No politics please, we're hackers, too busy to improve the world
Jacques M,<p>Presumably, you have read through the comments of the referenced thread[1].  If so, your essay omits a perspective about politics dicussion that many HN participants have.  I&#x27;ll attempt to summarize that position:<p>1) Yes, politics is extremely important.<p>2) Yes, politics <i>touches every subject</i>.<p>3) Yes, HN readers perform technical work in programming and hardware that affects politics, and vice versa.<p>4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of <i>emotional</i> comments instead of <i>insightful</i> ones.<p>5) The overall <i>net effect</i> of political discussion on HN is <i>negative</i> and we&#x27;d rather not have 1 of the valuable 30 slots of the front page taken up by a political story (e.g. &quot;Trump denies climate change.&quot;)<p>To reiterate the points above, it does not mean &quot;climate change&quot; is unimportant or that HN posters are <i>&quot;burying their head in the sand&quot;</i>.  That&#x27;s a 1-dimensional caricature of the people who&#x27;d rather get their diet of political discourse from somewhere else besides HN.<p>Therefore, it&#x27;s possible to <i>simultaneously</i> hold the view that politics is super important and they don&#x27;t want it on HN.  Your essay doesn&#x27;t address this perspective.<p>[1]  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13108404" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13108404</a>