[edmcnulty101]

It's very hard to define specific political content as separate from technology.

I remember a single Covid scientific paper turning into a 500 post political discussion.

Or tech giants and censorship and privacy. How does one separate tech from politics in this sense?

Maybe society has become more political and it's making it's way to link aggregator sites?

[johannes1234321]

I think it is more that tech (and tech companies) become more subjects of political debate.

[edmcnulty101]

Are there subjects of political debate that aren't political?

[iqanq]

People want to debate politics, but submissions about politics get killed. Therefore people end up using any excuse to debate politics in any thread.

[Aperocky]

Still better than being unregulated.

I don't come here to have political discussion, I want to find out what's interesting in tech, not to engage in flame wars (except the vim/emacs kind, that I fight).

[edmcnulty101]

I see tons of threads without political debate. I actually think the majority of threads are not political.

[loceng]

Technology is used as political tools/weapons to drive and manufacture consent, through promoting hate and creating divisiveness - and through captured mainstream media channels, and online platforms; this couldn't be any more obvious with Trudeau's behaviours and observing the mainstream landscape of what the majority of Canadians are seeing.

And so you're correct - politics and technology is intertwined, but HN is happy to suppress conversation that would arguably lead to discussing technological solutions.

The biggest problem is our information distribution/propagation (and therefore trust) apparatus is corrupted, which does include the issue with low-to-no-effort downvotes allowing a person to suppress content while getting rewarded via a dopamine hit.

[edmcnulty101]

You're preaching to the choir here about mainstream media being super corrupt.

Puts a lot of pressure on one or two hacker news mods to be the purveyors of neutrality for the entire media landscape if that's what's expected.

[eldaisfish]

the reality is that almost everything has an element of politics and it is good to understand the relationship between politics and technology in particular. Tech, in many ways, has been adept at skirting existing laws because tech transcends barriers that were show-stoppers in the past. AirBnB, Uber are good examples. Google, facebook and spying. Clearview and their immoral data gathering.

There is the additional issue that tech has crept into everything and the internet is where modern state-sponsored disinformation and misinformation campaigns are being fought.

Tech is maturing and a consequence of that process is that politics develops. It's not necessarily a bad thing as the cynics say.

[edmcnulty101]

I think it makes sense that more political discussions occur on hacker News because tech and the world in general possibly is becoming more political.

[kenjackson]

Tech and political ideologies have collapsed, and especially in areas of interest to HN. Climate change, when a fetus is a baby, etc... these are areas where science has intersected politics before HN existed, but they also don't intersect HN regularly.

But now some of the hot topics in tech are also hot topics in politics-- privacy and mass surveillance, platform censorship, vaccinations/medicine(which were a little political, became super political), affirmitive action in the tech industry, etc...

I don't know if we'll ever go back to where we were as tech plays a larger and larger role. And if you think we're intertwined now, just wait until the metaverse!