[badsectoracula]

Honestly, downvoting - especially as implemented here in HN where it fades out things - was a mistake. I do not understand why people still insist on it and ask people to not use it as a "disagree" button (and flagging as a "super disagree" button) when many years of evidence show that despite any effort, it will be used as such.

I can understand (even if disagree) with Reddit-the-company wanting it to stay there because it increases "engagement" with the platform (regardless of the engagement's quality) and thus gets more ad revenue, but why anyone else (and any site that doesn't monetize such "engagement") would insist on downvoting is beyond me (and i especially do not understand people acting as if the topic itself is some sort of taboo to not even be discussed and treat its existence as unquestionable dogma).

[mattsfrey]

Agreed, I wish there was no downvoting, it's long run its usefulness in this forum

[mises]

The better option would be to get rid of political BS entirely. I am incredibly sick of hearing each side scream into the wind while the other screams back. This was originally mostly a tech forum; it's grown to a size where it needs to be only a tech forum. People can go to reddit if they want to scream about politics.

[Pfhreak]

That's a position that's ok if and only if you are ok with the status quo. It is, in itself, a political stance.

Now, screaming into the wind is also far from ideal, but I think the answer shouldn't be "Ignore politics because I'm fine."

There are a ton of places where tech intersects with politics, whether that's in climate science, gender, mental health, medicine, art/culture, public transit (and other public shared resources), copyright, privacy, safety, etc. Strictly restricting the discussion to tech doesn't erase those intersections between tech and political domains.

[mises]

Except all the issues you just raised are primarily things about which one side cares. The cares of the other are ignored or, in the rare case they are visible, flagged down.

[Pfhreak]

What? These aren't boolean propositions. Each of them has a pretty complex set of connections with tech, across a variety of subdomains and interests....

[mises]

Maybe a better way to describe it is as a venn diagram. If there are circles with "lefty" things and "righty" things, you took (as HN tends to do) the whole lefty circle. That includes things in the center, but not those on the right.

[Pfhreak]

Ah yes, the "lefty" concerns of privacy, safety, medicine, public land use, and intellectual property and how they intersect with tech. I somehow always manage to forget that the "righty" folk are disinterested in discussion on how those topics might intersect with tech.

Again, these issues aren't binary, they aren't left v. right, there's much more to understand than just two fixed points. I didn't even dive into any specific issues. Public resources could mean parks or it could mean the Bureau of Land Management, eminent domain or subsidized bus fare. Safety and privacy could be a discussion of the TSA, or gun rights, or immigration, or facial recognition.

Those are obviously concerns that impact a wide group of people, across many different political ideologies.

You are seeing something that isn't there.

[dang]

Your image of the old days is inaccurate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

[tracker1]

The issue is a lot of tech companies, especially the larger ones are in larger metro areas that tend to lean left, and staffed by those who went to very left leaning schools and as a result lean further left than most. Combine this with a bit of elitism and you get what we have today.

A set of professions guided more by feelings that knowledge and reasoning. Not to mention an ever increasing inability to actually have a civil conversation with someone you disagree with. I'm relatively center/libertarian/classic-liberal and I seem to feel it from all sides at times.