I Quit Hacker News

There is a strong commitment by the community to prevent the site becoming like digg, reddit, or slashdot. Losing focus on the topics that brought us here in the first place (technology, startup culture, and programming) is the first step on that path in my opinion.

All I can ask is please, try not to submit/vote up stories which are not particularly related to tech. It's not what I'm interested in discussing in this particular venue.

Or maybe I'm just in the minority. I guess time will tell.

P.S. Just because you put the word "Hacker" in your article/title, doesn't mean it belongs here.

Politics is involved with _everything_ the world has to offer; and more specifically, politics is fundamentally bound to technology.

The fact that people like making 'cool stuff', will always have a flip-side. We need to be able to talk about the way that technology is utilised and that (necessarily) involves political discussion.

Without this kind of discussion, people involved in the tech industry are destined to become unthinking drones .. consideration of ethics and politics is essential if technology stands any chance of making the world a better place.

Your point of view completely baffles me.

"Why shouldn't we be willing to debate and explore a subject in depth?"

Good question! I would be happy to debate and explore political ideas in depth. (That's why I hang around some politically- and economically-focused blogs, and I chat about politics with my friends, and I read the writing of experts.)

But how on earth can you call Hacker News posts about politics "debating" or "exploring a subject in depth?" They are the absolute opposite of depth! Pseudonymous, evanescent discussions, where you stick around for a few hours and a few comments at most; you have no commitment to defend your words or argue sincerely, and half of the commenters don't know what the other half said last week on the same topic. Could you possibly think of a worse format for "debating?"

At the very best I have ever seen, Hacker News debates are someone who sounds smart stating a reasonable-sounding position, and then someone else who sounds smart suggesting that there might be reasonable-sounding problems with the reasonable-sounding position. Then after a dozen posts about the position it's off the front page and forgotten. That is the nature of this medium. Usually, everyone just lines up behind their premeditated arguments and fires upvotes and downvotes at each other until they see another interesting post.

Places that are reasonable for debating and exploring a subject in depth: A small, focused community that's willing to build on their prior discussions over the course of months or years. Talking with friends with whom you have a shared, growing, and conscious context in common. Books, essays, and other long-form prose where you can present your whole position at once. NOT here. At least I've never seen it happen, and I don't see how it could.

So if someone wrote an essay about net-neutrality (which is almost entirely a political issue), that shouldn't be posted or discussed here?

That may have been true for the first TSA post about backscatter scanners and pat-downs, for example. But it wasn't true for most of the next hundred.