Hacker News Guidelines

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

I'd welcome a firmer hand on eliminating these submissions.

The existing moderation works fine.

I bet if you looked through recent stories that made the front page, <1% would be classified as "about politics".

It depends on the context.

Obviously partisan politics don’t really have a place here but metapolitical critiques of the technology known as bureaucracy (which is pervasive in government, science, everywhere really) and how well it is or is not working is definitely relevant from a systems perspective, imo.

Generally submissions about politics without any tech angle do get flagged.

Politics that do have a tech angle (e.g. SEC/FTC actions, net neutrality) are more on-topic.

I'd like clarification of whether politics is meant to cover matters of policy or strictly partisan politics and news about the lives of political figures. Surely regulatory policy with regards to technology, communications infrastructure, and similar is of interest.

Most internet technologies are currently in a phase change due to a changing regulatory and political environment. That has major implications for the direction of many types of technology discussed here so to that end I think tech policy is a very valid topic for HN.

Now, the horse race of the day, or manufactured moral crisis? Not really what this is for.

You can play a role. Depending on your points level, you can go to "new" and flag political posts.

Agreed, those threads are usually terrible.

Yes comrade, for example we could get rid of these stories about these “start up companies,” they are clearly capitalism extremists pushing their political viewpoints.

Jokes aside, I think it is hard to moderate too strictly on the topic of “no politics” without enforcing a particular political viewpoint, because we tend to see politics we like as normal, and politics we don’t like as politics.

I'm guilty of commenting on these, and I used to disagree about eliminating more of these - with my thought being that politics is interesting to "hackers" because it is interesting to people and "hackers" are people - but with the wisdom of years, I'm inclined to agree that the discussion on these submissions nearly universally sheds more heat than light.

This does seem like a good distinction.

the big challenge here is that "politics" nowadays can include nearly everything, and many stories are very relevant to HN audience. Like Tiktok getting banned or regulated. Clearly very political, but also highly relevant to HN. A firmer hand would mean no exceptions for stories like that.

The solution space for this is pretty small, meaning that most things that feel like they might work (e.g. just ban politics) don't actually work. But the answer we've converged on over the years is pretty stable: some political overlap is inevitable and ok, but the articles should be ones that can support an intellectually curious conversation rather than just garden-variety flamewar.

Here are some past explanations of how we approach this. If anyone reads those and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

users tend to be quite good at flagging most highly political stories, so they disappear off the front page pretty quickly but can still be found by those who really want to engage. The status quo is good imo

It may not be a useful distinction, when what we really want is to exclude based on “propensity for useless flamewar”.

The “climate change” ones are becoming boring. Recent penguins for example.

I enjoy reading the discussions about politics on HN. Most comments are refreshingly thought out and not just lines being drawn and people parroting what they hear somewhere else. I don't know of anywhere else on the internet that has actual thoughtful political discussions.

Also, HN-ers tend to have very sharp BS detectors which really helps.

Certain high profile stories get flag protection, which seems controversial to me, especially when used silently and only admitted to after the fact. I can't remember the specific one but it was one in the wake of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. It ranked highly despite the flags it was getting, according to dang.

Sure, we sometimes turn off user flags when the article contains significant new information and the topic seems intellectually interesting.

Most of what we do is "done silently and only admitted to after the fact". HN is a curated/moderated site; it always has been. We don't publish a moderation log but it's always possible to get an answer to a question—you just have to ask.

Given the advancements of LLMS, have you given thought to automating some moderation to tell the user they're about to leave a predictable repetitive flamewar comment? Ie, a cleverer version of https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-a...

Not yet, but the relevant data for doing this is mostly public, and if anyone wanted to work on it, we'd certainly be interested in what they came up with.

I welcome the curation and moderating of this site! I'm more imagining that those stories got posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=dang, with some time delay, so years from now, amateur historians can see what articles were deemed noteworthy in such a fashion.

I don't know why people are so terrified of politics.

I’ll venture a guess. Mainstream politics (in America at least) has become something of a spectator sport that leads to unproductive, irritating, and dysfunctionally polarizing behavior.

Because activists can talk about nothing else.

It's annoying, not terrifying

You know you can skip those right? Just because it's posted and upvoted to the front page doesn't mean you have to read it.

