X, Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook are all places for battling over politics. There is no shortage of places for people to exercise their freedom of speech to massive audiences online.
There IS a shortage of places for entrepreneurs in tech. Think about the reality show “Alone”. Contestants there never are allowed to talk about politics, though I am sure they all have strongly held opinions. What makes the show worthwhile is it has a sole focus on outdoor survival. If they allowed people to rant about politics half the time, most of that value would be gone.
HN is a small, niche community in the grand scheme of social networks / upvote sites.
If mods continue to allow all of the irrelevant ragebait politics, the site will lose all of its actual target audience.
Also – I understand the desire to have huge audiences. I chased that adrenaline rush myself when I was younger and had a blog that got hundreds of thousands of viewers and hundreds of comments… but then I realized I had lost my actual voice and just was posting garbage clickbait like demotivational posters. So I quit and my audience shrunk far down, but the site actually became something of value again.
I am not asking for a new policy, I am asking for this existing policy to be enforced:
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they’d cover it on TV news, it’s probably off-topic.
An article about legislation changing something relevant to tech like the DMCA rules would great to see. But don’t let those stories be buried in a mess of political arguments that have nothing to do with tech, even if people get very angry about whatever those issues are.
If users flag down an irrelevant politics story, mods should not be resurrecting it, even if they agree with the story. Mods should be far more active in flagging down irrelevant politics. The people who want to argue will find another site to do it on.