A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles. Posts like these are low-key attempts for Quillette to legitimatize itself.
Going by article quality rather than site quality works well for HN and has been this way for a long time. We have various penalties for various lower-quality (for HN) sites and various ways to override them.
While this is a reasonable standard when it comes to brimstoning cities, I don't think it's a sane way to moderate a forum. Send forth your angels to Quillette and I imagine they'll quickly report it's a site that advocates phrenology and can be nuked safely. Having it appear on HN is bad for HN and not principled even-handedness.
Non-racialized Quillette articles, by the way, have mostly served to endumben HN. See, for instance, "Sokal Squared" and "Mathematics Intelligencer".
(Jacobin doesn't belong here either!)
That doesn't stop anyone from perceiving bias, indeed obvious bias ("of course"). It's the instant reflex that every ideologically committed user experiences, but it's in the eye of the beholder. People's own views determine how they imagine HN's bias or mods' bias—not only which polarity they perceive, but how intensely they perceive it. If you tell me what bias you perceive in HN, I can tell you what your own politics are. This is perhaps the most reliable phenomenon we see on HN.
Re: the “cement milkshake conspiracy”, the Portland police’s official twitter account posted a warning about cement milkshakes. For a (short) period after that, it was entirely reasonable to mention it as a real possibility.
Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Quillette pieces (~50/50 for me), it should be obvious that it is a legitimate, even valuable publication. If you’re having trouble seeing this, perhaps you’ve been caught in a social media echo chamber.
You seem to be familiar with them, so I think that you're aware of this, to be honest.
You state this as if it's fact, instead of just your opinion.
People who consider themselves public figures from "the intellectual dark web" have time and again made clear that they have virtually nothing in common with the alt-right (Sam Harris on countless occasions, for example).
In your OP you say,
>A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles.
Can you list some examples please? This hasn't been my experience as a casual reader of Quillette.
I’ll also point out that you’re calling me “disingenuous” in one breath while broadly painting several individuals with wildly different politics, audiences, and personal ethics with the term “alt-right” in another.