I hear you, but I don't feel that HN is that influential, and I feel like what influence it does have would evaporate if we tried to use it. HN works best as a place to meander, with unspecified side effects.
Since some people perceive discussion quality to be (relatively) high on HN, they often want to redirect its focus to things that are more important to them (such as urgent public issues or, less loftily, promoting their own stuff). But if those things did grab the focus, quality would go down, making the forum less desirable.
I know that the quota we put on political discussion here—allowed to some extent, but never so much that it dominates—can be frustrating. Why not relax the constraint, especially in urgent times, and apply this valuable resource to things that really matter?
The answer is that the constraint is not arbitrary—it's not a dial we could just turn up if we wanted to. There's a limit on how much political load HN could bear before its character changed. To know how it would change, just look at the political threads we do host: they are by far the worst and nastiest that appear here, and moderation has limited ability to do much about it.
If we moved in the direction that that vector points toward, HN wouldn't just get a little more like that—it would get a ton more like that, because these effects compound. In other words, if we tried to turn that dial very much, we wouldn't get "HN, but with more politics". Rather, HN would cease to exist.
Thus the problem space is more constrained, and the solution more overdetermined, than one would guess at first. We can't move too much in any direction, and this leaves a lot of users unsatisfied.
Btw I found some past threads where this same point came up:
FWIW, I've noticed that HN features heavily in FastGTP's responses (by Kagi), it occasionally throws my own (recent) comments back at me, which is a bit unnerving to be honest.
YC itself is finding itself in the midst (or outskirts) of several current political discussions including associated ventures and personnel.
HN is also sufficiently of general interest that the New Yorker ran a profile on its moderators a few years back, as you may recall ;-)
Since some people perceive discussion quality to be (relatively) high on HN, they often want to redirect its focus to things that are more important to them (such as urgent public issues or, less loftily, promoting their own stuff). But if those things did grab the focus, quality would go down, making the forum less desirable.
It's one of the feedback loops of this system: things that make HN better attract things that make it worse, so there's a cap on how good the site can ever get (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I know that the quota we put on political discussion here—allowed to some extent, but never so much that it dominates—can be frustrating. Why not relax the constraint, especially in urgent times, and apply this valuable resource to things that really matter?
The answer is that the constraint is not arbitrary—it's not a dial we could just turn up if we wanted to. There's a limit on how much political load HN could bear before its character changed. To know how it would change, just look at the political threads we do host: they are by far the worst and nastiest that appear here, and moderation has limited ability to do much about it.
If we moved in the direction that that vector points toward, HN wouldn't just get a little more like that—it would get a ton more like that, because these effects compound. In other words, if we tried to turn that dial very much, we wouldn't get "HN, but with more politics". Rather, HN would cease to exist.
It works the other way as well: we can't turn the dial down much either. Trying to exclude politics would be neither possible nor desirable for reasons I've explained elsewhere (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219906 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and the links from there).
Thus the problem space is more constrained, and the solution more overdetermined, than one would guess at first. We can't move too much in any direction, and this leaves a lot of users unsatisfied.
Btw I found some past threads where this same point came up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786150 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443080 (Feb 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438384 (Feb 2018)