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.
I remember a single Covid scientific paper turning into a 500 post political discussion.
Or tech giants and censorship and privacy. How does one separate tech from politics in this sense?
Maybe society has become more political and it's making it's way to link aggregator sites?
I distinctly remember reading articles about major world events in the beginning as well so it's not entirely new, but it has grown a little.
I don't think it's a problem, and this is coming from a centrist that typically doesn't care for political discussion on any medium.
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.
There is the additional issue that tech has crept into everything and the internet is where modern state-sponsored disinformation and misinformation campaigns are being fought.
Tech is maturing and a consequence of that process is that politics develops. It's not necessarily a bad thing as the cynics say.
And so you're correct - politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions.
The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.
In the decade-plus I've been around, there has always been a small but steady stream of nontech political content. Despite the policy. My perception is that hasn't increased or decreased, though it does have periodic surges (say, US election season). I personally think it adds to the appeal of HN - in moderation, of course. Political conversations here are generally better informed and more polite than they are in other places, and I tend to learn more than I would by solely reading formal news sources.
However, I am saddened with the diminishing engagement with actual hard tech stories (not tech opinion pieces) that reach the front page. Lately, it seems like links to stories about people doing cool software or hardware things with complete write-ups can barely muster enough upvotes to stay on the front page very long, if at all. The comments occasionally yield some fun further discussions, but not like they did 5+ years ago on HN. It seems the interests of the average HN upvoter (who ultimately shapes what we see on the front page) are shifting more toward the political and controversy type pieces.
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.
Good luck with that. One person’s apolitical feel good story is a nefarious propaganda piece in another person’s eyes.
(Interpreting “about politics” to also encompass “political”.)
I don't come here to have political discussion, I want to find out what's interesting in tech, not to engage in flame wars (except the vim/emacs kind, that I fight).
There was a change a while back that made the front page less volatile, around that time you started seeing stories merged more often, and traditional news creeping in a bit more. I think it is sort of like a lightning rod to keep the rest of the front page pure. Before that stories would show up and get flagged constantly, and the front page would change multiple times an hour.
One thing that I have noticed is that 2020 was a bit of an eternal september for hn. Many times I see people posting things that don't really seem to work with the hn style, but they have a fairly high karma count and an account that was created in or after 2020. I think maybe a bunch of people suddenly working from home felt safe to use the internet without a boss over their shoulder, and needed a bit of community they were missing from not going in the office. This influx has watered down the ability of hn to aggressively flag/downvote politics, dumb jokes, etc.
Though, all in all it's still mostly the same it has been in the last 10 years or so.
Both these ostensibly tech-related stories have strong political undercurrents.
As one of the people who thinks that more (too much more) political content has crept in here, I will say that I agree with you on the above. That is, I agree that it is becoming harder (albeit not impossible!) to disambiguate what is "tech" versus what is "politics" when it comes to things like the discussions around, eg "social media's affect on society" and etc.
And to be fair, talking about tech has always tended to lead to a certain amount of political discussion, especially in terms of things like encryption policy, DRM, etc. So even I wouldn't try to say we should have zero political content here. But it does seem like it's grown a bit more prevalent than I'd prefer.
In the old days, politics and world news were not as intertwined with technology as they are today.
And even in those rare political posts I find, the discourse is very different from other places. I think that boils down to the golden rule of comments: "thoughtful and substantive". I've noticed the culture of HN is to downvote any comment that does not adhere to this rule, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. Even in comments I've posted about China that ended with a sentence about how I disliked the leader got knocked for being counterproductive.
At the end of the day, you can have the most frought and divisive thread here and the comments are going to all be far more civil and thoughful than on Reddit or Facebook because even thought everyone might be up in arms, all of them are going "well I'll show them! types long thoughtful comment that addresses everyone's grievances"
And more broadly speaking, what are the roles of technology in an extremely political sensitive climate. Should Telegram do A or B, and what about Whatsapp, Facebook moderation, Apple App Store disallow certain group, is that a curation problem or a political problem? Fake News, Yellow Journalism, none of these are "new". But now they happen on Tech rather than traditional media, is that a tech problem or a political problem? We just dont have any concrete answer.
There are other Geopolitics issues. I mean if WW3 did start surely that is important enough for HN submission. Or China decide to invade Taiwan, so to speak. Surely the threat of TSMC Foundry supply is important enough for submission even if the article itself doesn't mention TSMC.
