[tptacek]

1000000000% agree. I think the site is pretty bad at hosting political discussions, and, worse, that the resulting discussions are tedious. There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

[krapp]

For example - any thread even tangentially related to the Paris attacks recently. There are probably still subthreads simmering over whether Islam is really a death cult or no more evil than Christianity or whether the West really had it coming, or whether maybe we should just nuke all of Asia and be done with it. Except really it was all a false flag operation by the New World Order because Snowden. For a while, the comments page was practically toxic - and every bit of it entirely predictable.

I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views. When your day job requires you to prove things to a certain degree of correctness, maybe it makes sense to believe the world and people should work the same way. There seems to be far too much cynicism, vitriol and condescension here around some subjects, and too many people who seem to think those are the qualities of a keen intellect. Maybe politics is one of those fields everyone just thinks they're an expert at.

[mindcrime]

I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views.

I really don't see engineers being in any way unique in that regard.

[Alex3917]

> There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.

[mbrock]

The guidelines say "avoid bringing up flame bait unless you've something new to say."

I think a better guideline might be "avoid just expressing your opinion unless you can make it both polite and interesting."

[tptacek]

That's a much better guideline. The reason I think it won't be adopted is that HN's moderators feel like "make it polite" is already a guideline.

[mindcrime]

There are very few long-time readers of HN who can honestly say they'd have a hard time predicting what HN will say about any given political issue.

The only issue I have predicting that stuff here is related to the surprise I sometimes feel at how much the bias of this site has drifted over the past couple of years. There's definitely been a pronounced uptick in the prevalence of left'ish wing /socialist'ist thinking here. At one time opinions focusing on individual rights, free markets, etc. were mainstream here. Now they routinely get heavily downvoted.

[brudgers]

Personally, I believe there is more diversity of opinion on political topics than behavior exhibited in the comment threads on political topics.

[pvg]

That's exactly the sort of thing a plant of the technonormative Big Karma oppressor would say.

[krapp]

karma is the opiate of the masses

[earleybird]

the medium is the oppressor