Think about what it means to the HN culture to have a subject that normally would have been flagged out of existence as overtly political suddenly be featured front and center
It means that a bunch of people who once thought they were somehow above or apart from politics find that they are not, and that the things that happen in the world constitute news of real interest to hackers. That's growth.
It's also misleading to talk about this as an issue of ideological purity. People talk about purity when the politics of the public figure in question are not extreme enough. The problem is that she helped start a war that killed rather a lot of people, none of whom are now able to lend their voices to the discussion, and those who wish to remember those people are obliged to speak on their behalf. You don't mind her politics, and that's cool. But no one's forcing me to pay Dropbox anything. So I won't anymore.
> The HN community has always held strong beliefs about political issues, but what did we do about it?
The problem is that "the HN community" doesn't have unified beliefs about nearly anything. There are people who are violently for and against: higher taxes, lower taxes, affirmative action, race-neutrality, abortion choice, life, fracking, nuclear power, wind power, birds, etc. If we declared that we couldn't work together despite differing views we'd quickly find that we're each an island. There is no single "hacker news" political view. We are comprised of atheists, baptists, catholics, jews, muslims, sikhs, janes, buddhists, and nearly every other group you can think of. Some are rich, poor, and in the middle. Old young and retired. You are free to use your money however you want, but it is not the "HN community" view.
> "the HN community" doesn't have unified beliefs about nearly anything
We don't need unanimity. We don't have to agree on every issue.
But we do have incredible power, because we're the ones who know how to build things and make them work. Those who would do evil depend on us to do our part.
I won't participate. I will deploy my talents and money against wars of choice, the police state and institutional theft.
We may not all agree, but the HN community is disproportionately interested in these issues, and has the ability to do something about them.
Then we'll democratically argue and fight about it, and people will cast votes for the news they want to see, which will determine what the general "mood" of the site is.
Its the bane and blessing of all social groups. As they get larger, people get exposed to / interact with lots of viewpoints that might not have originally been part of the core. To some level this is good, as it broadens horizons and enhances discussion. At the extreme, it all becomes bland, vaguely funny photos of animals (mostly cats).
Its why community generated sub-forums / sub-reddits are kind of genius / kind of crap, as they let folks go off and sub-fracture as far as they want until the discussion matches whatever their internal worldview is. Of course, then nothing challenges their internal worldview.
True arguments and debate on the internet are rather rare. Its generally a curbstomp in a single direction towards the predominant political opinion of the specific website.
For example, you've got Huffington Post vs Dredge Report. If you've ever visited the "conservative side" of the internet, you'd recognize it as totally night-and-day compared to the side that us (typically) liberal technocrats view.
HN really isn't the place for political discussions. It's even in the guidlines[1].
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon
OK, yeah, they're fun in a way; and I've made the mistake of participating in a few myself (largely NSA stuff). But the thing is, there are plenty of other forums for discussing politics. There's no real reason for discussing politics here unless it has a specifically technical aspect to it.
Personally, I'd like to see HN get back to a focus on technology and business, and the intersection of the two. If the front-page were nothing but stories about Erlang, D, Javascript, acquisition announcements, new tech announcements, and "Show HN: Rate my Startup" posts, that would be a Good Thing, IMO.
All this political talk has poisoned Hacker News for me. It has been a constant onslaught. Instead of a focus on building cool stuff, Hacker News is becoming a location for internet activism.
Oh no, now you can build cool stuff and be an internet activist on HN.
Waaait a minute.. Now I get it. These sly HN activists are forcing you to go into political threads, read them and participate in the discussion and you don't have time left for reading about cool stuff. Damn these poisonous activists!
To be fair, you have a point. But, IMO, there actually is something almost "poisonous" in a sort of insidious way, about having an influx of political articles. It seems to contribute to a slow - but perceptible - overall drift in the tone/spirit of the site and the community.
