During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, I have to say I can recall a thread of people saying, "No, that doesn't make sense, you're trying to disprove a negative", etc.
tl;dr - My point here is that I think the baseline intelligence of Hacker News is higher than we might think it is just by observing the front page, and that there are actually a lot more savvy people gaming the front page who are just driven by a relative few who act as the passionate, vocal majority.
That's just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I like to think there's a lot of under the radar intellectual activity, and people are just being really opportunistic for karma or some such.
As for legal acumen, I agree completely - I don't have nearly as much as, for example, 'rayiner. But that's exactly why we have people with niche expertise or domain knowledge. It's a real problem when people get frenzied and decide they know Constitution without having read it.
I haven't been here as long, but I believe that we have sampling bias from the hugely outspoken minority who know it's trendy to be anti-state.
EDIT: I want to submit my experience about the site being gameable - it's true it's easy to get the top comment for news stories that are heavily politically loaded, but I have to say it's easy to karma farm even if you're not anarchist/cynical/conspiracy mongering. I do not try to game the forum to get high comments, but I can still personally attest to having some top comments in the high 40s during the NSA scandal while being incredibly vocal against the "popular opinion" that Google was directly aiding the government. I probably had the top comment on at least half of those stories, arguing against the tone of the story profusely. I don't have a sockpuppet ring, so those numbers of people who upvoted me are to the best of my knowledge genuine. They may not have been as vocal in their agreement with me as the detractors who replied to my comments, but they certainly exist.
I guess I just want to try to dispel pessimism. I don't think all is lost regarding the political climate of Hacker News :)
The parent comment says X, the one below says the opposite, and then someone says X again. Do people click and write mainly to get karma? Should posting also cost karma?
The longer you write the easier it is to say something that's not true and harder for people to follow it accurately.
(I know I'm guilty of this.)
But...I do agree with you. It becomes harder to sift through facts when a post is very long. I do it because I enjoy writing long prose on topics I'm interested in - I don't think it's particularly correlated with getting high karma. I've seen very high comments that consist of a little paragraph (albeit packed with technical information).
But I think a lot of people do just click and write for karma. As long as there is a karma system, this is somewhat unavoidable. I really wish we could do away with the entire karma system entirely, but your suggestion about posts "costing" karma sounds really neat, I'd definitely test that on a small forum...not sure how you'd deal with throwaways though, and how would new users accrue karma?
If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns.
Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 point headline about Snowden or the NSA. The coincidences piled up until it is impossible that the NSA story's popularity was not largely a political creation, and just barely might be a false flag operation to punish the intel community.
Likewise, I was downvoted to oblivion every time I pointed out that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news. My first awareness of the NSA was their Echelon spying efforts, where it was openly discussed that they wanted to vacuum up all the worlds' communications. The weakness of the DES cipher was widely recognized to be a NSA plot to make it easy to intercept domestic comms. The Clipper chip and key escrow programs were a naked domestic snooping plan. This was widely covered by the trade press, a fair bit by the mainstream media, exhaustively by Slashdot and Ars Technica, and obsessively by the Computer Underground Digest, the Hacker News Network, the Cipherpunks, Telecom Digest, and many others.
Hacker News has also started importing the Reddit Censorship ethos. Downvoting rings censor many politically correct or just unpopular comments, comments that in many cases are correct but counterintuitive. The endless September seems to have finally arrived at HN.
But it didn't before, as best I can tell. The switchover seemed to happen in 2013, but it wasn't Snowden's leaks that caused me to notice the change.
I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).
I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.
To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.
Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.
GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.
That's doubtful. http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/stevens.asp
I don't know if giving that much more power to older posters is necessarily the answer, although it might help reinforce the perception of the community maintaining a certain tone in discussion, if the same posters are more likely to be heard and heard more often. On the other hand, with that scenario, karma would actually mean something (though that just brings up the possibility of karma-farming posts.)
And you ignored the other half of my comment, about how the NSA story is not news. It is merely new to excitable young people who mistake unfamiliarity for exposé. If I can convice them to take the red pill, they will learn that parts of signals intelligence are profoundly more important than even the astroturf claims, and at the same time more mundane.
About the other stuff, I only recently realized that the IRS scandal, the US spy who was caught in Russia, and Benghazi have basically disappeared from the news, while the one thing that the White House has the least control over and is the most distanced from is the one that is now most talked about.
Another thing to think about is that when the IRS story broke, a lot of new agencies were calling it a "controlled or planned leak" meaning that the white house and IRS had coordinated on how and when to break the story, timing it with new info on Benghazi for information-overload, and finally Snowden was just a freebie, while I'm sure they're not happy about the facts coming to light, nothing internally will really change, they'll continue spying on us, they'll just be more careful who they allow to access the information.
With politics, there seems to be no such restraint.
Now it is just about too late. For the next 10-20 years, national infosec policy will be driven by the radicals' memory of their principled stand against the NSA "revelations". "Abuses" will be "curtailed" without regard for legitimate security needs.
The is no elsewhere to reserve this discussion for. If HN is credulous enough to believe staged CNN sound bites, there is no hope for other venues.