I've thought a lot about how this might be studied empirically. The problem is that the only people who'd care enough to bother are people with a strong commitment to one side or the other, and any study they produced would be guaranteed to regurgitate the conclusion they've already come to—for a whole bunch of reasons, some obvious, some not so obvious. You'd just re-encounter the same problem at a meta level.

Here's a different way to look at it empirically. Can you, or anyone, find a single example of someone making a strong ideological generalization about HN that wasn't opposed to their own ideological preference? If my analysis is wrong, these shouldn't be hard to find, so let's start with an existence proof. I'm pretty sure I can find thousands of cases the other way around. If that's correct—thousands of cases exist on one side, close to zero on the other—it is surely evidence of something. I claim that it is evidence of a psychological mechanism, and not a weak one.

By the way, while I have you: would you please stop arguing in the flamewar style on HN? It's against the guidelines, it's destructive, and it's tedious. Snarky swipes like "or is that just a [fancy synonym for stupid]" destroy curious conversation and don't belong here. People do this when they're more interested in defeating enemies than in learning from each other, and this site is supposed to be for the latter, not the former.

You unfortunately do this a lot. In fact, the last time you asked me a question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879) I had the same feeling: that it was not a genuine question but a cross-examination, almost of a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort. There's a reason why we added "Don't cross-examine" to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

"Both sidesing" is another example. That's a reductionist label which doesn't reflect back to me how I actually see this problem at all. When you categorize what I'm saying that way, my felt sense is that you want to back me into a corner rhetorically, alongside a bunch of concepts I don't have, but which are easy to argue against. In other words, that you're advancing a step in a fight.

I don't enjoy this impression. I prefer the feeling that the person I'm talking with is curious to understand what I actually think and feel, and is interested in dropping any distorted perceptions they may have, rather than affixing them to me further.