zlacker

Not wanting politics on HN, need not imply support of the status quo, or even a lack of interest in politics. It can simply be a different belief about the purpose of online forums.

I read about politics all day long in many different places. My belief that HN should be relatively free of such stories is not because I believe I can detach myself from politics, but because I believe topic based forums are more valuable and useful than “anything goes” forums.

>>apprec+(OP)
Allowing politics on HN doesn't mean discussing politics in every thread. If it's a story about someone who improved performance of their system by using Rust then sure there's no need to bring anything political. But threads about Nvidia, Tesla, encryption, internet blackouts, social media, startups investments, etc, all warrants political discourse.

>>stackb+Ds
The use of Rust is already political!

>>stackb+Ds
I wish that were true, but in my experience so far, it isn’t.

Not only does politics and general stories crowd out everything else over time on other sites, there are HN submitters who seem to be trying to accelerate this.

During the war, when HN was getting Israel-Palestine stories constantly, I started looking at the submission history of some of the submitters, and some of them were just pushing these types of stories every day for months and months.

So yes, I think allowing politics will eventually mean being dominated by politics and general interest.

>>apprec+SV
Globalizing the intifada means pushing an agenda everywhere, including on HN, on posts where it is relevant and on posts where some obscure or conspiratorial connection can be made.

If HN is going to allow accusations to be slung against groups of people it has to allow others to respond, and that sets off endless debate amongst people who will not be changing their minds on the matter but will repeat the same argument on the next post.

>>alight+Q81
Every Israel Palestine story was like that. Just hundreds of back & forth exchanges of fire that could be copy pasted from the last story, along with copious complaints that HN was censoring them even though the story was on the front page. Just a complete waste of time, and very dishonest & unserious people.