I keep getting "join threads to see more posts like this" notifications on Instagram. Each time it's been entirely filled with people ranting about American politics, or carrying out the same sorts of discussions that kept me off Twitter in the first place.
As a non-American having American politics, or the American viewpoint of world issues, shoved in my face every day gets exhausting.
Everyone posting about $CURRENT_POLITICAL_ISSUE is not a great way to learn about the world, especially when they have no idea of what's actually happening and just post to feel good or be part of something. It's also way too biased for current US things. I don't need to see people talking about California fires for a month, and never ever hear about what's happening in my country. This is not "learning about the world", this is just a new flavor of the US cultural hegemony.
Bluntly, if I wanted that, I'll go somewhere else. Speaking as a non-American, American politics already takes up far too much oxygen in every dang forum I participate in. I appreciate places where I can find respite.
And I say that while commenting on HN about an American political post because when I see them, I just can't frickin' help myself... sigh
I don't mind the occasional post that is big news like this could be, but it feels like the number of politics posts has grown a lot lately. Most of it US-centric
Also you'll get American politics in your face on many subs, even generic topic-based ones. It's like I'm not even American, why would I want to see BLM stickies on every interest-based sub?
Or check out the top posts in /r/cringe or /r/publicfreakout. It's all related to Trump. It just gets so boring, repetitive and predictable.
I remember a time when constantly trying to shoehorn politics into completely unrelated online conversations was seen as a very American phenomenon. I'm starting to see more and more of it from my fellow Brits lately though. Sorry to drag the thread even further off topic...
American Politics in general dominates almost all online conversation spaces, as someone who doesn't live there it has essentially ruined most internet forums in English for me.
I used to think people who banned politics from the dinner table were being closed minded, but I get it now, they're fucking bored of the topic, and it creates tensions that the topic is underserved of. It's the same discussion over and over again.
As a non-US citizen, the amount of US politics content is frankly way too much. It affects subs that should have been apolitical, like r/pics, r/science, r/coronavirus. I hoped things would calm down a bit after US elections- it did, but not nearly enough.
Truth is, I personally wouldn't mind political content, I regularly read NYT, obsessed over every update in last US election. My problem with Reddit is that there really isn't interesting political content, same old DT-bad-AOC-good over and over again.
Some niche subs are exception, but they won't ever make front page, and will be heavily brigaded if they ever do.
I have the opposite experience. Try discussing pretty much anything (from latest news, to car repair, to salad recipes), and see how quick it goes to bashing GOP and Trump supporters. As a non-USian myself, this gets really tiring pretty quick.
I don’t think these things, or even a lot or the other political topics are uninteresting. I’ll often still flag them, however, since I’m really very uninterested in what the HN crowd who responds to these sort of things have to say about it.
Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.
Good point. Honestly, in Spotify I don't even want to see political content from people I agree with. Sometimes I just want to take a break from my European duty to care about US politics 24/7, but it's getting hard to do so anywhere on the internet.
All the political stuff just ends up making me mad and probably ends up pissing off certain acquaintances if I jump into a thread. Why would I want to continuously look at that stuff?
It really is. I know the mods discourage standard political threads, but I wish they’d rule out even the more interesting ones, because even those are never really interesting or unique discussions. If someone wants political discourse, Reddit exists. It can also be had on Twitter (a) if you’re careful about who you follow (b) with far more interesting and knowledgeable participants. There’s just no value to having those battles here.
Currently, if you're in the US, you're mostly missing out on people re-posting articles about politics, rants about politics, expressions of solidarity with protestors and so on.
Reddit front page is too political. I'm non-American so most of it isn't even relevant to me. I wish all social media had a "No Politics" button for the user to auto-hide all political posts.
As a non-American having American politics, or the American viewpoint of world issues, shoved in my face every day gets exhausting.
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