Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by awakeasleep 2622 days ago
Are you saying you think there should be restrictions on the ideological content of what people should be allowed to create?
1 comments

No, I said I believe it to be inappropriate to use your position in a public software project to push your politics. I didn't ask for "restrictions on ideological content". Believing something to be inappropriate doesn't mean I think it should be forbidden or restricted.
Why do you think that's inappropriate?
Because a) politics is an extremely divisive topic which leads easily to flame wars and b) politics is completely unrelated to software development, so there's absolutely no reason to deal with a) in the context of software development.
Is it so controversial to say that technology is related to power and money? If you ignore it you're simply letting someone else take care of the matter for you. How should technology and power relate to the rest of society in a harmonious way? Not obvious, but you can always let someone else take care of the matter for you.

Do apps like WhatsApp or Facebook inherently have severe political considerations, even though they're primarily apps for communication and connecting people together?

Seems like a reasonable argument if the case we were talking about is a large software project that requires consensus building & collaboration, but it sounds like OP was talking about a personal project that is largely defunct. It seems like there are few stake holders that OP needs to satisfy.

Not all politics & software development are unrelated btw, there have certainly been political movements that would have targeted & tightly controlled software development if it was as big as it is now when that movement happened. Khmer Rouge comes to mind.

There are also explicitly political software development projects: Bitcoin, Tor, arguably GNU, the great firewall, stuxnet, whatever nation state actors are cooking up for mass social media manipulation etc

> politics is completely unrelated to software development

I strongly disagree.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and my politics/philosophy is one of the things that makes F/OSS so very attractive to me.