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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Every online community has its biases. For HN, it's being anti-MS and pro-webapps, anti-desktop. Less than reddit, but still noticeable. Upmods are pretty worthless when it comes to these subjects.

Getting all your tech news from places like HN or reddit can be harmful, they distort reality significantly.

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I do not get the impression that Hacker News readers are anti-Microsoft. It's more that Microsoft is mostly irrelevant for a community interested in startups and web applications.

Indeed, I don't see that much anti-Microsoft people these days. Microsoft is mostly out of the picture entirely.

Paul Graham wrote something similar about 3 years ago so it's not a new deduction: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

I actually don't think there's a particularly strong anti-MS bias on HN. There's just a lot of uninformed commentary by people who haven't even heard of more than half of MS's businesses.

I don't think that's the case with any other company or subject.

What other news sites would you recommend to a HN reader to help balance this out?

Metafilter might be a good place. Good news commenting sites with a great user base aren't exactly a dime a dozen.

The problem is with the comments, not necessarily with the news pieces.

I don't recommend any news sites in particular. I would look for the blogs / sites of competent people in the industry I'm interested in and watch those.

"Every online community has its biases." Agree but I have yet to see a pro-MS online community. Maybe in gaming?

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