Ask HN: Is Hacker News avoiding criticism of Trump?
Do you think Hacker News is failing to uphold its intellectual standards by not actively challenging Trump's statements and actions?
I know this aligns with HN's rules against political discussion, but isn't avoiding critical debate on Trump contributing to cowardice within big tech?
Get the politics out of HN. Seriously, go away with it. If you want political nonsense, go to Reddit.
On the contrary, I don't want political _nonsense_. What loss would it be if we couldn't discuss politics under the same guidelines[1] we use for other HN discussions. Places like Reddit allow chaotic non-thoughtful one-liner slogan/meme discourse. If we manage to discuss politics according to HN guidelines, I don't know where else you'd find this level of thoughtful discourse on the internet. It does stress-test this site, but so far it's been able to handle it.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not necessarily sharing that view, but that is the answer for all the posts, who claim that criticism of trump/musk/Tesla/USA etc. is censored on hn. Enough people are sick of all that politics and want their old hn back. So they use the tools, that hn gives to them and down vote and flag posts.
Not until we have a sane political climate again.
This! Let’s get back to talking about non-political topics, like science, economics, and technology.
At what point do we start talking about the effects current politics are having on these things? Or just avoid that too and pretend it's not happening?
Can't quite tell if this is a joke or not, but just in case it isn't: everything is political.
Poe's law strikes again!
[flagged]
This thread was dead BTW, I had to "vouch" for it in order to comment. Yes, posts critical of the current US regime are being flagged. I already emailed admins about it, who said they "don't think it's a coordinated campaign". This was back in February, the behavior has continued.
I hear people complain about this all the time, but all of the political content I see on HN is very critical of Trump.
no:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> Do you think Hacker News is failing to uphold its intellectual standards
What standards are these?
In my experience in the last few months political stories come up regularly. Most are flagged, but the ones that aren't tend to get many hundreds of votes and many hundreds of comments. So the flagging tends to act as consolidation into a small number of stories.
For instance, this one is currently on front: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43610246
If you're looking for the political comment on the smaller stories, use an alternate interface like hckrnews.com -- the discussion happens long after they've been flagged off the front page.
No data but just anecdotally I don't think HN folks are avoiding criticizing Trump more than they did avoid Biden or other world political figures.
I think there's an tendency to avoid discussing politics of any kind. I have seen a few political discussions get flagged or penalized off the front page.
Yes.
There's too much overtly political content on HN, and it trends towards liberal, anti-Trump, etc. I agree with it about half the time. But the other half of the time it's like some mainstream leftist media stream got randomly interspersed into HN. I have a ton of places to go to find out how awful the regime is, no matter if it's 2020 or 2024 or whatever. They're all equally awful. Please get them all out of HN!
[flagged]
I tend to see a lot of criticism of the Trump administration when such topics come up. One "standard" HN tends to uphold is not following every single turn of the news cycle. This is why political discussion isn't as active here as it is on, say, political communities on reddit.
As you said, it’s not Trump related, it’s against the rules to have political discussions which is great. Please don’t convert HN to another Facebook or twitter.
It's not just political news being flagged. It's also highly relevant tech and world intersecting news which is highly relevant.
Not that I don’t like to dunk on Trump when given the opportunity, but just honestly Trump doesn’t lead in a manner that leads to deep HN style discussions. If there were a few policy wonks on his team that released 100 pages of explanation on trade, we could discuss that, but as it stands, Trumps leadership aligns with sort of the “bad” side of politics, in that it’s mostly emotional/intuitive and there’s not a lot to discuss. He put out, what 1 page on his tariff decisions? There’s a pretty global consensus they don’t make sense, what’s to deeply discuss?
At its core, this website is strictly about making money. We're not here to criticize the decisions, terrible as they may be; we're here to see if we can capitalize them. From what I understand, Reddit was spun off from this site back in the day for such discussions.
Reddit launched 2005, HN 2007.