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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

It's penalized on HN the same way we downweight all mostly-political or ideological publications. But such sites do come up with the occasional interesting article, and on HN we care about the article, not the site. Same with Jacobin or something like that.

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"ideological" meaning not matching the HN ideology of course

Leftists think HN is rightist, rightists think HN is leftist. We moderate on both sides of the ideological abyss, in the hope of preserving HN for intellectual curiosity rather than ideological battle. One can't have both.

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.

Maybe if Jacobin published articles on Lysenkoism and denounced rootless cosmopolitans.

I haven't examined their corpus. But actually the worst articles aren't particularly relevant. On HN we're interested in the good articles. Bad sites sometimes produce good articles, and those are the ones we want here. Conversely when a good site produces a bad article, we don't want it here.

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.

And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten's sake.

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.

Where do you draw the line? People have submitted VDARE.COM links, and, in fact, more of them have survived flagging than not. I assume there's some kind of threshold past which we're not accepting articles no matter what their quality.

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!)

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