So while the rule is not black and white as zero politics discussions. I think the moderation is fairly consistent. Still dont know how Dang manages it. To the point I sometimes worry about him leaving YC, and HN may never be the same again.
I hadn't connected that to a pandemic-induced demand increase, but that could well be true.
As for submissions (rather than comments), it does feel like HN has shifted more towards broader industry and politics news, rather than just tech and programming. I'm okay with this, in fact HN has displaced Reddit for me thanks to the much higher standard of discourse, although I do worry a bit about marginalizing the crunchy tech content for those who come here for that.
Puts a lot of pressure on one or two hacker news mods to be the purveyors of neutrality for the entire media landscape if that's what's expected.
But now some of the hot topics in tech are also hot topics in politics-- privacy and mass surveillance, platform censorship, vaccinations/medicine(which were a little political, became super political), affirmitive action in the tech industry, etc...
I don't know if we'll ever go back to where we were as tech plays a larger and larger role. And if you think we're intertwined now, just wait until the metaverse!
The world, technology & online culture have changed so much over these years. I don't think submission/curation standards could have remained consistent throughout.
Google, FB and internet companies becoming $>trn companies happened in that time period. Crime, sports & politics have become intertwined with the stuff that was on topic back in the day. FB or Twitter's policies are a major factor in elections worldwide. That's inevitably political. Cybersecurity, infosecurity and even (silly as it sounds) meme-wars are playing a big role in the current eastern european affair.
TV news came to us, moreso than we went to it...I think.
I feel that, if this is the reasoning it's becoming more prevalent, then it should be reeled in a bit. Politically charged topics seem to rarely bring in good-faith discussion I have come to expect from HN.
In light of this pretty natural scope creep, I agree with the above point that the moderation feels pretty consistent, and am, for one, extremely appreciative of Dang's work.
A key problem is that these days a lot of techie/nerdy/geeky/hackery news has a potential political angle. Advances in cryptography, drones, medical matters, and many other things, increasingly touch on politics because they touch the wider world not just techie people and often do so in decisive ways.
Take face recognition and similar tech: all cool as the tech on its own, but there are scary implications that we see forming already so even if the original post is a purely technical & politics free look at a new development the comment threads resulting from it often won't be.
Conversely, political issues affect technical ones: free speech or the lack there of both has an impact on the use of current tech and drives ideas for future systems, so while seen as a political matter by some (a philosophical matter or both by others) there are valid interesting technical discussions that can be had relating to changes in those issues around the globe.
> In the old days
I think some of that is that in the old days the connection wasn't as “real” because the tech being discussed was not widely used, or was in fact still only theoretical. Now the tech is out there, and many are using it including many who have no specific technical bent because these things are becoming part of normal life. Once tech touches real life, it touches the sticky subjective messy aspects of real life: politics & morality. Also even when things are still theoretical, the developments are more open to the general public for better or worse because access to information (and, of course, misinformation) continues to become increasingly ubiquitous.
Take cryptocurrency as an example. A decade or so ago it was just a techie plaything really. People were talking about what wider impacts it could have, but it wasn't having them yet and it wasn't clear that it actually would in the end. It is easy to be dispassionate and unpolitical at that point. Now though some of those impacts have happened and continue to happen, and can affect lives in significant ways, so new stories on the subject can't help but attract some political discussion as well as going over the technical developments, or in fact are news stories about developments that are happening because of (to aid or circumvent) political concerns.
For another collection of subject matter that has seen a massive change in public and political interest, you only have to look at the last couple of years development in certain fields of biology.
There is little moderation here or elsewhere can do about this significant set of changes & movements. The mods and the community can nudge things in a certain direction, but they can't fully control them.
History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.
A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.
By definition, as the site becomes more popular, more obscure technologies/projects will be pushed to the edges, especially when it comes to the front page.
Having a more robust search and tagging system would help with that, it’s analogous to how Reddit had to move to a vast number of sub-Reddit‘s once it got popular.
But it’s pretty obvious on “hard tech stories” that few people have the knowledge to meaningfully contribute.
As I get older, the saying “it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt” resonates more and more.
I think the guidelines might be right, in that this hasn't really seemed to change in the ~10 years I've been here.
I don't disagree. And if somebody started a forum dedicated to "the social implications of technology" I'd probably join and participate (some). But TBH, when I come to HN, I'm more interested in "Check out this cool new Erlang library" or "Why Go should or should not have generics", or "1001 Neat Regex Tricks" and such-like, than the more political stuff.
