Comment by kornaki

> and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged

It's not exclusively (or mostly) U.S.A. residents who complain about contemporary politics topics getting flagged. We see plenty of complaints from Europe and elsewhere.

We've long accepted that there is a large overlap between politics and technology. The Snowden leaks in 2013 were huge on HN, as were several other Wikileaks releases well before that.

HN has never been a politics-free zone. It’s just subject to the same standard as everything else on HN: there has to be some “significant new information” to the story.

As a Canadian I have a different perspective.

I am upset when stories that are critical of the country that has threatened to annex my country are spiked by people who don’t want us to pay attention to the actions of the American government that is aided by American tech corporations and the people who work for them.

From my perspective we’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about an existential threat and we shouldn’t be letting these people’s inability to talk about these current events constructively be the reason why we can’t talk about them at all.

We should continue to talk about things like open source, self hosted software, digital sovereignty, defeating DRM, surveillance, and sousveillance and the real world reasons why these things matter.

We shouldn’t let people with brainrot stop us from talking about these very important things.

This might be an open door, but I use the amazing HN-reader app called Hack which offers a filter that hides posts via a list of keywords you can manage. Of course some false negatives happen this way, but I don't mind about that.

Front page consists of 30 links. If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.

Right now I see two posts about Rust (don't program in it, don't care), Kyber is hiring (retired, not interested in a job), etc. That's fine though, I just don't visit those links/comments.

I thought the question was about you reading the news, not about you preventing everyone else from reading the news.

Surely the answer is, when you see news related keywords in an article title, to simply not click through. Same as when there’s so bit of technology or corporation that doesn’t interest you.

OK well, it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news, so cutting down on it probably doesn't help the nuance building. Aside from that there are a lot of Americans on HN, it's reasonable that they expect to be able to discuss what effects them.

I haven't really noticed politics of other countries get flagged that much, does it? Other than stuff that looks like propaganda from one country against another, that seems to get quickly flagged.

Finally I don't know what makes you think that HN is an unrelated to American politics forum, given that the guidelines of what the forum is for is quite lax.

I second that and I think the HN moderation (@dang) here should do a better job keeping things on topic. That is actually super important because HN will eventually just be another reddit. Quality of conversation here has been deteriorating already significantly in the past years due to more and more people with insignificant curiosity about technology and science but all the more interest for engaging in pointless political debates.

There are other platforms for discussing Trump and his shenanigans. Reddit for example.

I sympathize, and the attitude may be annoying, but you've got to realize you can not bury your head in the sand about the global rise in fascism, nor the fact that what happens in America affects the entire world. Imagine if you were to transfer your comment back to WWII era, perhaps you're French and you're saying that you're tired of hearing about this little kerfuffle between Germany and Austria... well, clearly the disinterest did not pay off.

"doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen…"

Sounds familiar. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Attribution appears to be a matter of debate.)

> Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.

If you mean extermination camps, they knew. They were also part of occupied, conquered and heavily terrorized lands. They occasionally did something, terrorist attack against Germans here and there, usually retaliated against by killing a lot of random citizens. Usually motivated by plight of own people.

Extermination camps were located in Poland - German plans involved moving away and killing all Polish, so that they can be replaced by Germans. Germans seen Jews as primary danger to be exterminated fast, Slavic as secondary lower value being to be exterminated slowly in time. Polish army lost the war. And random villagers were not in position to do anything about the highly violent occupying army.

(And yes, Jews were at danger of being denounced by anti semitic locals too. Turned out one could be subject of racial oppression and being oppressor himself).

With the news being so biased it could very well make you less able to participate in democracy effectively.

Maybe the villages around concentration camps did nothing because they were consuming nazi propaganda.

Anyone downvoting this is either ostrich or a fan of Trump.

If you already have a prepared list then fair enough, but what are you personally doing to take part in the healing of society that consuming mainstream news media helps with? The person you're replying to hasn't said they live as a hermit and don't engage in any part of their local society.

I fully agree that it all seems fucked and there is no point in following anything other than specific tech stuff I'm interested in. Anything else actually important someone else in my life will probably mention it to me. Or the explosion will vaporise me and knowing it's coming won't have helped much.

> When the world is on fire and people are suffering

The problem is that the world is always on fire and people are always suffering.

Especially so because now we hear about the whole world’s problems, and no matter how peaceful a state the world is in there’s always a war or something happening somewhere. It’s been like that for all of human history and I don’t expect it to change any time soon.

I don’t think it’s healthy to live your whole live hearing about these problems that you have no ability to affect at all. In my experience it only has negative effects on your life and whether you’re tapped into the real time news feed or not, it doesn’t actually change these events in any way.

You can still be a proponent of change and discuss these changes with local politicians and what not without being on a 24 hour news IV.

However, looking at the current political climate in my own country, I too have lost faith in them solving local and global issues. When the people I can vote for don't actually solve pressing societal problems, then what's the point? Now factor in the influence of people in large countries that are in power that I can't even vote for...

There is a glimmer of hope that the EU now seems to have finally found some balls somewhere though, with their response to the Greenland situation. Maybe they've finally learned that a strategy of appeasement does not work for strongmen in power (hey, that sounds familiar...)