It's not all bad. We're here, aren't we?
Places like HN are rare these days. If there is anything similar, please let me know.
My point is, of course it feels comfortable amongst like minded people. But don't extrapolate that to mean this is somehow a special place that's uniquely accepting of all opinions. If you don't believe me, do what the guy in the article did, and play devil's advocate in a few comment threads here.
Edit: The Trump thing, from my perspective, seemed to get wrapped up in one post and then people moved on.
I'm with you on the Tesla worship.
There are some detractors.
And I think there's a lot of people here who, like myself, don't have much to add to the conversation and keep quite.
HN has a hard liberal slant. There are a lot of bleeding hearts in SV, so not much of a point to bring political views into tech discussions.
I try to avoid any "technical" convos on what people fear may happen when legislation doesn't even exist in the planning phases yet.
Too many irrationally scared people to have those exchanges.
I don't believe that to be true. Firstly "Hacker News" isn't a coherent whole, and also in any politically charged discussion here there are always diametrically opposing views.
There are pretty diverse political views here. I don't know if you remember all the HN discussions on Brendan Eich's political donations a while back, but things got pretty heated on both sides. The for and against arguments pretty much drowned out any opinions in the middle.
I used to enjoy Google+ for the same reasons. The crowd was smarter, geekier and seemed a far cry from the Facebook swamp. Unfortunately in the last 6 months or so G+ has been infiltrated. This place and a few subreddits are all I know of.
I'm sure the people on alt-right forums feel the same way about their fellow posters.
Alt-right forums have a specific agenda, the former would have none. I see HN in that regard, but that's just me.
> But the agenda of HN feels to me like "have productive, civil discourse, in a generally pro-technological advancement vein"
I agree with this. That is why I'm here. But here we also have a lot of censorship and imposed moral and behavior rules frequently unfair toward some types of discussions or arguments.
If, however, you don't think there are echo chambers here, you might want to look again.
The parameters are just different here.
The echo chambers here tend to be related to > surprise, surprise < technical stuff, and things can get pretty heated and occasionally mean. Fortunately there is a lot of self-policing here, but on some topics you might notice excessive downvoting of non-inflammatory opinions that simply run counter to what the herd is thinking.
People might not care about your gender/religion here, but they do focus on other attributes. I've seen people marginalized or dismissed as not being "real programmers" for using a glossy screen, PHP (not so much now, but PHP debates were really bad a few years ago), etc.
On any given day, you'll find some people who think that Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. are crooked and evil and will never change their opinion. On the same note, you'll also find people who think Apple/Tesla/Elon Musk/etc. are infallible.
More recently, if you look at the debates over the whether the new Macbook Pro is "pro enough", you'll see a lot of comments to the effect that "it's [not] like that for me, so it must [not] be true for you/everyone else [either]", which is pretty similar to the bubbles people sit in the non-HN world too.
But yea, aside from the tech-centric bubbles and biases, the intellectual climate here is pretty refreshing compared to Reddit, Twitter or FB.
This is what I was trying to say in my original comment. I guess I got a bit too hyperbolic :)