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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?
- marklubi 1y ago[flagged]
- techpineapple 1y agoThis! Let’s get back to talking about non-political topics, like science, economics, and technology.
- drcongo 1y agoCan't quite tell if this is a joke or not, but just in case it isn't: everything is political.
- fragmede 1y agoPoe's law strikes again!
- jackstraw14 1y agoAt 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?
- ahofmann 1y agoI'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.
- liumnber 1y ago[flagged]
- hakunin 1y agoOn 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- archagon 1y agoNot until we have a sane political climate again.
- tmaly 1y agoI don't want to see it on Reddit either. They should keep it somewhere else
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mooreds 1y agoNo 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.
- wsgeorge 1y agoI 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.
- Oras 1y agoAs 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.
- josefresco 1y agoIt's not just political news being flagged. It's also highly relevant tech and world intersecting news which is highly relevant.
- Mashimo 1y ago> Do you think Hacker News is failing to uphold its intellectual standards What standards are these?
- mouse_ 1y agoAt 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.
- mtmail 1y agoReddit launched 2005, HN 2007.
- JohnDeHope 1y agoThere'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!
- piva00 1y ago[flagged]
- josefresco 1y agoThis 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.
- miloignis 1y agoI hear people complain about this all the time, but all of the political content I see on HN is very critical of Trump.
- recursivedoubts 1y agono: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=trump&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIn 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 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.
- techpineapple 1y agoNot 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?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- red-iron-pine 1y agoYes.
- stubish 1y agoThe army of somebodies who don't want Trump or Tesla discussed veto upvotes, so on the surface yes. But turns out Hacker News is also siloed. Use https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active as your front page or an alternate like https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ or https://hckrnews.com https://hckrnews.com and you get the uncensored experience, with flagged articles clearly labeled but perfectly functional.
- tim333 1y agoThe HN guidelines: >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics It's not avoiding criticising Trump as much as avoiding politics in general. And there's a good amount of Trump criticism that gets through.
- tomhow 1y agoIn the past week there have been: 7 submissions with "Trump" in the title, and over 100 comments in the thread: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=true&query=trump%20comments%3E100&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... 9 submissions with "Tariff" in the title, and over 100 comments in the thread: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=true&query=tariff%20comments%3E100&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... Apart from perhaps LLMs, no other topic has had anywhere near as much discussion, and the stories and comment threads are full of criticism. You may not be seeing them because because they often get pushed down the rankings due to the flamewar detector, user flags and software penalties that are applied to submissions about politics and mainstream news. If those mechanisms weren't in place, the front page would be dominated by flame wars about U.S. politics every day, which is not what the majority of the HN audience wants. The intention of HN is to be a place to discover and discuss different topics that engage intellectual curiosity. But the stories, discussions and criticisms are definitely there, and are getting plenty of exposure on the front page.