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I Quit Hacker News

(mattmaroon.com)
261 points cwan | 1 comments | 23 Nov 10 17:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.464s | source
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pg ◴[23 Nov 10 18:50 UTC] No.1934880[source]▶
The TSA stories are certainly fluff in the sense of being easy to upvote, even if the underlying principles are important. Ironically, so are posts saying that one is tired of TSA stories.

I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger. If there's a road from hacking to politics, it's probably civil liberties. So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty.

There are no TSA stories on the frontpage at this moment. In fact, the frontpage is a pretty normal HN frontpage now.

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1. davidw ◴[23 Nov 10 20:37 UTC] No.1935253[source]▶
> the underlying principles are important.

I have a suspicion that the more the underlying principles are important, the more things tend to decay into discussions that aren't particularly useful. Offhand, I can think of numerous issues that are far more important to the world than pretty much anything on the front page:

* Ireland and the Euro.

* Will Berlusconi finally be turfed out of office? Will it be for good?

* Health care in the US and the broader debate of taxes and the deficit.

* The upcoming vote for independence in South Sudan.

* Korea and Iran's nuclear capabilities.

* TSA

And so on and so forth. Indeed, we could entirely crowd out "hacker news" topics with those that, I think are objectively more important in that they impact more people more deeply than Ruby on Rails ever will. I would be very disappointed to see this happen.