The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.
I'm not saying HN should allow ALL political discussion, but when technological issues inevitably and undeniably involve politics, either by influencing or being influenced, it seems a little cowardly that the general attitude of HN is "just don't discuss it" when the it in that case is core to the issue at hand, even if it happens to be political.
HN generally bans explicitly political opinion pieces, articles with overt political statements and articles primarily covering current political affairs (e.g. articles about something a US politician said). But even what is or isn't "political" in this sense is again down to the unstated biases of the moderators (e.g. what if the US politician said something about a well-known tech company).
A lot of articles that make the cut tend to be overtly about economics, but those are still extremely political. Universal basic income is political, climate change is political, how companies treat their employees is political, the "sharing economy" is political.
HN isn't free of politics, HN is centrist (with a neo-liberal bias, i.e. anti-regulation, pro-market). And centrism isn't an ideology, it's merely a compromise relative to wherever the current Overton window is.
Saying you don't want to talk about politics riles people up because in order to think of something you talk about as "non-political" requires you to be considerably aloof and far removed from the real-world impacts.
And for completeness sake: yes, even saying "when a company makes an economical decision that negatively impacts people that's not political" is political because it presupposes a laissez-faire capitalist worldview where the Friedman doctrine is unquestioned.
(Hopefully we don't need to talk about why any pretenses of a "meritocracy" or "only hiring the best" is political as these specters should have been cast out of most tech forums at this point)
This is absolutely not true. The best postings on hacker news are cool technical stuff that doesn't have an ounce of political.
And yes, there are plenty of articles with a political lean but they are really the least interesting ones here because you can read those anywhere else.
I'd much rather read about the guy who built his own video card than what (non-technical) thing Uber is doing this week.
To elaborate:
* To get the obvious one out of the way: it's something you need sufficient free time, money and knowledge in order to even do, so the author likely comes from a certain amount of privilege which colors his experience.
* Building a video card is in itself only possible due to the existence of open standards and free access to the relevant information, which is absolutely political.
* The act in itself is to a certain degree anti-consumerist because it's likely driven by a desire to understand rather than merely use the technology.
* Building a video card that actually works will likely require some reverse engineering and working around proprietary restrictions, which may enter DMCA territory. So it's willfully doing something legally questionable if not downright illegal, i.e. protesting the laws in question, which is absolutely political.
Everything is political. If you don't see the politics it's only because you agree with them and think they're a no-brainer.
You may see a cool hobby project but try to explain the project to a non-technical person and you might find that you're carrying a lot of preconceived notions of what the world is like, how it functions and what is acceptable or not. That's all politics.
If everything is political then the word political has no meaning.
The word "political" doesn't have no meaning, unless you take it to be understood as purely binary (i.e. "there are politics in this or there are not") in which case it's indeed a useless qualifier because, as I explained, there are always politics in it if there are humans involved. So yes, "x is political" is a useless statement because it is practically tautological in most situations where it is uttered -- but the same is true for "the Earth isn't flat", yet that's a perfectly sensible thing to say when dealing with Flat Earthers, just as "everything is political" is sensible to say when someone claims it very much isn't.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
EDIT: It's also important to understand the distinction between "x has no meaning" and "x is no useful distinguishing quality". "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do, including what humans write, especially when they write about other humans. That's meaningful. But the qualification of something humans do as "political" is indeed useless just as qualifying water as "wet"[0] is generally also useless, because if those qualities are always present for everything in that category (i.e. all water is "wet", all human communication is "political") there's nothing the presence of the quality distinguishes any of those things from (of course water is "wet", hence why we don't talk about "wet water" and just talk about "water" instead, with the implicit understanding that because it is water, it is also wet).
[0]: Using the colloquial definition of "wetness" here. There are other definitions according to which e.g. soapy water is "wetter" than pure water but that's not generally what a layperson means when they say something is wet (i.e. is covered or soaked in water).
That's an interesting take since I refuted your points. You simply added a bunch of potential political concepts to something that wasn't political and then claimed it was.
> You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
> "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do
If it applies to everything that humans do then there is no "involves politics" or "expresses politics". A human taking a shit isn't expressing politics no matter how hard the struggle is -- so I've just refuted that obviously over-broad point.