Glad to see some people sticking up for each other in these times especially.
Obviously warehouse work isn't glamorous and they are under a lot of pressure and there's nothing wrong with increased scrutiny on how they are treated, but it's also getting exhausting when people act like Amazon FC workers are treated like slaves.
It was a fantastic job relative to my other options. I got paid 2x minimum wage and lots of overtime. The job rocked compared to the retail jobs that were my other option.
It's pretty easy to shit on a job like that, and the pay, when you're making well into 6 figures and have a comfy office job with free snacks.
People aren’t shitting on the jobs themselves or the people doing them. They don’t like how Amazon, the company, is treating these workers and the HQ employees acting in solidarity with them.
Some political overlap is inevitable [1], but political battle will soon take the site over if we allow it to, so we don't allow it to. The reference to fire in the word 'flamewar' is not by accident. These things consume and destroy an internet forum the way that fire does.
It isn't that the issues you're posting about aren't important. On the contrary, they're more important than most of what gets discussed here, like someone's basketball hoop side project, for example, currently on the front page [2].
The issue is the kind of site Hacker News is trying to be. We're trying to be a site for intellectual curiosity [3]. That means a place where smaller, more obscure, more delicate topics get a chance to flourish. It's not possible to be both that and a forum where people bash their enemies about current affairs.
If you want further explanation about how we handle this on HN and why, I've written about it extensively—see [1] and [4]. In the meantime, you're contributing (unintentionally, I realize) to destroying this place for its intended purpose, and we need you to stop doing that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
p.s. I flagged your comment for a different reason: the first sentence breaks the site guideline against name-calling: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Other of your recent comments have been devolving into the flamewar style also. That tends to be what happens when people use the site primarily to fight political battles.
Intellectual curiosity depends on how repetitive a topic is. The more repetitive it is, the less curious—curiosity withers under repetition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
When there's a major ongoing topic (MOT), HN gets flooded with many follow-up submissions about that overall story. The test we apply in such cases is to ask whether a submission contains significant new information (SNI): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
When a follow-up story doesn't contain significant new information, it falls on the repetitive side and tends to produce repetitive, generic discussions. Those are worse for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Worse, repetitive and generic discussions tend to devolve into flamewars. It's as if the mind resorts to conflict to amuse itself when there isn't any material for curiosity to play with: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The key thing is whether the comments in such a thread are about interesting new information contained in the new article, or whether they could be copy/pasted from any other recent thread about the topic. HN thrives on diffs: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Basically the question is: where's the SNI?
All: if any reasoning here is wrong or unclear, have a look at the above links. Then if there's still some question that hasn't been answered, I'd love to know what it is. These principles have built up over many years of operating Hacker News. The same situations and questions come up repeatedly; you'll notice that as we've posted explanations over the years, the answers have slowly been converging. That's I link so often to past explanations: in addition to giving more information, it lets readers see how the answers have developed and why they are the way they are.
The question of how to treat politics on HN is a hard puzzle. It has constraints that make a solution nearly impossible. Worse, without a solution, the site will destroy itself. My answer here (plus the links) is our best attempt at a solution. If anyone thinks they have a better solution, I'd love to hear what it is—but please familiarize yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just leave the threads alone", I've answered many times already why that won't work.
p.s. If anyone doubts that the current topic is a MOT, I pasted a dozen links to major recent threads here: >>22902685 . Look through them and you'll find plenty of generic discussion.
It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that the businesses we rely on exploit workers and abuse them. It is far more comfortable to "stay asleep" and preoccupy the mind with quirky intellectual diversions and fascinating little rabbit holes. In these times of economic crises, these sorts of pro-worker articles and sentiments increase dramatically. I support the author of this article despite the comforting detractors who would rather rationalize their treatment. The prevailing argument in this discussion is that the warehouse workers are ungrateful and too critical of their corporate masters, and this I find frankly to be disgusting.
HN is either a site for intellectual curiosity or a site for political battle. It can't be both, for the same reason that you can't have a tank battle in a flower garden or a museum.