It's almost like, people come here, see the front-page at a point in time, and use that to make a snap judgment about the character and tone of the site. So if random new user A comes along and the front-page is all Erlang, Javascript, Groovy, "Foo acquired Bar for $123MM" and "Google IO tickets go on sale today" and "New advance in 3D printing", etc., they will reach a certain conclusion which will - in my theory - influence their behavior and manner from then on. OTOH, if the front-page is about Condelezza Rice, minimum-wage controversy, environmental issues, etc., that same user comes in with a whole different mindset.
Or maybe more to the point, those different front-pages attract a different category of people who stick around and become regulars. In either case, you get "scope drift".
Honestly, what this reminds me of is when Slashdot took a pronounced turn towards a more openly political "flavor" and developed a much stronger leftist bias and became what people were calling "SlashKos".
What we want to say is "the front page is a zero-sum game". Every political article forces out an article on hacking and startups, and attracts the kind of people to the site who want to talk politics, not startups.
Can't you folks that want to talk politics just go somewhere else? There are tons of sites on the internet for that kind of discussion. Don't wreck one of the few that's good for tech and startups.
I felt the same way about the constant barrage of NSA threads last summer, and I can't help recalling that you've submitted a good number of such stories yourself. It's a bit hard to take your complaints about scope creep seriously under such circumstances; if those submissions were relevant, then surely so is this one on the basis of Rice's empowerment of the NSA during her tenure as National Security Adviser.
I have mixed feelings about the NSA stories. I think some of them were somewhat relevant, but maybe they weren't all relevant. Or, maybe none of them were. Maybe I thought they were at the time, and now I think I was wrong in hindsight. Truth be told, I don't remember exactly what I did and didn't submit, versus what I simply commented on. I will allow that I let myself get drawn into that discussion pretty deeply at times, and now I doubt that was a wise thing to do, for exactly this reason.
Don't get me wrong... the NSA story is absolutely important and the overall issue is something I'm passionate about. My question now (and should have been before) is "is this a good topic for HN"?
Edit: you piqued my curiosity, so I went back through my submissions for the past year or so. And yes, I did submit a few Snowden/NSA stories (I count around 10-12 depending on what you include as "Snowden/NSA related"), and some of those I would look back and say "Nah, not worthy". But by the same token, I think most people who bothered to go through my history[1] would say that a small percentage of my submission are political or clearly off-topic.
Were you able to read all the other stuff that was posted on HN today(at least 4 pages deep)? If yes, then sure, your experience on HN was "degraded" by these stories. I doubt that, though.
I do, and I like lobste.rs, but it's a little bit of a catch-22. Lobste.rs is more "ideologically pure" because the userbase is smaller, but that smaller userbase also means there is a lot less discussion going on at any given time. But I think we're clearly starting to see aspects of the "Eternal September" effect here, due to the user growth over the years. So what can ya do? sigh
It's way to easy to argue about politics on the net without any real effect--too fun, too easy, and too useless.
So, some of the problem--a good part, really--is that political discussion need not be furious debate and talking past each other.
An article on some sort of political theory, on some philosophy of governance, etc. can lead to useful discussion. Having more systems articles on politics is something I wouldn't mind seeing on HN at all.
But, most articles posted (I believe--haven't run a report on it) do not seem to lend themselves to that sort of thoughtful analysis.
> is that political discussion need not be furious debate and talking past each other.
No, but it's pretty much bound to wind up that way. The effort to put forth a well-considered, nuanced, reasoned point of view is an order of magnitude more than that required for a snarky one-liner about "dude, like, the US is, like, totally not a democracy and stuff". Which means that the latter out-competes the former.
The voting system should be at least a partial feedback loop against that effect, but it's obviously not perfect, especially if people view it as "agree/disagree" rather than "quality/not quality". I get the sense that reddit has historically been the former whereas HN was mostly the latter.
It's actually the opposite, historically rediquette was to upvote quality and not downvote just because you disagree. Where as HN policy is to downvote things you disagree with. The difference is just that reddit grew faster and had a broader focus. Without careful moderation HN will grow (both in users and topic types submitted) and will suffer from eternal september as well.
