Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ThomPete 2788 days ago
Agree

The obvious way out of that is to join bubbles that are aligned with your interests rather than political views. If your interest is politics then find a better interest :)

3 comments

Every now and then when I access Reddit not logged in from somewhere I get reminded of this. If you curate what you are subscribed to it will be much better. About a year ago I wrote a little Python script in about an hour or so that subscribed me to every single state-level or above location-based subreddit (there is a webpage that you can go to that lists them all, I simply scraped that). I have learned so much about different cultures just by reading posts from people around the world posting things about their area.
can you share the script ? I'd be very interested in trying it out.
Sadly it was wiped when I reformatted awhile back. But it’s rather trivial to implement if you know a little python. The website I scraped is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocationReddits/wiki/index

It took a bit of finagling to exclude the US college and city subreddits but otherwise I subscribed as-is to everything on that page. I think I only have unsubbed to a couple of them manually after, mostly because of excessive political posts by people who clearly don’t live in the area (Israel and Palestine subreddits come to mind)

You get some great content from doing it. Specifically Denmark and Sweden have amazing content in Danish and Swedish respectively that you wouldn’t ever see otherwise. Plus the former Yugoslavia countries and Eastern Europe and basically a lot of Europe generically has some sweet content you would not normally see if you weren’t subbed to their subreddits. Right click to google translate helps a lot. There are some truly dank European memes out there.

One of the other things I noticed that was really cool is that I now am tuned in to state politics outside of my home state in US. You really start to see the major issues other states have when you are subbed to their home subreddit.

100%. Having a "passion" for politics was abrasive to my relationships with friends throughout high-school and returned very little value to me (save the short-lived energy I got from stupid internet debates).
Some people don't have the ability to not be concerned with politics.
If you mean like a bad habbit i agree.
Pretty sure doublepg23 was referring to those of us who aren't straight, cis-gendered males. Politics directly affects us, sure the rich among us can run to lavender marriages and try to cover up their innate desires, but the rest of us will end up being fed to the wolves.

For us, going to a rural town or even many suburbs elicits the observation "It smells like dead gay people" as you've entered an area where you may get lynched for being yourself. Even here in Seattle, non-straight couples are getting violently assaulted for being out in public with their significant other. The state of affairs is rapidly getting worse for us!

That's a remarkably privileged and blasé take, denying the importance of civic engagement.
Civic engagement happens in the real world, not by commenting on reddit, fb or Twitter.
Civic engagement happens wherever people discuss politics
That would be quite an exaggeration. You can already see in this thread how fast the conversation deteriorate into completely meningless quibbles.
Posting in political subreddits is not "civic engagement."