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Poll: Should submissions about Elon Musk's political actions be allowed on HN?

15 points by minimaxir ↗ HN
The Hacker News guidelines have stated since the beginning:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

It has been clear that in 2025, this guideline is no longer adequate. The political ascent of Elon Musk/DOGE, as silly as it is, has far reaching implications for both the tech world and the US.

Submissions about his latest political actions both a) get upvotes very quickly due to their importance and impact and b) get flagkilled very quickly due to the politics rule.

So let's take it to a poll. (I have no affiliation with HN or YC so the results won't matter, but it's worthy of a Sunday discussion)

14 comments

[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] thread
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pvg
They are being discussed on HN a great deal so it's not clear the question makes sense. HN also doesn't really have a 'politics rule'. This is worth a read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

minimaxir
I missed that comment (because the parent submission was flagged lol) but dang's argument IMO more drives to the point that current HN policy/culture is insufficient. Flagging for repetition is fair, but the problem here is that there's very little repetition because Elon/DOGE keeps finding new ways to interfere with institutions.
pvg
dang's argument IMO more drives to the point that current HN policy/culture is insufficient.

That's the "This time it's different" bit from his comment so I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying this time it's different except even more different?

but the problem here is that there's very little repetition because Elon/DOGE keeps finding new ways to interfere with institutions.

Right but that's not how 'repetition' works in the narrow context of HN. It's a fuzzy repetition, a repetition by reference not by value. If Elon Musk goosesteps 3 times today and 6 times tomorrow, that doesn't mean it makes sense to put 9 Musk goosestepping stories on the front page of HN. There'd be no HN left.

Edit: I saw a mention of https://news.ycombinator.com/active in another thread. As I type, I count 7 ongoing, live threads about new US admin stuff and that's just of the 30 most active. It simply is not the case that this isn't being discussed on HN. It's being discussed on HN more than any other topic and, in fact, with way more than a typical, to use dang's term, Major Ongoing Topic gets discussed, at least concurrently.

mdhb
It also doesn’t really take into account the fact that this is part of a very deliberate strategy to push through as much crazy shit as quickly as possible. This ongoing partisan takeover of various parts of government for example right now is a good example of a story that has a lot of different moving parts and it’s not all just “repetition” or anything like that. The entire strategy literally relies on people being able to handwave it away which is what the default policy as it stands today is exactly designed to do.
pvg
The entire strategy may rely on that in some broader sense but if you think the presence or absence of these stories on HN makes an iota of a difference to the actual implementation of any of these things, we're doomed and alwayshavebeen.gif.

The International Brigades don't start mustering on the Ellipse to rescue the Republic, called forth when the 5th muskery story appears on the HN front page on a given day. Nor is Czechoslovakia handed over to Space X if no such stories show up for a bit. It's still just a medium-sized nerd messageboard.

nico
Not just Elon. The CEOs of the most prominent tech companies had front row seats at the inauguration

Clearly tech is now a lot more than just code, chips and networks

atomicfiredoll
It feels to me that insightful details about what's going on have been coming out of tech/startup publications like TechCrunch and Wired instead of some more traditional news media. These stories feel relevant to the communities and interests here in a way that other political ones don't.

[Edit: That said, there's a risk some lower quality, less substantial, and more sensationalist articles or publications will be submitted as a result, so it's extra important to not just vote based on headlines.]

1oooqooq
snipery slope... for example, when congress was interviewing the drunk wife beater with no previous experience for the job, the news and HN was all over the few crazy deportations. populists, by definition, knows very well how to control the narrative...

a more recent example, musk is leading the control change of USAID from nsa to cia, like happens on every dem/rep switch... you can even discount this as conspiracy theory as it won't change my point: wich is that he's doing it while he just tweeted "USAID created covid". it's batshit insanity.

polka_haunts_us
I vouched this dead submission and voted yes as a support of the status quo, because you can trivially put "Elon" into search bar and find that they aren't a shortage of Elon political submissions.

Look, my highest rated comment on this site is asking Dang to unflag a certain thread on Jan 6, 2021. You need to understand there are plenty of people on this site who will flag anything political regardless of the content, because frankly that's not what this site is for. I understand that perspective, I don't get my news from here I actually go to news sites and read there. Hacker news is an entirely different compartment of my life and I assume I'm not the only one.

On the other hand, people flagging Elon isn't some new phenmoenon. People have spammed every single time he's been in the news for years. Like Taylor Swift, the guy is a bonafide superstar. Millions of people who both love him and hate him for years have hung on his every word and action.

Speaking for myself, I decided Elon was a piece of garbage when he called the submarine guy a Pedo, but I was still happy to get some Tesla stock when I thought it was a good deal. My real life friends of 10+ years, apropos of nothing, were taunting me in a more mean spirited than joking way in December 2022 that the value of the stock had fallen, boy aren't you sad you lost those thousands of dollars. Then at least a couple times a month since they want my opinion on the Elon outrage of the week, most of which aren't real outrages but shitty celebrity gossip they found out about because they spent all their curiousity about the world on r/all, where thousands of Elon haters were doing the same thing. This has been the temperature from a certain segment of the population for years.

I'm legitimately concerned about some of the stuff going on, but I do honestly think there quite a large component of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", even if there is also a component of "Don't Look Up". The fact of the matter is if you honestly believe there is an in-progress fascist takeover of the US Government, there are 50,000 better things you could be doing about it than debating the Hacker News current events flagging policy.

s1artibartfast
Case by case based on the quality of the submission. There are some interesting and insightful articles out there, but also a lot of political hype and screaming.
elpocko
If all the posts concerning US politics that have showed up in my HN feed[0] today (maybe ~40% of all feed items) had ended up on the frontpage, the site would be useless to me. And probably to all those other users that flagged them as well, because US politics is not why we come here.

[0] https://hnrss.org/newest?points=10

karlh
I think it should be allowed. His actions often have significant impacts on tech and he seems to be expanding his reach by taking control of government spending science funding.