
Show HN: Hide all Snowden-related HN links with a Greasemonkey script - bpodgursky
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/171743
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pvnick
Hacker News is the one place I've consistently found good information related
to this extremely important case (that and Greenwald's twitter account
itself). It's important to the HN community because we're typically
technology-minded and libertarian-leaning, and these topics strike at the core
of the privacy debate and "big data" issues. Therefore it seems to me to be a
great place for Snowden-related news.

Of course if you want to use this plugin go right ahead. But don't start
grandstanding with philosophical statements about how "HN is only for
startups" and "this site must stay away from politics" because 1) that's false
and 2) you're probably not a moderator.

~~~
tptacek
Respectfully, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. The people who are saying that HN
"isn't for politics" aren't making that up; it's right there in the site
guidelines.

The cognitive dissonance you have here comes from three things, I think:

* The moderators on HN take an extremely light touch with moderation; most of the stories that get "dead'd" on HN are killed by user flags, not directly by moderators. I think this is even more the case now that the "flamewar detector" is in place; stories that might have earned a moderator intervention 3 years ago are now left to be auto-buried by the flamewar detector. Buried != dead.

* The "no politics" guideline on HN takes a back seat to the politics of the people who run HN. All signs point to Paul Graham being on your side of the Snowden and Manning cases; for instance, if you follow him on Twitter, he has posted supportive links. Similarly, Graham chimed in on a gun control thread in (IIRC) favor of gun control.

* Many of the NSA stories that have appeared in the last few weeks have also been highly technical. There's a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that gets played to try to connect the dots from any political story to hacking and startups, such that Ron Paul supporters have ready arguments for why their stories are germane to HN, but those stories tend to get flagged off anyways. Here, we're talking in large part about the internal retention policies of Google, and it's hard to make an argument that those stories aren't at least somewhat germane to HN.

I've given up on the idea of flagging political NSA stories, but I would have
a big problem with anyone drawing the conclusion that HN now encourages
political stories. It doesn't, and it shouldn't, and it won't if it expects to
maintain a civil community. Political discussions on HN spark enmity; people
who could discuss eloquently and at length the details of programming
languages or linguistics or literature instead follow each other around from
threat to thread downvoting out of spite.

~~~
adventured
I disagree. I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting the site guidelines.

This: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless
they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

It does not say HN isn't for any politics. It says "most stories about
politics" but does not say all or any. It has a further clause which I would
argue absolutely pertains to the relatively new phenomenon of PRISM and its
cousin programs.

Clearly Snowden / PRISM / etc and other stories like those about Aaron
Schwartz fit in perfectly with Hacker News.

All that said without implying that HN should be all about politics. I think
there is room on HN for specific political issues that are of interest to
hackers.

~~~
tptacek
I think you and I said the same thing with different words (though I'm not
sure how "perfect" the fit on these topics is; I'd rather there was 1/10th the
amount of NSA coverage, for instance, and even less about Snowden himself).

It's "Swartz", by the way.

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aidos
I'd like to point out there are just 3 stories on the front page that this
will remove - this being one of them.

~~~
bpodgursky
Yeah.. sadly I had to temporarily turn turn off the script to read the
comments.

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bpodgursky
I'm sick of seeing nothing else on the front page. I'll go to
reddit/r/politics when I want constant updates on his flight itinerary.

~~~
austenallred
I understand if Steve Jobs dominates the front page when he dies, because he's
Steve Jobs. But Edward Snowden has dominated the front page for a week, and
little else slips through? I only hope enough people use a script like this
that non-Snowden stories can gain traction.

~~~
goldfeld
Are you joking? The death of a man who has contributed as much or more
negatively to our industry as he did positively (on different spheres), and
who gets the full frontpage only because he attracted a legion of irreparably
clueless people, is more important than a case of the world's privacy in
danger? (of course, it has been going for years, but it's great to finally hit
the spotlight)

Sorry if I'm offending someone, but I find the comparison really offensive
myself.

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eieio
Was this removed from the front page? It was in the top ten maybe 30 minutes
ago, and now I can't find it in the first 4 pages...

~~~
bpodgursky
Thread got hellbanned I guess. Hopefully it didn't ban my account as well.

~~~
eieio
Well I appreciated your post!

I see your comment without showdead so I think you're good.

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andrewcooke
fwiw, this seems to have been removed from the main feed (i don't see it in
the first 200 or so entries) and "ask". you've got what appears to be a
hellbanned thread.

oh the irony:

1 - hiding a thread "in support" of posts arguing for less secrecy;

2 - the people who would be most annoyed by this are the ones your script
gives the bird to.

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NameNickHN
Day 1: Hooray for Edward Snowden. Day 2: No get the hell out of here. We've
enough of you. You're boring us.

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vardl
Why talk about Snowden when we can all discuss flavor-of-the-week javascript
and rails crap that few people in the real world actually care about?

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jardaroh
Why? :s

~~~
mfieldhouse
Because HN isn't a politics site. In fact it's not even a tech news site.
That's what the likes of mashable are for.

~~~
buro9
Technology is a tool, how you use that tool is an expression of politics,
whether or not you consciously think it is.

It is inevitable that on a technology site, politics relating to technology
will come in.

~~~
jiggy2011
Do they need to be ~80% of the front page though?

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jardaroh
yes. Especially when it is of this importance. Even IF it was 80%, which of
course it is not.

~~~
jiggy2011
It isn't 80% right now thankfully, but it has been at many points over the
last few weeks. I don't see what purpose it solves apart from making people
avoid HN.

