[long_warmup]

I'm reading HN for quite some time now and there is no a day go by that I would not see a political post.

I'm not American so I don't really follow facts of your political leaders or your racial/gender problems that your government is trying to address. I consider myself neutral and I would love to see no political posts on HN. They tend to spread into flame wars and as far as I can see bring no real value apart from people venting here..

And I think for that reason you should ban everyone who does politics, either if they hate or love one side or another. Strictly no politics. I love HN for its tech stuff, not political.

[dang]

I've explained this many times. The answers are laid out repeatedly in comments you can find here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396.

If anyone truly has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. But first make sure that you've familiarized yourself with the previous explanations and understand the constraints we're subject to. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why that won't work.

Given that stories with political overlap are inevitably going to appear here, that the site has rules for discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and that the rules don't stop applying just because a topic is politicized, if users break the rules repeatedly and ignore our requests to stop, we ban them. What else would we do?

[Wowfunhappy]

Technology is politics. Politics is technology. You can't wholly separate them.

I have read that there was a week or so in 2016 when HN tried banning all political stories, and it was decided that it didn't work.

[long_warmup]

I humbly don't agree with the statement that technology is politics - it does not make me a better software developer if somebody or somebody else will be a president.

Even though there is an overlap (i.e. taxation, regulations and policies) and we could talk about this since these are the things that impact revenue. But discussion about politics outside of those things that affect us directly is leading to flame wars and unnecessary arguments that bring us nowhere.

Personally I feel even talking about taxes/regulations brings us nowhere as we have no way to influence them.

[Wowfunhappy]

If you run a social network, you need to decide what posts to allow on your platform. Every platform needs some moderation, lest they be overrun with spam and porn and scams.

If you develop artificial intelligence, you need to determine what applications of the technology are ethical. Is it okay to sell to authoritarian governments? What about the US military? What about individual police departments?

If you develop hardware, or run servers, you need to consider your impact on the planet.

[long_warmup]

> If you run a social network, you need to decide what posts to allow on your platform. Every platform needs some moderation, lest they be overrun with spam and porn and scams.

Agree, spam/porn/scams are problem on this kind of platforms. But social media is only tiny part of tech in general, and also spam/porn/scams is not really political. And I guess, if in example somebody posted hateful content or content that is bringing damage then this is what our juridical system should handle?

> If you develop artificial intelligence, you need to determine what applications of the technology are ethical. Is it okay to sell to authoritarian governments? What about the US military? What about individual police departments?

Most of the times I - as an engineer - have no say when it comes to those issues - from my experience these are business issues, not technical. And I guess these issues are probably influenced by politics, to some degree.

> If you develop hardware, or run servers, you need to consider your impact on the planet.

I'd say same as above - it's business to decide what to do about those issues. We as engineers think about efficiency - and had been thinking for decades, as far as my experience goes. I was always taught to build things that consume least amount of electricity, things that get from A to B with least effort. And Mr X or Mr Y being a president had no influence at those principles.

[tsimionescu]

You can't outsource your ethics to 'business'. Is it ethical to build UAVs for the military? If you feel the answer is yes, no problem. But if for your the answer is no, but the company you work for is selling just that, then you have a problem - you can try to address it by lobbying your company, by ignoring it, or by quitting. But it is your problem.

I'm not trying to say that you should believe one way or another, I just take issue with the idea that, as an engineer, one should feel no responsibility even in principle for the way the product they create will be used.