Oh for God's sakes let it be. If you want to boycott Amazon then Fine. Do it. No one's stopping you. But don't spam other threads with your political views.
Amazon as a provider is not an option if you are going to host any material that will upset politicians in Washington. A simple phone call from a senator and your site will be down. This is a big deal if you run a media organization, a political activism organization, or a disruptive startup that politicians want to regulate to death (like Paypal back in the day, and ironic that today they cooperate with Washington against those who disrupt Government's secrecy).
Depends on your aim. If you are voting with your wallet and you want Amazon to know why, then spamming these threads doesn't do a lot of good. If you are boycotting and you want to recruit others to do so, then spamming these treads does do a lot of good (for you, the boycotter), but in the end it is a solicitation.
I agree with his "don't spam other threads" (and I think a real spamming would make any boycott less effective); I just don't think the comment amounted to spam (which is subjective of course).
You can scream boycott from the top of the highest mountain for all I care. Up vote every item that posts on your boycott. Just don't disrupt every other conversation on HN.
A "conversation" on HN is something with a diagonal shape (a comment replying to a comment replying to a comment, etc.) Adding a comment to something (a post or a comment) that already has other comments doesn't "disrupt" the conversation, it branches it. This isn't a phpBB.
I think you're mistaken. In this discussion, I actually found it quite disruptive to have to scroll past 60 comments talking about politics so that I could find the discussion about the thing we're actually here to discuss.
They have lots of places on the internet to talk about politics. If you want to do so, I bet you'll have no problem finding an appropriate place.
There's only the one thread, with those 60 comments in it—so that's really just an artifact of the fact that comment threads can't be collapsed on HN like they can on Reddit. With that addition, this system really does support as many tangents as the userbase cares to follow for any given post, without any egregious annoyance per user, up to a certain scale.
Past that scale (probably 1000 individual threads or so; rarely seen on Reddit, and never on HN), a secondary voting mechanism purely to sort threads by "on-topic-ness" might be required, or perhas an automatic sort on how similar in word usage the comments are to their parent, to derive some crude sense of topicality.
The way I see it, people are not going on random threads and spamming this sentiment. They are only commenting on companies relevant to the recent events. Like anything else it'll die off with a long-tail...
