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.
When I tried posting a technology angle to this - "Ask HN: Do we care about our captured systems?" - to point out that it's the design of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. that's allowing propaganda and ideology to easily get to the top, while easily suppressing the truth - and where on HN it's easy to suppress perfectly valid, well-written, articulate comments to prevent the majority from seeing ideas that may actually be the truth.
It's a problem.
Edit to add: Thanks for all the fish, enjoy your lazy dopamine hit.
Presumably every single member of this community is also a member of one or more other communities, some of which have an overt intention to be "more political". Given that, no one is being denied an outlet to share their views, give input, discuss, influence, vote, etc. when it comes to political events. So what is it so particularly important that this community be "political" (I'll just hand wave around exactly what we mean by "political" for now, for the sake of discussion)?
Personally I come here (mainly) to hear about / discuss obscure programming libraries, new programming languages, startup strategies, new scientific breakthroughs, etc. I get enough of "general politics" and "world news" elsewhere... I'd really rather not see it here as well. But, that's just me.
My opinion: because here you can find arguably the highest concentration of powerful and knowledgeable minds, and this is the sort of thing that the world needs working on these hard problems.
I find the concern over serious issues that is often expressed here to be rather disingenuous, as people love to engage in bitch sessions about the bad behavior of the members of their outgroups, but the notion that we should consider rising above that level of behavior and think about trying to find actual solutions is somehow ~inappropriate, as this is a place only for "curious conversation" (except for the exceptions to that rule, of course).
I know HN and dang aren't going to change, they're conservative let's say, and Twitter and Reddit aren't going to change either - and so I am working towards my own solution that I think will allow for adequate moderation and discussion management. I've had 5 years of severe chronic pain, only recently had a surgery that reduced my remaining pain by 25%+ and the specialist was finally able to diagnose 2 other nerve compression syndromes I have, and after those surgeries I believe I'll be able to go full speed ahead with my plans. I'll probably only do a "Show HN" in a year from now, but if you're interested in joining it earlier/once very basic MVP is launched and giving feedback I'd appreciate it; matt@engn.com