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Maybe once the site gets 10x as big and the mod team gets overwhelmed, it could serve a purpose, but I doubt that to ever be the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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If you're looking to Hacker News comments for political insight like you hint at, you're expectations of the site are misaligned with what it's been established to be and what it's guidelines aim for. Seemingly, it's the same kind of misalignment that makes people loudly complain when political threads get flagged and killed. This site is specifically a salon where a bunch of pseudonymous "too smart" nerds opine abou…
Always some European or flyover state resident wanting to not feel left out of discussions related to SV.
Otherwise, the call is coming from inside the house when it comes to all kinds of traitorous behaviors. Plus, many people who are on here are immigrants. So, they’re living in Silicon Valley but they’re from China/India/Israel/etc.
The less HN behaves like a social media platform, the better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking to Hacker News comments for political insight like you hint at, you're expectations of the site are misaligned with what it's been established to be and what it's guidelines aim for. Seemingly, it's the same kind of misalignment that makes people loudly complain when political threads get flagged and killed. This site is specifically a salon where a bunch of pseudonymous "too smart" nerds opine abou…
Someone should create a Hacker news for politics. Moderation would be hell though.
The reason would be to have long running discussions which is the opposite of HN. Events evolve and so do discussions and details around them. Short lived threads also make it easier to memory-hole a topic.
But if people don't care, then cool.
Folks are allowed to be knowledgeable about things that are not directly relevant in their “county of origin” in the same way they are allowed to be ignorant about things that are relevant.
One where the users are completely anonymous and comments have no history attached to them.
One where the users have profiles and comment history but are not linked back to real life.
One where your real user profile / brand is at stake.
And have public analytical metrics to see what people are saying or what bot farms have been hired to say and who hires them
Moderation: Won't meaningfully impact moderation. HN can already see this info and they are the ones that take moderator action. It may hurt moderation/increase moderation costs because people may tend more to report content based on country instead of content.
Transparency: Outright influencer content (political or corporate) doesn't make it to the front page enough for it to matter, or if it does, I can't tell.
Anti-abuse: Same as moderation. Abuse reports should be processed based on content and not country of origin.
Meaningfully improves discussion quality: If a story is about something happening in a particular country, people who look like they are from that country might get asked more or different questions. This puts people from that country on the spot. They may get increased unsolicited communication or thread hijacks. Right now, if someone wants to be on that spot, they can voluntarily identify, either in the profile or in the post.
Possibly something useful would be a rule/requirement that claiming to be from a country different than the one you made an account from--seen either in a profile or post--requires verification for further posting, but if you never make such a contrary claim, the verification is not needed.