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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

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runarberg

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It's much worse than that actually.

Any tech + political thread is auto flagged + deleted because the mods don't want to manage flame wars.

So it's completely by design and also literally because they are lazy and don't want to fix anything.

Pretty simple actually. Not that deep. Just pure laziness

No, it's not laziness. It's protection.

HN is trying to be a place for thoughtful discussion, mostly about tech or tech-adjacent topics. Flame wars about political things are about the opposite of that.

Now, when tech intersects politics, then it's on a razor edge - is it going to turn into a tech discussion, or a political flame war? There is a tendency (mostly from readers rather than admins) to presume it's going to turn into a flame war and flag it to death.

Again, that's not laziness. That's trying to maintain a site where sane discussions can happen.

I guess text based websites / premium internet has completely hit its limits then.

Trolls won

Serious question, how should we be able to have a sane discussion during a genocide? The whole situation is extremely insane. The amount of death and destruction we are witnessing is anything but normal, and the fact that people are responsible for these horrors, that people are participating and contributing to it makes it all infinitely worse, very likely even a non-insignificant amount of people with accounts here on HN are contributing in one way or another.

I feel like letting discussions devolve into a flame war is the morally superior choice then to simply ignore it. When there is a genocide, we as humans are supposed to do everything in our power to try to stop it, no matter how performative and futile those actions actually are.

Nothing anyone says here is going to have any effect whatsoever on any matter of great political import. This forum is not the UN, or the White House war room, it's just a place for nerds to waste time talking about nerd stuff. Political discussions here are simply entertainment and intellectual diversion like everything else. And realistically unless someone has actual direct experience in the matter at hand, which most of us will not, their opinions likely aren't even worth the cost of the pixels they're rendered with, and the best thing they can do is STFU and let other, more qualified voices speak.

If you want to "stop genocide" get off of HN and do something practical. What? I don't know. Or accept that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and don't waste your time in yet another Hacker News hell-spiral of political nonsense, pretending like it matters. It never will.

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