Maybe, for me, that's a reaction to the amount of time I spend on politics in the rest of my life. I'm politically active enough to the point that I've run for public office before, and spend a not small amount of time discussing public policy in other forums. So I guess I would prefer to find HN a bit of a refuge from that stuff. Of course I understand that other people have a different experience and will therefore feel differently about the "correct" amount of politics on HN.
I think one issue with approach by up/down voters is that sometimes the "thoughtful and substantive" thing to say is inherently ideological, and I notice that being explicitly ideological (for example, making it clear that you regard a long term trend in the economy as serving the interests of a particular group of people) is viewed as counterproductive.
This mirrors a dilemma out in the "real world" where people find it hard to bring up substantive political ideas because just doing that is viewed as divisive and antagonistic. Unfortunately, sometimes (maybe even often) this is actually what is required to have "thoughtful and substantive" discussions.
-posts about nostalgia, how the 'old' world wide web was better, retro computing, reliving the past, etc.
-quanta magazine math articles, because the concepts are too difficult or abstract for anyone to debate or discuss them
-posts about privacy, big tech bashing (gets tired, repetitive after while)
I would like to see fewer of those kind of posts. I would like to see more:
-personal blog posts
-posts about economics findings (instead of just the 'hard' sciences)
It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc).
EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
Nah. Yesterday's political topic (there's almost always at least one per day) was about the WWII Tokyo firebombing.
I think the real answer is even simpler: I think dang (or whoever is on duty that day) asks themselves "is this topic going to lead to an interesting conversation, or will it devolve into a shitshow?" Shitshows generally get canned, no matter the subject. It's benign dictatorship at work.
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.
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.
HN, to me (and I am long in the tooth on this site), is about that which is fascinating to the mind, with a culture of good, meaningful content which is relevant to said minds...
Politics permeate our lives - and especially moreso now. (FB was never a thought re politics when it was born, but it has so much mindshare now that its inexcusable to not think of FB as a political force (even though its literally a revolving door with government security apparatai)
Also, @Dang is a fucking bad-ass... He is probably the best mod I have ever encountered...
He has on multiple occasions put me in my place, gently, as I tend to post heavy handed comments when drunk and we have gone at it and agreed about when we both posted drunken rage comments...
Yet @Dang ALWAYS replies to my emails and helps me when I ask for it...
I've been on HN/YC for a long time -- @Dang has never failed being just an awesome mod of this forum.
---
The culture of HN posting is golden, thus far, and this forum is something to be protected. @Dang needs a mod protege to take the reigns when he decides to go live his fuck-you money on an island.
My opinion is that as a topic belongs to "History" rather than politics. But I understand why people might disagree. I mean even my reply above is getting a lot of upvoted and downvoted at the moment.
But I do agree with the interesting conversation and shitshow being the simpler answer.
So what is "tech" now, if we take the definition to be "new technology not yet widely adopted by everyone's grandmother"? Maybe some of the blockchain stuff? Nuclear fusion? Reinforcement learning based AI agents? Self-driving cars? Hyperloop? Homomorphic encryption? Nerve implants? Robots capable of moving in unpredictable environments (like Boston Dynamics has)? Artificial meat? Space ships?
Shame really as it it was the best automoderated system I've ever seen.
I have keyboard shortcuts to bring up the most common ones, but otherwise I just go find them in HN Search.
Without fail :) Thanks @dang!
Please note that I'm making no such claim. I would just prefer to discuss the intersection of "real-world moral and, hence, political concerns" and "hacker interests" either A. less often and/or B. somewhere else.
Growing up in the era of peak Slashdot it was hard not to view politics through the lens of technology. There were politicians trying to take away my games, and restrict my speech, and put me in jail for downloading MP3s. Fighting those battles through the years has definitely formed my political views.
I think I have heard Tesla to be described as a tech company, once or twice. And with Bosch, my favourite power tool company, the same. I mean I am not a english speaker, but it would be really news to me, that "tech company" is defined as "brand new tech".
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.
Huh. Today I learned I'm not one of the good ones.
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.
I consider myself a tradesman who, naively or not time will tell, leverages a rarified skill set at market rate trying to deliever value to clients as best as I can.
Millenial enough to have no expectations of a charmed future, despite earning an annual income in the top decile, but not jaded enough to put a price tag on my soul, principles nor well-being.
