots from any political story to hacking and startups, such that Ron Paul supporters have ready arguments for why their stories are germane to HN, but those stories tend to get flagged off anyways. Here, we're talking in large part about the internal retention policies of Google, and it's hard to make an argument that those stories aren't at least somewhat germane to HN.
I've given up on the idea of flagging political NSA stories, but I would have a big problem with anyone drawing the conclusion that HN now encourages political stories. It doesn't, and it shouldn't, and it won't if it expects to maintain a civil community. Political discussions on HN spark enmity; people who could discuss eloquently and at length the details of programming languages or linguistics or literature instead follow each other around from threat to thread downvoting out of spite.
I agree with your sentiment for the most part, except to nit-pick and say that the guidelines prohibit "Most stories about politics," but, like you said and what I think I stated pretty well in my post is that this topic is particularly important to the HN crowd. In fact, I would even go so far as to say the whole thing is NOT political, insofar as the whole democrats-vs-republicans dichotomy is irrelevant to the discussion.
I disagree. I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting the site guidelines.
This: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
It does not say HN isn't for any politics. It says "most stories about politics" but does not say all or any. It has a further clause which I would argue absolutely pertains to the relatively new phenomenon of PRISM and its cousin programs.
Clearly Snowden / PRISM / etc and other stories like those about Aaron Schwartz fit in perfectly with Hacker News.
All that said without implying that HN should be all about politics. I think there is room on HN for specific political issues that are of interest to hackers.
I think you and I said the same thing with different words (though I'm not sure how "perfect" the fit on these topics is; I'd rather there was 1/10th the amount of NSA coverage, for instance, and even less about Snowden himself).
It's "Swartz", by the way.
I mostly agree and I think your last paragraph is the best thermometer: the "political" discussions involving the NSA scandals mostly have not sparked enmity, and since most people agree on the political stance towards these, the discussion can healthily lean towards the implications of it for information freedom and technology and how we can fight these advances to our privacy through our tech and internet savvy. So I deem (most) of the posts a good thing, except where it gets repetitive with similar stories in frontpage spots across days or even at the same time, and have not once thought about flagging one.
Ehh, I wouldn't go that far. We mostly agree on these stories political, but some of us don't agree "enough". There has definitely been enmity on some of the NSA threads.
I read a lot of political commentary on the web, from all sides. Most of it consists of long arguments about why party A is good, and/or why party B is bad. At times these articles can be spun as personality pieces, analysis, or commentary on current events. You'll start reading a story on pig farming and suddenly end up inside a "Candidate X!" commercial.
I'm not seeing that here. Yes, I am seeing quite a bit of annoying hero worship, pouring over each little detail of Snowden's journey as it creeps along. But I'm not seeing calls to perform some kind of political action. (Admittedly there was a petition drive. But AFAIK it was non-partisan) Nor am I seeing emotional content structured to make one party look good and the other bad.
I want to be respectful as well, because nobody wants another reddit. Startups and news of interest to hackers is why I'm here. I can get politics anywhere. If I wanted a political rally, I'd go elsewhere.
Having said that, we're in a bit of an odd spot with these latest stories. We're like a bunch of guys who make ceremonial swords, gushing over the details of how to construct a hilt, how to hone a blade, and so forth. People are now bringing us stories of these swords being used to behead people. Many of us are adamantly refusing to admit any connection between what we do and what is going on in the world.
For a long time, I was happy enough with the bit about "That's all politics. We don't do that." But at some point, you have to realize these stories are about us -- about other hackers. Snowden, for whatever else he is, is a hacker. Wouldn't surprise me if he didn't spend a bit of time here. As was Aaron Swartz. These aren't stories about what kind of politics we should choose for ourselves, these are stories about how the technology we create and the jobs we have are actively affecting (and in many cases doing great harm to) other people in the world.
So I'm not so sure the lines are as clear cut as some would like. For instance, out of the current front page, I see one Snowden-only post, one post about Google handing over chat records, one post about Chomsky prattling on about something or another, and 2-3 posts about how secrecy works in general in the U.S. That doesn't look like "Six Degrees of Separation" That looks like stuff hackers would be interested in. But, of course, others may disagree.
More in-depth argument here: http://freedom-or-safety.com/blog/techologists-role-in-oppre...
A thousand different "hackers", a thousand different political issues that impact the lives of those "hackers". Pretty soon, we're discussing Ron Paul again, making fake users with the usernames of people who we don't agree with, following people from thread to thread downvoting them.