Yeah. It's been going on since the dotcom boom. I watched Slashdot become increasingly right wing for a decade. When I finally gave up on it, it was practically Stormfront.
Half crazy, half too pure to get their hands dirty. 0% sensible discussion of absurdity that can only be explained by actions undertaken extremist ideology that benefit the ultra-rich and harm everyone else.
HN standards typically avoid political discussion that doesn't intersect with technology. But it's hard not to talk about seeing the far-right seizing total political control of the executive branch and destroying the entire bureaucracy and the concept of fact.
If you mean that trade war, what is here to discuss? We (Canada) just got fucked royally by our "best" ally and trading partner. There is not much we can do in return tariff wise without causing even greater harm for ourselves. I think our demented government should just learn the lesson, and develop our own independent trade and foreign policies. There is a whole world out there. Just stop bending over.
Additionally, political discussions on HN are hamstrung by the guideline to "assume good faith", which doesn't work well for political topics because there is a lot of bad faith commentary.
Hacker News might try to ignore politics, but politics isn't ignoring tech.
You have impending tariffs on chips on the way to wreck tech businesses, and incoming xenophobic immigration policies coming to kick out the talent pipeline.
But sure, let's flag any posts that might hint at everything not being totally awesome. Did you hear that some build tool got open sourced?
>Hacker News might try to ignore politics, but politics isn't ignoring tech.
Great! Maybe folks could discuss that in any of the hundreds of other social forums all over the internet? One of the absolute worst things to have happened as traditional forums and such have gone away and been replaced with "feeds" and "feeding trough" front pages is that every single place seems to eventually devolve into a death spiral of US Team Sports Politics. Does anyone really believe that the relative dearth of political discussion on HN is actually preventing anyone interested in that discussion from finding it? Or keeping anyone interested in being informed on the relevant issues from being so informed? Maybe it's possible to have places in your life where you talk to other people and don't have to talk about politics.
I think the interesting is the tech community that used to be liberal and loving turning to something completely the opposite. Blindly following some playbook by "luminaires", and adopting the most awful parts of the discourse.
I know I am now going to be voted down, but it's the truth.
The tech community at large is very well in line with democracy and progressive values. There's a small cult who got very rich and became insanely hubristic, and they and their fans are a very rotten extremity of an otherwise very healthy and positive community.
There's no 'used to be,' the tech scene is not down with authoritarians today and never will be.
That's the rub. It would've been a non-issue in the late 90's when extremists weren't in power and there was just moderate levels of corruption rather than gold bar senators or Department of Fox News Defense. It's imperative to call-out absurdity where it interferes with the continuation of organized multicellular life rather than be silent, because silence gives consent (Qui tacet consentit).
No? I see under 10% of the HN front page stories being related to U.S. national politics at the moment, which feels very low compared to Reddit and Facebook for me (which are well over 50%, but I realize that each person sees something different potentially).