HN Explorer

Time to get back to respecting the 'no politics' rule

8 points by hagbard_c ↗ HN
Ever since the last election was won by 'the wrong candidate' according to a vocal minority of the participants on this site the place has been inundated by clearly political threads and postings. One of the differences between this site and the otherwise comparable Reddit is that politics is supposed to be mostly off-limits here where it can run wild on the former site. Had the election been won by 'the correct candidate' (according to the same vocal minority) I suspect that similar griping from the opposing side would have been slammed down hard as being off-topic so my question is: what is different this time around? Why is politics suddenly a relevant topic here? If no, why are these threads not culled like they would have been otherwise?

11 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] thread
slater
Good thing there's no such rule.
zahlman
> 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.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Most of what I've been seeing since November 2024 is not at all what I'd call insightful. It generally reads like complaining about how the usual suspects did some outrageous (read: not to the ideological taste of the submitter or commenter; sometimes there is at least an implied argument about social or environmental impact of a policy) thing.

dang
As pg put it many years ago, note those words most and probably (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426).

The basic point is that not all political stories are off topic. Most are, but having some stories with political overlap is in keeping with HN's mandate as long as there aren't too many of them.

Here are a couple posts, one recent and one older, where I tried to explain how we approach this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614703 (Jan 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019)

I've been writing a lot of these lately - here's a few more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43111620

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

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

There should be more than enough information at those links to answer everyone's questions about this, but if anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

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zfg
> what is different this time around? Why is politics suddenly a relevant topic here?

Because the tech sector is now explicitly and unabashedly political.

Musk, for example, is flipping fascist salutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smQNNo2a9xc

And censoring speech: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/musk-shows-us-what-actua...

And helpfully calling an astronaut "fully retarded":

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/20/elon-musk-iss-deorb...

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892584783064052114

And seeking to wreck Wikipedia, one of the internet's greatest projects: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-...

And mocking a blind man who disagrees with him for being blind: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/17/elon-mu...

And threatening companies with government interference if they don't advertise on Twitter: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/x-hinted-at-possible-deal...

And so on and so on. It's grubby stuff.

This is what so much of the tech industry is now. You can't be afraid to look at what it has become.

beretguy
And trump wanted to buy $400 million worth of armored teslas. We like posts about teslas here, right?
ok_dad
There is also a button that says "hide" on every posting, so you folks could use that.

Personally, I want to be able to talk about and read about what HN users think of the current situation in the USA, as it affects my family and I greatly and I respect the knowledge, experience, and intelligence of this platform's community. I feel for those who think/hope that none of this affects them, but even those of you that aren't in the USA will probably feel the fallout of this massive retraction in American policy.

hagbard_c
If the hide button works for those who do not want to see this type of political discourse it surely also works for those on 'the other side' who do not want to see political discourse which they do not agree with? That is not how the site has been handling politics though which is why I'd like to either see the current rash of griping banished like political subjects were banished during the previous regime or the 'rule' (which is there even if some in this thread claim it is not) on politics being off-topic to be removed.

Better still would be a 'tag' option which can be used just like the 'flag' option. Tag an article as being in one of those categories which many people do not want to see here but which do keep on popping up, things like politics, AI and crypto and such. Add an option to either hide (if shown by default) or show (if hidden by default) articles with given tags and the problem is mostly solved. Those who want to gripe about Trump and Musk can gripe about them without bothering those who want to see this site as it was intended to be. Once the "democrats" get back into power those who want to gripe about whomever they fielded can gripe about him or her without bothering those who currently do the griping. Just tag those threads as politics and leave it up to the site's visitors whether they want to see them or not. This gets rid of the rules for thee but not for (D) problem as well and does not add any significant complexity to the code or the interface.

dang
As slater pointed out, HN doesn't have a "no politics" rule [1]. It has a rule, but it's fuzzier than "no". See my reply downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134386.

> what is different this time around? Why is politics suddenly a relevant topic here?

HN isn't different. What's different is the macro environment. We can't be immune from macro trends [2], and sometimes the world has intense political swings. Every time that happens, the same phenomenon that you're observing shows up on HN, with the same complaints from the different basic camps (i.e. the various partisans, plus the users who don't want so much politics on HN). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018) for how far back this goes.

These swings, and especially the feelings of intensity, tend to fade from memory after a while, so when a new one comes along, it always feels like something unprecedented if not disastrous, but the short answer to your question is that HN has ridden out these fluctuations before, and will most likely do so again.

See also Ask HN: Can we stop with the political posts? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613027 - Jan 2025 (22 comments)

[1] Incidentally, we tried it once just as an experiment for a week. It was a disaster and we ended the experiment early.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637 (Jan 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 (Dec 2016)

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

IAmGraydon
The guy who posts about "Trump Derangement Syndrome" and links to it in his profile wants to "respect" the no politics rule. Isn't that cute? It seems to be a thing with you guys to only support freedom of speech when you agree with it. I appreciate your plea, but I think we'll keep talking about it.