Thank you @dang for the in-depth and thoughtful information communicated in those links. You put a lot of effort and dedication into taking care of HN. Really appreciate that
Given how much has happened and come out in the last 48hrs alone. I would say there is a big unprecedented Major Ongoing Topic (MOT)
The MOT is the coup going on. You might call it something else, but you can definitely group a lot of the political news under unprecedented and illegal
Also, given the seriousness and impact of what’s happening, and considering how close the tech community is to some of the events and the people involved, HN is not just any bystander, it’s a pretty influential actor
Whatever HN does about this MOT, will impact not just the behavior of its users in the short term, but will likely also have repercussions in the future of the United States as a country
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 ;-)
Why do you say there is a coup going on? There was a peaceful transfer of power.
A plurality of the electorate voted for Trump to be the leader of the executive branch of the United States [1] and a majority of the electorate voted for the Republican Party to be in charge of the House of Representatives [2] as well.
It only seems like a coup because the policies of the current administration and current Republican Party are drastically different from preceding administrations but sometimes in a democracy these types of radical changes occur. It doesn't make it a coup.
I'm being quite serious here. I see much alarm over the things going on in the US right now but the stuff going on seems to be a result of democracy rather than a threat to it...
another question I had was what are your thoughts on spinning off a politics.news.ycombinator.com or some other official link from here, and letting the people that want to do politics have a space separate from the main site?
I don't know who would both want to and be good at moderating that.
Also, I'm not sure it would make sense for YC to fund it. HN is in a sweet spot that way [1] but the sweet spot is a fairly constrained corner of the internet, different but analogous to how I described the political constraints in my reply above [2]. I doubt it's possible to modify one variable very much while keeping the others fixed.
One big problem with that is there'd be constant tension about what political thingies were important enough to be on the "main" site; we'd just instantly recapitulate all the problems we have now, while also supporting a site full of inevitably awful threads as a sort of attractive nuisance.
I have a question. How can users here help you, Dan? Judging by the activity over the past 15 days have gone, the next four years are going to involve multiple MOTs on most days, and moderating that all seems like a lot of work for one person.
If anyone has a question that isn't answered at those links, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.