| Arguments about HN getting too political / ruined by politics go back almost as far as HN itself: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of
keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually
interesting and not just about politics: 2008:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.) |