It likely will. There’s major impact on literally everyone in tech, there’s huge data privacy concerns, and it has less coverage or discussion than a new version of jQuery. The US gov could fall but that would count as politics here so clearly irrelevant.
In a corrupt and authoritarian country, it is common to have officials busted on "corruption" or "embezzlement" charges. And yet most people know they are actually not jailed for the crimes they got charged for, because there are more than enough people to fill all the prisons for breaking the exact same laws they are accused of breaking. They knew the only reason these people got jailed is because they lost some kind of power struggle within the administration, and corruption is just a convenient lie those who prevailed tell you to keep you comfortable.
You never see the "no politics please thk u" crowd when it is about protests in Iran, Chinese oppression in Hong Kong, Russian aggression on Europe or hell, when people were literally running a political campaign the EU to stop killing games. You only see people flagging political submissions when it is a particular kind of politics - just like you only see corrupt officials jailed when they are a certain kind of officials.
There is always going to be an intersection between tech and politics. This convo is no different than talking about Section 230, H1B visas or using vision models to sexualize people or distort the truth.
Or rather, most people aren’t here to have their preconceived notions challenged by reality.
Politics is a nebulous term for topics that affect a large number of the population. Tech intersects with politics all the time and deserves good faith discussion.
When the computer code many of us are working on is directly shaping that politics I think that we should talk about it and stop hiding behind the bush.
Yeah so find a forum that’s for discussing that and discuss it there. Don’t try and force people who are discussing something else to talk about politics with you. Do you also randomly go onto GitHub issues and start talking politics because the people who are talking about repo bugs are “hiding behind a bush” and should talk about the political things you think are important instead?
I think that forums like this one should discuss politics as affected by computer code seeing as HN is one of the main (for lack of a better word) computer programmers' forums based/located in/with a focus on SV, it's not some random computer forum which specializes in some random computer programming issue.
Hacker News is not lambda-the-ultimate.org, seeing them as similar is part of that hiding behind the bush, people commenting on here actually work at companies like Palantir, Alphabet, Meta and the like, companies whose recent involvement in politics affects us all, at a worldwide level. Also see this recent FT article [1] in connection with how the leaders of those companies have gotten a lot reacher since Trump ascended to power for a second time.
> Tech titans lined up for Trump’s second inauguration. Now they’re even richer
> Silicon Valley bosses who lined up behind the US president for his inauguration have fared well under his administration
Absolutely and it's unfortunate that all essential topics that need discussion, which is the only thing that works to understand and find solutions for problems, is being flagged off the front page. Some of the flagging seems political as well, why isn't that recognized as a problem as well?
There was a time when SV and technology eschewed politics, but that time is long gone. You only have to look at how often all the big tech CEO's end up at random Whitehouse events to see how they are intimately intertwined now.
There has always been politics in SV, this is a weird rewriting of history.
Presumably there’s so much pushback now because people are quite uncomfortable having to confront the fact that they may be the bad guys (even though they were probably the bad guys years ago as well).
> There has always been politics in SV, this is a weird rewriting of history.
Not rewriting at all.
Nien-hê Hsieh, a professor of business ethics at Harvard University says that in the 1990s, “there was a real reluctance or reticence to engage in Washington” from the leading tech companies of the day.
...
The early 2010s saw huge growth in lobbying spending by tech companies. A plateau in the late Obama years was followed by another steep increase once Trump took office. But in recent years some major players have slowed or even decreased their spending, suggesting that major corporations are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to wielding power on Capitol Hill.
It gets down to the definition of political which is basically anything that might have a human cost, including to the people here. I have many coworkers having to upend their lives, some can’t currently leave the country. This is not worthy of discussion, but an esoteric library update is. Paul Graham posts are not political topics for some reason, but H1B people is.
Technology, technology leaders, and technology companies are literally driving politics, buying elections, driving the whole US economy.
Saying what “political” topics are IS political - and it’s decidedly a right wing position. Only those with the powers protecting them get to avoid politics.
Well said. Even people with a lot in common can and should disagree often. In non-authoritarian systems, politics is supposed to be about managing this disagreement in civil ways. Politics seems unsavory to some, often because they find a lot of political manifestations to be vile or insipid. [1] I get that, but in a way this revulsion is backwards. The alternatives to the sausage-making of politics is usually worse: pretending there is no disagreement, coercion, violence, gaslighting. So when someone says "I don't like politics" I like to say "disagreement is to be expected".
The "hide" link is right next to the "flag" link. Using flag instead of hide puts more strain on the mods, and is not the right thing to do for "this topic doesn't apply to my interests."
If your problem is that you have no means to control what other people find important enough to talk about on a public forum, in their spare time, or that the means at your disposal to do so are insufficient to make other people saying things that make you uncomfortable go away... That isn't a problem that can or should should be fixed. Hell, the desire you've expressed could be uncharitably interpreted being contributory to part of the problem that has people around you discussing politics in the first place.
FWIW I agree with you and recognize that to be one of the reasons it frequently isn’t allowed.
I also think there’s very few places with the power to meaningfully dialog with and among people who build stuff in Silicon Valley. I have dozens of friends, coworkers, etc who are in FAANG or the newer big tech companies, and all of them are extremely well paid, and most will insist they work for positive reasons. I believe in that most of them believe in other people, and don’t want to build a surveillance society or one that concentrates all wealth and power in a few.
For this reason, I think that some conversations on here are important to have - the impact technology is having on people who are outside the tech sphere, the effect of leaders of our companies on the economy, geopolitics, and power generally. Mark Facebook is a powerful player on the world stage. So is Paul Graham, and Sundar Pichai. Davos just took place - leaders from major economies are seeking guidance from these people who many people here work for. Let nobody say they aren’t participating in politics. Where you work matters, what you build matters. It’s not tinkering around in people’s garages anymore - they’re building the infinity gauntlet and someone is gathering all the gems. The Death Star plans are on AWS.
To pretend otherwise is to deny one’s responsibility - in the short term frequently profitable. In the long term, the pendulum tends to swing back..
But it is the right thing to do for "this topic violates HN guidelines both in letter and in spirit, as well as predictably causing low-quality discussion threads".
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
To the latter point, hundreds of comments in, and nobody has even brought up the intellectual curiosity angle of this (what limits are in place to the Federal government using data from Federal programs for law enforcement purposes? and does it matter if the program is administered by individual states?).
Instead it's just political rage bait, including citing the Rev Niemöller poem as if we're talking about Nazis.
(It used to be part of Internet culture that the moment you compared something mundane to the Nazis, you automatically lost the argument and were mocked mercilessly. We should bring that back.)
You're past the time of saying that and not being seen as an enabler my friend. This isn't normal politics anymore. They are killing people in the streets. If you don't think that your tech toys have a lot to do with that, then you should grow up. This pathetic point does not apply anymore.
There are no interesting apolitical topics. Food tastes good sometimes, weather is doing weather stuff, yawn. I feel like we sometimes try to seek conflict out of boredom
Tons of political posts are on the front page of Hacker News all the time. The ones I actually see get flagged are generally bad articles. Sure, there's real stuff that gets flagged down too, but Hacker News is far from a place where politics is always flagged.
Yes. I think the problem is people that drive into police officers, abandon their children or bring a gun to a law enforcement event then resist arrest. HN is full of activism these days and I’m tired of the support for vigilantism.
No the problem is bootlickers with less self-preservation skills than animals who bend over backwards to reject actual reality because they think they're in the billionaire pedophilic ruling class in-group when they're not.
