zlacker

>>nicola+(OP)
Question for the mods:

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.

>>awb+r8
I spent a few hours a while back writing up a reusable answer for this question, with lots of links from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.)

If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN, here are some links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

or you can look at these past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

p.s. In case anyone's worried, no, we're not letting (or going to let) HN be taken over by politics. The proportions are stable and carefully regulated, although there is fluctuation, as with any stochastic process.

>>dang+Ks
Hacker News's biggest problem is the chilling effect. The long-timers know that if you write too well and people start inquiring about a "follow" feature with you in mind, it's only a matter of time before you get banned because you're "too young" (well, he isn't anymore) to have that kind of "success" and less articulate people feel bad about themselves.

On politics, Hacker News itself isn't right-wing, at least most of its users aren't, but the fact that anything more than a standard deviation to the left gets you hammered through that passive aggressive rank-altering and "slowban" has really put a damper on the ability for people to indulge their intellectual curiosities. Simply asking whether we, who "hack" in service to corporate capitalism, are doing the right thing, is enough to get you in trouble.

There are some absolute top-notch people posting here, but there are far too many corporate shills, and the good ones know they have to be careful.

>>sveno+iP
"...there are far too many corporate shills, the good ones know they have to be careful."

Huh. Today I learned I'm not one of the good ones.

>>0x4d46+OP
You only have 258 karma. You don't have to worry yet. When you get into the mid-thousands, that's when things get dicey.

Tech is like card counting. If you actually figure the game out, you get punished and flushed out. If you keep gambling and losing and don't know why (because you're bad at what you're trying to do) there will be a seat at the table until everything is squeezed out of you.

>>sveno+pQ
I have 51000 karma. I am not playing any game. I just enjoy posting here, and try to make interesting comments. I far prefer it to Reddit and Slashdot, and rarely bother with them anymore.

Probably all thanks to dang!

>>Walter+Ma1
Similar karma, also post as I think. Often disagree with viewpoints expressed, including many of those of WalterBright's.

But I agree with him here that there's been no general penalty observed.

The only things I've noticed are a couple of people reaching out on account of my being on the leaderboard (no, I can't get your posts approved, yes, I will report your trying to do so), and having corresponded with the mod team for years (occasionally viewpoint issues, mostly boring submission stuff such as titles, disambiguated URLs, and occasional spam), what I think is a fairly good mutual understanding. Not always agreement, but general respect. I'll make my case or argument, and almost always accept the moderation response. I've had numerous submissions entered into the 2nd chance pool.

Overall calibre of discussion for an open and general-interest website is excellent. Occasional visiting expertise is an added plus.

My own submissions sometimes succeed, are occasionally flagged, and mostly just languish in the "new" page.