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Comment by ythl | Hacker News Reader

/r/politics used to be extremely anti-Clinton not too long ago... instead strongly favoring Sanders.

But yeah, you'll never see a single pro-conservative story on /r/politics

The pro-Sanders bias was so extreme that it was actually pretty amusing to watch. He'd lose 6 primaries in a night but win, say, Wisconsin, and every front-page post would be about his win.

The users there made the same mistake Trump makes after a well-attended rally. If you're surrounded by supporters, then it's hard to reason about how broad your support really is.

Reddit's userbase is relatively young. And even young, white, males aren't really feeling the GOP these days, so it's not really unexpected for r/politics to skew a bit left of the nation as a whole.

Of course these things are all relative, as some people (again, probably younger) would consider pro-Clinton and pro-conservative to be the same thing from their perspective.

Except it's not a "bit left". It's literally full of anti trump and pro clinton posts. No ideology involved.

I've seen polls with Trump coming 4th for people in the younger age groups, so again, on the face of it, that doesn't seem unexpected to me.

Up until shortly before Clinton won the nomination, you would find a mix of anti-Trump, anti-Clinton, and a bit of pro-Clinton stories on /r/politics, but that quickly shifted to be almost exclusively anti-Trump and pro-Clinton stories. I'm genuinely not sure why that happened; perhaps former Bernie supporters getting on board, perhaps brigading.

How on earth did the polarity flip on that one? Amazing.

It didn't really. Sanders lost the nomination and a large chunk of his supporters are supporting Clinton now as the "less bad" option.

As the election approaches, many more ordinary people start paying attention to politics. In the year before an election, political forums are filled with die-hard supporters of candidates that inspire the most passion; now, the vast contingent of people who prefer Hillary have entered the discussion.

It's almost as if there were a group of people who felt that the record needed correcting in /r/politics. So to speak.

Mission accomplished, by the looks of it today.

It just means that the sub is more "anti-trump" than "pro-clinton" right now, even though the end result in both cases is similar.

Through the magic of money and super PACs

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac...

Hillary is spending 6mm+ on Internet astroturfing.

In most of the anti-Trump things I am seeing on /r/politics, the top comment(s) are generally anti-Clinton, or at least more rational about a dislike for Trump based on things he has actually done or said.

It's not hard to understand at all. Dominating the voting in the new-queue takes a lot of effort. When Bernie was in the race such efforts had a potential pay off. Now that Bernie is gone there's no longer any reward. The reward has now shifted to getting Clinton elected and/or keeping Trump from being elected. Incentives drive behavior.

The GOP has a lot of work to do for pro-conservative stories to exist again.

Well now, yes. But /r/politics has almost always been this way, even when GOP had fairly good candidates (Romney)

They're certainly in a worse state right now, but there's plenty of ammo to use against either side. /r/politics is very much a biased, liberal operation. Forget pro conservative; you'll never see anything on there which suggests any level of impropriety against a democrat (well, aside from the Hillary bashing when Bernie was still in contention.)

The demographics of reddit users probably do lean towards a more liberal/libertarian group, but r/politics certainly has no problem with bashing Democratic party members, employees, or appointees.

A quick search proves this out: there are tons of highly upvoted posts calling out Obama, Holder, both Clintons, Spitzer, Geithner etc. This is actually what fueled a lot of the fervor for Sanders - he brought together the disenchanted Paulite libertarians, lefter-than-Obama liberals, and anti-establishment independents.

Did those posts crop up around the time Bernie was throwing his hat into the ring, or well before?

Many long before. Prior to Bernie, the classic stereotype of a redditor was a Ron Paul supporter and I'm sure it would still be skewing much more conservative if western conservatism hadn't completely degraded into nonsense. The demographics are evening out, but the dominant viewpoint is still a straight, white, college-educated male, which has traditionally been a strong predictor of conservative tendencies.

Ah yes, I do remember the Ron Paul surge.

Well if you assume Hillary is a conservative...

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