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Comment by htsh | Hacker News Reader

Yeah as a user since 2007, it went noticeably conservative in the last year or so (which is when many of us moved to Reddit). And it's not just conservative leaning but really pointed partisan stuff.

I hope they can figure out a way to solve this sort of thing going forward. And I'm curious if their choice of either digg/bury instead of upvote/downvote makes it easier to game. I believe it does, as these folks haven't been able to do the same with reddit. I'm not sure, but I believe a story is gone once it gets a certain number of "buries" whereas on reddit a story with a lot of downvotes can be easily resurrected by upvotes. (though I could be wrong about this?)

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Well the main reddits have a sharp liberal bias. When people from other subreddits who don't conform to this view speak up they tend to get smacked down pretty hard and quick.

I think it's both Liberal and Libertarian. And Ron Paul is quite popular there.

Also, there's still a difference between something that happens there and what the Digg Patriots are doing in that they are conspiring to game the system. There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.

Edit: I think we see the natural split of progressive v. libertarian on reddit, and both parties are represented very well. Perhaps there's not a neo-conservative/fox news voice, but I would not be quick to blame that on some sort of conspiracy as much as I would on the difficulty one has reasoning with these sorts of extremists. They are not there to engage in dialog as much as they are there to poison it.

> There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.

As far as we know.

People tend to self-segregate in real life. It makes sense that it should happen on the Internet, too.

Agreed, but I think this is a little beyond self-segration. If they just wanted to self-segregate, they'd find stories they agree with and digg them up, but extending that to also ruin other people's discussion is another thing. They are gathering with the explicit goal of drowning out other voices outside of their self-segregated group.

Perhaps another reason reddit isn't as susceptible is that it allows for user-created subreddits where like-minded folks can form such hives.

Happens in real-life. Look at how many news stories you see about some speaker coming to a college and being shouted down (or food being thrown at them) so they can't speak.

A long time ago I read an interview with Charlton Heston. He said during the filming of Planet of the Apes, the costumes took so long to put on and take off that they left them on during lunch. One day he looked around and realized: all the humans were sitting together, all the gorillas were sitting together, all the orangutans...

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