
Ask HN: Where Are the Protest Discussions? - whythewho
I understand that HN tends towards apolitical content, and the benefits of that. But on a day where protests and riots are filling the streets, the silence here is eerie.<p>Should we not be discussing actions that we can take to join the people on the streets?<p>Protests are a surveillance issue. Protests elevate the voice of otherwise unheard people. These are problems which members here seem to care about regularly.<p>Where are these voices now?
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yorwba
There has been lots of related discussion in the past few days:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=true&query=Minneapolis&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

If you want to have threads like that every day, you'll probably have to look
for a more specialized site that is more tolerant of repetition.

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Klonoar
Ah, you must be new here. This site is the epitome of "don't bring politics
into tech".

It's a policy that really needs an overhaul for the modern world.

~~~
dang
That is far from true and always has been (or at least since 2008). We briefly
tested a 'no politics' rule in late 2016 but that was purely as an experiment
just to see what would happen, and we quickly reverted it.

The issue for HN is not that politics are off topic or "don't bring politics
into tech", as if these two things could be kept distinct to begin with. It's
that internet forums have a strong tendency to devolve into flamewar.
Political flamewar will quickly take over the site if allowed to. That would
destroy HN for its mandate, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).
So we can't just not moderate such threads.

Excluding politics is not an option either, for a bunch of reasons. One is
that many of the topics that get discussed here have a strong political
overlap. It wouldn't serve intellectual curiosity to exclude those.

Therefore we need a more complex approach that includes some political topics
and discussions while excluding others. I've written many explanations of
exactly what our approach is and how we've worked it out over the years:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20political%20overlap&sort=byDate&type=comment)

Some good threads to start with might be
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396).
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869),
which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the
argument _about_ politics on HN.

If you (or anyone) take a look at those past explanations and still have a
question that isn't answered there, I'd very much like to know what it is.
It's been a while since I've heard a question that isn't covered by the
approach we've worked out, which makes me feel like that approach is the right
one for this site. There are a _lot_ of constraints on this problem, given
HN's intended purpose, the dynamics of the internet, the political world, and
current social trends. It's a bit of a miracle that any solution exists at
all, and I have a hunch that the one we've found may literally be the only one
possible.

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dang
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361912)
for one answer to a similar question.

