Hacker News Reader

Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with reddit also and twitter - indeed all social media.

The main problem is that US political elections "season" runs for 2 years! So out of every 4 years, half of the time is campaigning season so it means that the rest of the worlds social media is polluted with "tons of political crap" 50% of the time.

For US folks: look at how other western democracies run their electoral campaigns to help understand this. They tend to be much much shorter in duration. For international users - remember that for Americans, it's normal to be swamped in political campaigning pollution for half of their time.

View on HN

American politics became Americans nightly entertainment, its a saturated behemoth with an insatiable appetite. It will not be long until election campaigns are non-stop. There's simply too much money in this game.

Any time you can spend a half a trillion dollars without accountability, you have a massive incentive to spend all of your time either trying to obtain that power, or trying to defend it.

To be fair, there's basically no sports or festivals or other distractions going on right now. Politics and politics-adjacent action are the biggest topic with zero competition.

> This is the problem with reddit also and twitter - indeed all social media.

Twitter provide a great solution; the ability to mute words. Just mute the names of election candidates and a few other choice buzzwords and all that noise will be gone.

Well, that the US presidential voting system is weird, is out of the question. But simply having a shorter campaign before election is no magic bullet either. Here we have the saying, that politicians only listen to people during the election. So shorten that time, shortens the window to get through with something.

But from a rational and idealistic point of view, none of this makes much sense. Campaigning is a huge waste of everyones attention and energy.

>Well, that the US presidential voting system is weird, is out of the question. But simply having a shorter campaign before election is no magic bullet either.

I disagree, before the election start here the politicians won't even be sure who will be candidate, then the flyers, walking trough the streets will not happen, there will be no debates on TV. When campaign starts soem peolpe get activated and they will try to promote their favorite party/ person - I am OK with that I would like an option to not see those posts, or an option to hide all posts from this person for the campagin duration. I think this persons think they are doing the right thing and informing people etc I just don't care and when I open FB once a week to see if there is some message for me I would like to see only relevant stuff.

Anyway, here in Romania I do not see many political posts outside electoral campaigns or when the government is doing some shity stuff and people are calling them out , or when some politician says a stupid thing and memes are created about their idiocy(now thinking about it if you have politicians that say a lot of idiotic things often you get a ton of political memes/satire ).

How do you figure it runs for 2 years? The presidential primary starts in the same year as the general election.

It is true that 2 out of 4 years are US election years, but that's because of the midterm elections in the middle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com