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Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Dang is speaking about scenarios where there is no /r/ForHillary or /r/The_Donald to intermingle yourself with. You get both sides in one thread and are confronted with ideas that you may not agree with - or that you vehemently disagree with. Not that people "come to HN to see opposing views". Rather that they must see opposing views when browsing a thread. Then you get a bunch of conflict from both sides.

As an example, HN often has socially-related posts that hit the front page, such as today's Voice Modulation in the Interview Process (not actual title). This gets people from two very different sides that are informally split, depending on who you ask, as "overly politically correct regressives" and "stupid racist [___]phobic bigots". A bunch of conflict that detracts from the study/topic happens when those two groups butt heads.

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You're assuming that there's a very wide range of people that visit HN, you can't get viewpoints from people that don't visit the site. I'd be surprised if a highly tech focused site called "hacker news" didn't have a strong bias towards certain demographics and viewpoints.

You'd be surprised.

If only there were some kind of survey mechanism on the site to test the various hypotheses. ;-)

Well I've just checked the front page and it seems extremely focused on a small range of issues. So I'm currently unsurprised.

Is there an article about the huge benefit of for-profit journals? How abortion is an affront to God? How ISIS is trying to do some good in an area?

Are you really suggesting there's really no bias towards certain demographics or viewpoints?

Are you two disagreeing about something, by any chance? :)

You could add articles against drug legalization, articles from a conservative (i.e. not libertarian or liberal) basis, articles against increasing city density, articles in favor of cars and suburban living, articles in favor of strong intellectual property laws, articles on the religious ideas and uses of technology, etc.

There's a definite demographic that posts here, and it is very much an echo chamber.

Here is an example of what I claim is not the case. We see angry arguments about all of those topics on HN. They're not even infrequent.

My claim is that you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us in your position) perceive HN as an 'echo chamber' on such issues precisely because it isn't. I imagine there are small biases on some of them, but people exaggerate this into "groupthink", "bubble", "echo chamber", etc., not because that's how it is but because that's how it feels.

It is an echo chamber for some of the threads, for other - people agree to disagree.

> Well I've just checked the front page and it seems extremely focused on a small range of issues.

This is by "design". These are almost the only things that are on-topic here and we mostly like it this way. I'm sure you know.

> Are you really suggesting there's really no bias towards certain demographics or viewpoints?

No one's suggesting that, but the fact that you had to pick those odd examples to make your point is evidence that on many common issues (which I hesitate to name because even naming them makes sparks fly) this community is deeply divided. And when people complain about HN being biased against their view, it isn't ISIS or abortion they're thinking of.

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