I read like 2-3 links max on my visits here.

it's not the topic itself that is terrifying but the antagonistic mode of discussion.

i have no problem discussing political opinions themselves, but i have no interest arguing about who these opinions belong to and which party is on which side of the debate or judging people or groups for having a particular opinion, or worse attacking them for it.

And even more specifically we want to optimize for intellectually interesting conversation.

I don't think it'll get better by NOT talking about it.

Sure, polarisation may exist elsewhere, but does that mean we have to bring it here too by talking about it? (Because the users on HN are subject to the same tendencies as everyone else, and almost invariably the kind of conversations that polarise elsewhere will polarise people here too.)

Depends on the time of day, UK morning time before east coast USA wakes up there's always one or two political posts which get quite a bit of attention. However they quickly go from the front page after a few hours.

I've noticed some San Francisco specific post appearing too at similar hours. These generally get more comments but as before usually go after some time.

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Personally, some political stuff is fine, interesting and worthy of comment. I do find myself replying and then deleting my comments on those threads after I realise the discussion is meaningless.

On top of that, it's easy to click the "hide" link under a story title, and that leaves more room on the front page for stories I might actually want to read, without having to dig deep into successive pages of stories.

It is absolutely not part of HN's charter to make US politics (or the politics of any country!) better. That's a project worth undertaking, but there are better places for it.

Strong disagree on that criteria, because there are many interesting and very valid topics that attract a certain type of minority who will derail thing to a "useless flamewar". The problem isn't with the topic, it's with these users.

I feel people are given too many chances sometimes, especially when they "also make good comments". The problem there is that these are often quite active users with a lot of total comments, so "only n% of bad comments" means a lot of "bad comments". The standards should be higher for very active users, not lower, as their influence on the site is much larger.

For example I'm looking at at story where a single user posted 45 comments (~17%), quite a few in "flame war style" and (rightfully) flagged. Most other comments are fine, except the threads that user created. The topic didn't cause the flamewar: that user did. Now, everyone can have a bad day and that's okay, but I'm somewhat amazed some people are not banned as they frequently engage with a type of aggression, contempt for differing views, and bad faith nonsense in a way that really "destroys what the site is for", as Dang would say. I can name a number of them from the top of my head and I can virtually guarantee you they will have at least one flagged comment on their first two comments pages or so, and most likely several.

The reason these topics are derailed are these people (and others), not the topic as such. Don't ban topics, ban people if they can't bring up the maturity and professionalism to keep some basic level of composure (maybe HN needs better tools for this; e.g. topic-bans, temporary bans, etc. but that's a bit of a different discussion).

Especially on difficult topics I want to have interesting conversations that explain differing viewpoints, and criticise other viewpoints in a constructive and good-faith way, or provide additional context.

While I appreciate this is a difficult thing to moderate, this, in a nutshell, is my main criticism of HN's moderation.

HN does very well about this.

The only "politics" stories are tech/industry politics stories.

That's not really the dividing line. It's certainly easier to get tech politics onto the front page than other political stories, but the real distinction is how interesting the story is, not how technical it is. Or rather, how interesting the resulting thread is likely to be, where "interestingness" is sort of conceptually measurable as the distance that thread will have from previous threads on previous politics stories.

Interesting solution. I had some concerns at first but increasing the threshold and manually whitelisting some common valuable but non-unique comments would probably go a long way. Maybe even reduce it to parts of a comment to reduce lazy jokes.

Because I don't care about what happens in a completely different country.

There is sometimes great utility hidden unseen, like the value of having access to hundreds if not thousands of threads of much more intelligent than average humans arguing about politics.

Not useful for all people, but potentially useful for some.

A problem: this is a function of culture, which tends to be invisible during object level discussions, especially when people disagree. It's like The Water for fish.

Another problem: subjective matters often appear objective during disagreements, and people tend not to be interested in this important distinction at these points in time (whereas in abstract threads like this those skills remain intact).

Another problem: relative categorization, ie: "HN moderation is great [compared to other sites]" that I suspect is not realized as such, and again: during disagreement, this perspective tends to be "not appreciated", "JAQing off", <your culturally infused meme of choice>.

It isn't a part of HN's charter, but certainly the attitude "politics must be avoided" is not good.