I've been flagging all posts I see related to politics. I understand politics and popular tech are now intertwined, but I still find it annoying to see it on a forum dedicated to hackers, startups, hobbyists, and makers.
More than annoying, this forum has repeatedly shown that it is incapable of holding a civil discussion about politics. Every thread about politics quickly descends into a flame war. After many, many examples I am quite convinced that politics should be a banned topic on HN because of the negative effect these threads have on the community.
I don’t love it myself, but I find this community to be like minded enough, and dissimilar enough to any I’ve ever encountered IRL. Due to that, I don’t mind seeing how other people here feel about certain things. We live in a rapidly changing political climate and at times I just need to know how other sane people feel about the situations. It might be US centric, for that I could see how it’s exhausting for outsiders, but this community skews that way so it makes sense.
For the most part, debating different opinions in this community still feels productive and I have not seen too many times where it’s completely devolved to indecency
I say that as a moderate/liberal Texan which tends to put me in the ultra far right compared to some of the more Bay Area/California liberal centric ideologies that I’ve seen dominate here
Flagging is supposed to be for rule breaking, not to be used as some sort of mega-downvote for things you really don't like. If you don't want to read an article, why not just use the "hide" feature or move along to the next row?
"About politics" is kind of vague. It's not like an article is either political or it's not. If you saw these headines at the top of HN, which of these would you consider "too political" and worthy of flagging?
- "Funding for NASA's next science mission in question"
- "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems"
- "State governors band together to propose new cyber-security rules"
- "UK government again takes aim at encryption"
- "List of IT systems DOGE staff members have access to"
Are all of these things just not-discussable here anymore, merely because they brush up against a government or politics?
That's correct. I use the tagphrase "political overlap" to post about this, so there's a trail of past explanations about how we handle this here (if anyone doesn't already know, and wants to):
>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
and
>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic
Going off these, I would say "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems" is clearly fine, and the others could be considered questionable to varying degrees. I think it's fair to say that a news update should not automatically be considered an interesting new phenomenon because almost by definition all TV news will have some new element to it, and that is expressly labeled as "probably off-topic."
