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Comment by hamax | Hacker News Reader

The comment is probably downvoted because it's a popular conspiracy theory that Google blocks bad suggestions about specific people the "liberal establishment" supports. In reality Google hides all bad suggestions about people. You can see the same difference in recommendations for "donald trump is a".

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This sounds like a very bad reason for downvoting. The post didn't say anything regarding that conspiracy theory - so the most damning thing is the particular name used. That's a lot of interpretation, which might end up being correct, but answering as m3ta did is a much better response.

More importantly, you're on a site full of liberals, and people here downvote because they disagree with somebody, not because the content itself is low quality.

I, for one, think that regardless of your political views (I didn't even know who George Soros was), this comment was very high quality.

I disagree that that's the explanation in this case. I've definitely noticed the liberal bias in other comments, but this is just beating the dead horse of a conspiracy theory.

I downvoted because I spent hours looking into the related theory that Google was trying to influence the election by only showing positive autosuggestions about Clinton, only to conclude that the algorithm generally doesn't autosuggest negative things or allegations of crimes. (You can try with figures like OJ Simpson, Bill Cosby, etc.)

So, like the tired old discussions we have all the time (but Go doesn't have generics!, "if you're not the market, you're the product", etc), I downvoted since I don't think it was related to the discussion, particular interesting, or insightful.

Thanks for the explanation.

The comment is implying things that aren't true. This is why it's low quality and downvoted. The fact that you don't know who Soros is doesn't change that.

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