The issue, of course, is that literally anything can be "political", and moreover by trying to actively avoid political discussions you sort of tacitly endorse the status quo.
It's a tough line to draw, and I'd be lying if I said where I knew where to draw it; HN is a fun forum specifically because the moderation is generally very good. They're not perfect but they do try and shut things down before they devolve into flame wars and personal insults. If there weren't aggressive modding, HN would devolve into 4chan or 8chan, and it wouldn't be appealing to me after the age of ~17.
But now that the status quo of Western countries had begun rapidly shifting into something completely different, the other side of that initial ruling is starting to bear fruit. I really think that at this point they should revisit this policy - not to abandon moderation, but make amends that try to distance this place from the current political establishment. What was yesterday's implicit favoring of the boring consensus is now a defined position that's supportive of whatever the current powers do. But, being more cynical, given how close HN is to Y Combinator, I'm not sure if that option is on the table.
You're correct that we like to avoid flamewars, but not correct to say "anything involving politics". We don't try to (or want to) avoid politics altogether—a certain number of threads with political overlap have always been part of the mix here*. For (reams of) past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
What we want to avoid is HN being taken over by politics altogether, and thereby turning into an entirely different site. We want HN to adhere to its mandate, which is to optimize for intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). That certainly includes some political discussion, but (a) not beyond a certain threshold, and (b) not every kind of political story or article. (For example, opinion pieces are usually less of a fit than stories which contain significant new information, and so on.)
Unfortunately, this way of doing things inevitably generates conflict. For politically passionate users, that "not beyond a certain threshold" bit is far too little—especially in turbulent times, as now. Apart from that, there's no agreement on which particular stories deserve to be on the frontpage, and even if there were such agreement, there's still no way of making sure that the most deserving stories get the spots (>>42787306 ).
Everyone has the experience of being frustrated when a story that they care about gets flagged or otherwise falls in rank. When feelings are running hot, people jump to the conclusion that we're secretly on the opposite political side, or trying to suppress discussion on a particular topic. That's not the case at all—it's all explicable by the principles that we've been repeating for years—but that none of that changes how it feels.
Then there are the users who feel like HN has gotten too political and is a shadow of its former self—this also has always been with us: >>17014869 .
Double unfortunately, I don't know of a fix for any of these binds, because all of them derive from the fundamentals of what HN is - e.g. a single frontpage with only so many slots (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(* Or to put it differently, note the words most and probably in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, as pg once said: >>4922426 .)
Hacker News is my favorite forum in no small part because this forum's users are, on average, a lot more educated than the average internet user. If not formally, a lot of the people here still do value learning and education as a whole. Those environments aren't organic on the internet, and it is largely due to efforts from folks like you to cultivate this audience and I do not want to dismiss that.
The concern, then, is that when the educated people can't discuss (and let's be honest, argue about) politics, then the only people who will be discussing politics will be the uneducated people. Politics is inherently contentious and we can't make progress (however you want to define it) without occasionally hurting feelings.
Now, a perfectly valid counter to this is "we're not stopping you from discussing contentious political issues, you're welcome to discuss it on one of the many other forums on the internet, just not here". That's fair enough, but it can come off as a little arbitrary, because virtually anything can be deemed "political"; I could argue that disagreements with type systems or the ISO standard of C or complaining about SQLite could be construed as "politically motivated".
I do realize that a line has to be drawn, though. The last thing I want is for the forum to devolve into 8chan or The Drudge Report or something, so while I don't completely agree at where you draw the line, I do understand why it is drawn.
If not, they're wrong for this site; more than wrong, corrosive. The stories themselves aren't bad (I have a lot of strong political beliefs too), but they're incompatible with the mode of discussion we have here: an unsiloed single front page and a large common pool of commenters.
(For the record: I don't believe there's a productive conversation to be had about ICE in Minnesota and wouldn't care to argue with anyone defending their actions. All the more reason not to nurture threads about it here.)
PS: I'm a longstanding "too-much-politics-on-HN" person, and even I'm a little annoyed that Jonathan Rauch's piece won't work here, if only so I can annoyingly noodle on the varying definitions of fascism. But flags are the right call here.
I think this is a poor litmus test, because there are plenty of stories on HN where the majority perspective is going to be either agreement or disagreement. For example, zero day exploits, leaks, anything related to Tesla circa 7-8 years ago etc. The notion that every conversation needs to have multiple perspectives is a common fallacy; I think we can agree that things like companies ignoring security holes is bad for example and someone saying 'actually, it's good' isn't actually adding anything productive.
