By flagging this thread you are effectively suppressing a very important discussion about the tech community's roles and responsibilities in the social and political worlds. As I mentioned in another comment, this industry tends to eschew political awareness. Which is ironic, because that passivity enables some of the biggest issues that we in the tech industry oppose (surveillance, irresponsible data collection, etc). There is real, visible, connective tissue between politics and technology and while ignoring may be the most comfortable thing to do, it's also the most irresponsible.
I also believe this is a terribly important topic to discuss, with special relevance for the HN community (not that I need to prove that, the number of comments speaks for itself).
I have emailed the mods, and will update with the reply I get (if I don't end up banned).
Our email address is all over the place but the best way to find it is via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, so you get a refresher on the site rules before you email us. Sometimes a question will answer itself along the way.
To call this drivel is specious. It's not a political cartoon, it's about illegal torture methods. The tech industry, with its tremendous growth and influence, has a responsibility to pay attention to these things.
What other things do we, as an industry, have a responsibility to pay attention to? Environment? Health and sanitation in developing countries? The civil war in Syria? HIV? There are a variety of areas where tech could play an important role in changing the lives of (b|m)illions of people. How do you draw the line? What makes torture (which I would argue is completely unethical but directly affects few people) more important than hunger (which isn't an ethical issue but which clearly affects millions)?
This type of behavior should have been expected from the day HN announced they weren't allowing political news on their site, just over a year ago.
It's pretty irresponsible: Primary news outlet for an industry that is already noticeably lacking in social and political responsibility decides to put up another set of blinders.
Low EQ Silicon Valley refuses to use its influence to affect political change in any meaningful way. Or even just political awareness. Ironic when you consider this political/social passiveness enables the same surveillance capitalism that this community is constantly complaining about.
"No politics" was an experiment that lasted less than a week. It was clearly labeled as an experiment at the time. I don't think that it's current HN policy.
Is the experiment really over when politically-adjacent threads are still getting flagbombed and removed? Just because it's not in the site guidelines doesn't mean it's not being actively enforced.
> Is the experiment really over when politically-adjacent threads are still getting flagbombed and removed?
Yes; that was happening before the experiment, too. Most general political news has been officially OT on HN long before the experiment, and remains so under the general guidelines. The experiment was effectively a ban on that small subset of political content that would otherwise be generally within the guidelines.
OK, but you talked about "the day HN announced". That's different from user behavior. (And I'm not sure user behavior changed all that much. People flagged political threads before the short-lived official ban, too.)
