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Comment by writepub | Hacker News Reader

It's a rather disappointing truth that HN whales, and HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats. You'd think a tech focused forum would be more diverse, but there's only one viewpoint kosher here. Unfortunate that the very people screaming for diversity lack basic tolerance for diversity of thought.

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> HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats

This is the hostile media effect: ideological users see the platform as dominated by their enemies. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671955, where HN is "the techno-libertarian norm around here".

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...

HN is made of humans, and humans project concious and unconscious bias in their actions.

Though perceptions may vary, there certainly is one ideology that can be scientifically proven to exist among HN whales. It may or may not be the one I perceive, but to pretend like HN whales carry no ideological baggage in their voting is inaccurate.

Maybe a poll, or sentiment analysis of the most Up-voted and down-voted comments can reveal this.

Thanks

Upvotes here may != correctness, but they are a pretty good proxy.

I've been here for a while, and most comments on policy/law really are downvoted for being dumb, not for whatever political label can be pattern-matched to it. If a suggestion presented in your comment correctly accounts for first-order effects and at least pretends to account for second-order effects, you can argue things that match pretty much any political ideology out there, as I've seen done here many times.

(Related, classifying things by political labels doesn't lead to correct answers in general.)

True that upvotes!=correctness. But the idea of karma and incentivizing those with higher karma with more privileges on HN basically means Upvotes=correctness for purposes of being heard on and being able to mould HN.

For all practical purposes on HN, a politically left leaning viewpoint is more likely to incentivize the op, and turn HN more left in a vicious cycle of Upvotes/Downvotes

As one someone I think you'd count in that group, I can say that you are unequivocally wrong. I am fairly active on this forum and I don't really reply to people who say things I agree with because its already been said. There is a surfeit of libertarians on this forum that give me opposing viewpoints to debate, as well as a minority of corpratists

I partially agree with your general criticism. But as conservative in tech, I'm completely with the lefties on this one.

You don't have to be a "left leaning, socialist Democrat" to disagree with the comment. It is rather worthless as an argument since it just a classic appeal-to-popularity fallacy.

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