Expressing frustration at a sudden bunch of downvotes on a post that shouldn't have been downvoted is understandable.

I'm in favour of down voting and I think people should be doing it a lot more on HN, but it is frustrating when reasonable posts are downvoted.

Reasonable posts? I dont even have the power to downvote, but I would if I could, Why? Because first its patronizing, >I really don't get how people can be so naive on HN. Let's talk about Snowden all day and wish we were more like Russia, where it's perfectly ok to say anything you want.

No one said or implied this, simply that russian people were understanding there was something deeply wrong about the situation.

>Sorry guys, but not every one really believes the NSA should be disbanded. They have a real job to do. Certainly there needs to be limits, which we could of course discuss for years on end, but I don't see the point of doing it in a forum that really isn't suitable for the topic.

Nobody said this besides extreme and unthinking people and to suggest it is simply a strawman. Secondly, "I dont feel like talking about it", well then dont click the article and dont submit a comment.

>Ok, back to the echo chamber. 4 downvotes and this message disappears. Well, I do need to try occasionally. HN used to be a great site.

Asking for it.

I hope you can see where people would think this post adds very little to the discussion and in fact is inflammatory in some respects.

> I hope you can see where people would think this post adds very little to the discussion

Yes, but it's a crap link so all the posts are worthless.

Except they're correct. HN has always been an echo chamber and the groupthink here is thicker than most places.

It's been worse lately, I wish all political debates were banned in this place. IMO HN should be a technical forum first and foremost.

There are plenty of places on the internet do discuss politics, this doesn't need to be one of them.

There is and always has been a massive overlap between technology and politics, especially computer technology.

To try and have a purely technical forum without any politics at all when dealing with the subject of computers, would be to ignore many of the main players and originators and also the motives that led to the existence of much of the technology.

The current news with the NSA is political, sure, but it is also as technical as it gets.

Be the change you want to see.

I mean, I'm guilty of the same thing, too.

Really, I think the problem is that I (or you) click on these obvious political headlines. It's not like it's not obvious what they are from the headline, so they aren't hard to avoid. I'd compare this waste of time with being fat; the problem isn't the candy jar; the problem is that I /eat/ the candy in the candy jar.

Honestly, here's the thing for me - I agree with your comment in theory, but in practice, I'm not so sure. This forum was never meant for politics, and I think it's a real bummer that a potentially large faction of the readership here will forever have a tarnished view of the discussion here due to the strong political bent of the last few weeks. But in practice, I really don't know where else to go to see smart people discuss this topic. I know lots of places to find lots of people loudly agreeing with each other on one side of the debate or another, and I know some places where people debate it with the I'm-more-stubborn-and-louder-than-you methodology. Certainly the discussion here has been guilty of both of those sins at times, but I've yet to find a forum with more adversarial but civil discussion than this one.

Suggestions?

Let's just flag those posts that we think don't belong here.

Careful, if you do this too often you'll lose flag privileges.

Besides, since pg has commented on a few of these posts approvingly, and since stories that would be [dead] within minutes previously now regularly top the front page, we have to assume he is OK with "Snowden News" at least for now.

How about starting by not commenting on posts you aren't interested in.

This submission has zero technical content. There is nothing in this discussion that is relevant to people running an online business in a world where PRISM exists.