See: https://hn.algolia.com/help
It's also accessible as a DDG bang, !hn
I also make heavy use of search. Often searching for dang's comments ;-)
Yes! No story makes it to the front page unless enough people upvote it on the "new" page. Thus, upvoting a new a story gives you much more editorial influence over the contents of the front page than upvoting a story that has already made it there. (And it takes fewer people to flag away an off-topic story while it's still new.)
Another perspective: By browsing the front page, you're looking at stories that other HN readers find interesting. By reading the "new" page, you have the ability to promote stories that you think are interesting.
In my experience it’s a pretty fair community and I’ve been downvoted many times.
Wouldn't this dynamic that you describe from your perspective exist in every industry?
Technology is used as political tools/weapons to drive and manufacture consent, through promoting hate and creating divisiveness - and through captured mainstream media channels, and online platforms; this couldn't be any more obvious with Trudeau's behaviours and observing the mainstream landscape of what the majority of Canadians are seeing.
Politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions.
The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.
In the card counting example, the game isn’t blackjack, the game is the house always wins. If you’re card counting and losing money, no one cares.
I’ve been reasonably successful in tech and don’t know of any games besides the free market.
And you only have 1 karma, so you're not qualified to say what you said in your previous post. Of course, my point is that I know how much karma you have, as much as you know how much karma any other person has, which is...you don't. And I've been here long enough to know that your original comment is getting downvoted, because it's largely full of false statements. Sure, you can cherry pick a few examples here and there, as you could on any site, but to say that is is HN's "biggest problem" is demonstrably false.
And by interesting - anything good hackers would find interesting.
It's a purposely high bar to filter out almost all mainstream news and even most tech news, and definitely most politics, which tends to satisfy emotional curiosity at the expense of intellect.
Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. These stories tend to brute-force their way in.
I'm REALLY glad I don't remember my username from my high school years.
The discussion of moderation policies and topics in posting usually derive from a shared understanding of a forum as a group of people, rather than a trajectory where current community opinions in turn, create the future community.
There is also the origins of Hacker News as Startup News, which immediately creates a covariance constraint between seniority and topic. The only way this dynamism can be managed is having temporal aspects (e.g., boundaries, limits on accelerationism toward specific topics), included in moderating policies.
FYI, clicking a username tells you have much karma someone else has.
For example, you have 4,258 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stronglikedan
Probably all thanks to dang!
As an example, the karma system at Reddit looks fine on paper relative to #1, but #2 is what created the phenomenon of meandering threads full of single phrase bad puns. The users are converging on a local maximum gain of esteem via upvotes, per unit of effort as measured by post length.
You're not wrong, I suspect....but as always, I am fascinated by how Dang and most people here seem to have utterly no curiosity about why the big brains at HN News re unable to engage in conversation about ~politics without it melting down into chaos like you'd find on most any other forum.
We often have these "serious" discussions about the dangers of climate change, fake news, etc, how it's super duper important that humanity gets its shit together, but is humans being able to communicate with each other in a skillful manner about difficult topics not plausibly a prerequisite for accomplishing these things that we talk about humanity "must" do? And if we not only can't do it, but refuse to even consider discussing the matter, then what shall become of the world?
I have been sternly warned about this message before, which I believe illustrates the validity of my point.
More evidence that dang is a superhuman form of life.
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.
Because you had frequent access to these resources/links/texts as a part of your job, I believe they live in your brain's RAM.
Keep up the good work @dang!
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
Karma is useless.
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.
That also occasionally seems to unsettle some readers. I think on balance it improves the site. All the more so when people respond or learn things.
(I've certainly learned from being challenged on my own comments, and make my own fair share of errors.)
For example, I could make a burner and appear to have 0 karma, but still have however much I've got on this account - much like sveno appears to have done.
I'm not quite sure what people "are", but that there is some sort of a fundamental (and I think unrealized problem) seems unmistakable to me. And I agree that they can't change on their own, but I don't believe that change cannot be coerced - at least, it is highly speculative.
> so I am working towards my own solution that I think will allow for adequate moderation and discussion management.
I am very interested, as I have been working on the same thing (but only conceptually so far), I will send you an email.
Slashdot was also a heavily BOFH type of site...
If you broke from the narrative, you were massively attacked...
That said, I was a very early user in /. - so much so that some of the prominent users I hired as linux tech consultants prior to LinuxCare... (long story and ego-s begone)
/. waned in my regular internet consumption though...