And Brendan Eich gave $1000 to an organization people don't approve of. A guy made a joke at a convention about dongles and got fired. A whole lot of Sci-Fi authors were prevented from publishing at Tor because they identify themselves as politically conservative.
This particular pattern has been growing over the last decade or two. The politics in question are growing more extreme and the required level of political correctness demanded is also getting more extreme. One exception does not disprove the pattern.
I won't disagree with you - more and more, people wear their politics on their sleeves and have their ears plugged to any view to which they don't agree. This isn't restricted to leftists going after conservatives, nor conservatives going after leftists. It's everywhere.
I think it's one of the side-effects of living in a society where so much information is available. In the past, we could know the politics of people in our immediate surroundings, but we also had to take our relationship into account. We might be acquainted with politics on a larger scale, but the people behind it were much more distant.
Now, we can be exposed to any and every political viewpoint out there, frequently whether we were looking for it or not. The kinds of politics we can be exposed to aren't just local and we're surrounded by a sea of strangers, all clamoring for our attention.
The natural reaction is to filter out the things we don't agree with and with so much political noise, we have to do it vehemently, just adding more noise. Or we can take another route, which is just to let someone else do the thinking for us, and there are people all too willing to step into that role.
Even though I lean left, I don't think Eich was the wrong choice for CEO. His religious beliefs didn't really have much to do with the job. I could probably work for the guy and disagree with him all the same, but it wouldn't matter - that would not be the nature of our work together.
Dr. Rice is another matter entirely. Her entire legacy under the Bush administration disgusts me. I would gladly chauffeur her to the doors of the World Court for her involvement in what I thoroughly believe are war crimes. Furthermore, her beliefs on privacy and security being subservient to the needs of the state are almost equally as disgusting to me.
I really hope Dropbox will reconsider adding her. I'm sure they can find someone else to fill their needs to work with foreign governments who is far less engaged with the state apparatus destroying our personal liberties.
This situation has nothing to do with technology. It's not some passive "I won't listen to this guy because he disagrees with me" stance. People are going out of their way to make sure people who have political opinions they disagree with can't work. All three of my examples show this. And there are many, many more examples. Academia and public education are two, just off the top of my head.
It started with conservative christians. Now that the most undesirable element is gone, the purges have expanded to anybody who isn't as extreme as the loudest member. As time goes on, the required politics have gotten more and more extreme. There's no evidence of this trend slowing down or stopping.
It means that a bunch of people who once thought they were somehow above or apart from politics find that they are not, and that the things that happen in the world constitute news of real interest to hackers. That's growth.
Unless the views that "unite" them are repulsive. If Rice's viewpoints were the polar opposite and we were all jumping on the bandwagon to boycott dropbox because they didn't support torture enough, would that be "growth"?
Of course not.
You don't like Rice's views on this issue, and want to convince people-- including the HN community-- that she was wrong on this issue, and that her views on other issues (warantless wiretaps, etc.) are dangerous for a business like dropbox. Moreover, you don't want to support dropbox now that Rice is a board member. Fine. But to claim that just because we all (or at least most of us) disagree with her views, that in and of itself means that we're "growing" as a community is genuinely dangerous-- because at some point, most of us are going to be wrong about something, and arguing on ideological merit is going to be the only thing that can "save" us. Simply saying that "we all agree, and that's growth" will just ensure that we're all wrong forever.
It means that a bunch of people who once thought they were somehow above or apart from politics find that they are not, and that the things that happen in the world constitute news of real interest to hackers. That's growth.
It's also misleading to talk about this as an issue of ideological purity. People talk about purity when the politics of the public figure in question are not extreme enough. The problem is that she helped start a war that killed rather a lot of people, none of whom are now able to lend their voices to the discussion, and those who wish to remember those people are obliged to speak on their behalf. You don't mind her politics, and that's cool. But no one's forcing me to pay Dropbox anything. So I won't anymore.