> If not, they're wrong for this site; more than wrong, corrosive. The stories themselves aren't bad (I have a lot of strong political beliefs too), but they're incompatible with the mode of discussion we have here: an unsiloed single front page and a large common pool of commenters.
That ship sailed long ago with stuff like the Google Manifesto or companies like Palantir. People rightfully point out ycombinators (and by extension, HNs) connection to the current political environment which means people here, especially long standing users, will find themselves more and more agitated.
For me at least, these kind of stories are increasingly unavoidable because they aren't just things I read on the internet, they're directly my life. Schools have gone into lockdown here in Seattle when ICE activity flares up, stores I've gone to have needed to prepare and think long and hard about what to do when ICE knocks at the door. Naturally this means people are going to gravitate towards stories here that are directly related to their life, and when those stories get squashed people start to notice the disconnect. People might go on HN to avoid these stories, but I literally cannot avoid my life.
This would disqualify more than half of AI/LLM/<insert_tech_person> stories. This seems like a cope out. It is our inability as tech people to embrace the discomfort that is not rational and engage with it.
When I see a submission like the current one, I get the impression just from the title that the OP doesn't believe it.
I completely agree. That's why ultimately I abandoned the mainstream stuff (outside of YouTube. Yay monopoly) for discussion and go to Tildes for a lot of political talk. But Tildes is small by design and will have some blind spots.
I feel denying a quality article like this (or rather, upholding the minority's rule of denying) cracks into the idea that these policies work to keep HN high quality. Especially when what's on the front page right now is "I ported typescript to rust in a month with Claude!". These don't feel quality driven.
Funny because I'm probably very radical about ICE and I can still find subtleties on how to reform this. I've never been "Defund the police", quite the opposite. I believe LEOs should have standing, qualities, and training that makes them stand by their emergency peers. Truly the best of the best. Getting that badge should be a similar thrill to being accepted into a top college. They should have years of schooling before truly starting to gain their title.
Getting into a firefighting isn't easy, so why should an LEO see of as a career as a backup for failing to graduate high school? That's where all this falls apart. And now the standards barely get these ICE goons a month of "training". That needs to change.
But with current times, that's not a topic I can discuss on X nor Bluesky. That makes it all the more frustrating that HN plugs its ears on such subtlety instead.
I've long argued for a 'other' category as one overflow method or a homepage that is generic and subject specific pages for those that only want LLM news or Apple. I'm sure we could agree on a 10 level 'top' set with 'All' the default. That's one step closer to Reddit of course, but with the growth that HN has seen over the years you can't continue to pretend that the 'small town' measures still apply to this big city. A lot of this really is just about scale and you need to adapt to scale.
In that we are practicing the very doublethink we criticize in the society.
Is a pretty good comment, but it got flagged, there is a degree of unfairness here.
Although generally I think the un-nuanced AI hype/doom articles are not nearly as damaging as the flood of one-shot LLM projects being presented under "Show HN" with apparently none of the framing text (HN post, project README, responses to feedback) being human-written.
Having a tepidness when it comes to the dozens of slop articles on some trivial Ai blogs contradicts this mission to encourage curiosity and encourage a quality discussion. It feels outright contradictory and feeds into this sentiment that "anything tech is fine, nothing political is". Having flaggers do the work and promoting it as "community vote" is a convinent smokescreen, even though we all know flagging is based on a super minority of the community.
I know it feels knee-jerk, but I had this sentiment for a few years now as AI rose, and it of course hit a fever pitch in 2025. I think seeing a Tesla earnings call flagged because it wasn't stellar earnings really made me go from quiet apathy to being more vocal on the phenomenon. The actions (which I disagree on) simply do not match the words behind it (which I overall agree with).
I think it's noteworthy that we couldn't even keep a metadiscussion of this topic completely civil. This shouldn't surprise anyone. "Don't bring up religion or politics"; it's a rule of etiquette (and probably the most common bit of advice in the "Respect" section of every page on WikiVoyage). Why do we think we're exempt?
It's very difficult to talk about, because it's important and people have strongly held beliefs. Respect that, and the purpose of this site.
This is a perfect example of imagining or assuming our (or the community's) motivations or allegiances then criticising us for what you imagine or assume.
Tesla is far more commonly criticised than praised on HN these days. The moderators have no allegiance or care for Tesla, its reputation or its stock price.
If a ”Tesla earnings call” story was flagged, it would be for the same reason that almost all earnings call or stock price stories are flagged on HN; they usually don't qualify as great topics for curious conversation.