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by papichulo4 479 days ago
We need politics out of here. Maybe make the line between HN and the rest of news a bit more clear.
3 comments

HN's approach to political stories has been stable for many years: most are off-topic, but some are ok; but only some.

'Stable' here means stable over time. The proportion of political stories goes through pretty big fluctuations (mostly in response to macro social events, e.g. elections), but HN's principles remain the same, and the swings eventually subside*.

If you (or anyone) want to read about what those principles are, I've posted about that many times. Here's one pointer into those explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

* perhaps ironically, this 'stability' includes the phenomenon of users complaining that HN is turning too much into a political site. For a glimpse into how far back that goes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

While I too find it distasteful and distracting, the inclination to expunge politics from conversation may have played a role in getting us (at least in the US) where we are: 1) where people have forgotten to talk about politics politely, and 2) where politics have been weaponized by tuning to especially divisive issues specifically for high-engagement.

And that is where many of us have played a role: increasing engagement.

> We need politics out of here

DOGE is a creature of Silicon Valley. Paul Graham spends his time now opining on woke [1]. One can escape base partisanship. But the political economy makes any attempt to escape politics pretend.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html