Comment by scythe

>For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?

I feel that you've highlighted a possible underlying cause of HN's present malaise, which is: many community members here are poorly connected on the Internet. HN is an open website, which means that it is very easy for someone who is new to the Internet to find and browse. If you've been commenting a lot in the recent political threads, I can make the following predictions: you've participated in online fora for less than ten years, and you don't pursue social connections much deeper than reddit user flair.

If you would like to take part in a lot of technical and political discussions regarding surveillance, you should consider joining a newsgroup or mailing list (if there still are any, I know politech and cypherpunks are dead) specifically devoted to this discussion. Usenet requires a modicum of effort (and maybe a subscription fee) to participate, which can help to limit the discussion to serious contribution by serious participants. You may also want to subscribe to and comment on blogs by people who know about these things, so you can get to know people and contribute to a discussion that, in order to be any good, must stretch on far longer than a single comment thread. There are communities devoted to this sort of discussion.

The content-link plus tree-style-comments format of HN is good for day-long free-form discussion on lighthearted issues of interest to technical people. It is not suited for deep, long-term discussion of complex political issues. HN can't be usefully political even if it wants to be, any more than HN can be used to design novel methods of quantum error correction. Some things just aren't suited for the HN style of discussion.