In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc.
Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways?
P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.
As in, it exists now. All of it. Already in the three letter agencies and social networks, you know or can extrapolate what everyone's opinion and views and compliance and "danger" to the regime.
Right now.
All it takes is a strongman from the D or R side to turn the key. So the political stakes are being reflected in the current capabilities of authoritarian large scale information technology for tracking.
Your web3 crypto blockchain will not help, they will own all the entry/exit points, and use of crypto will mark you as noncompliant and destined for the gulag.
I remember back when Carnivore was dismissed as conspiracy talk and I mostly agreed. And then came Snowden, and I remember the revelation of "wow I wasn't nearly paranoid enough".
Right now I will be gulag'd if the wrong party turns the key. Even if I don't make another political comment anywhere on the internet, I have decades of easily breadcrumbed data hoovered up that will lead straight to labor camps.
The fragile state of our government means that the existing authoritarian abilities of the NSA/CIA/etc are a far bigger existential threat to me than nuclear weapons, COVID, war, and maybe even on par with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes.
An alternate theory: they have cooperatively turned that key together, although I wouldn't expect everyone is in on it, or that "the key" is something in particular, other than a "general methodology" of how politics is performed, in the theatrical sense of the word.