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Examples of this?
The most recent interaction I had was a user saying CNN and Fox news are equally bad because one of CNN anchors once said "we" in the context of democratic party.
Also my original comment is at -5.
The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively than any polling is reporting. Also a shocking amount of support for Chinese governance.
The perceptions of 'skew' that you're experiencing are fraught with cognitive bias. Whatever side you're on in any divisive topic, I guarantee you that the opposite side has exactly the opposite perceptions—that is, they strongly believe that HN and its moderators skew the other way. Here's a small sample from a long list:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17197581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032682
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429442
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342402
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23396632
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21368961
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461976
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627676
Ironically, the reason these commenters have exactly the opposite perceptions is that they have exactly the same cognitive biases. It seems we all have them. In fact, they're so powerful that one can basically infallibly predict someone's political leanings from the complaints they post about HN skewing the opposite way.
What are these biases? There are at least three.
One is that we are more likely to notice and assign greater weight to things that we dislike. Pain makes a deeper impression than pleasure. A bee sting is more memorable than a field of butterflies. Two or three bee stings and you will be convinced forever that the site is skewed toward bees. I've written about this many times—it's really the dominant dynamic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Unfortunately nobody realizes that it's the dominant dynamic, so nobody questions their own perceptions of skew, so they come into the commons feeling surrounded by enemies, regardless of what's actually going on there.
A second bias is that people assume that HN is like the rest of the internet when in fact it has the unusual property of being non-siloed, meaning we're all in one big room together. This has the effect of making a site which is in reality more coexistent feel like instead like it's worse and more conflictual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
A third bias is that we have so little information about each other from small blobs of internet text, so we connect the dots and fill in the blanks to create a picture of who we're dealing with. Unfortunately, because we curve-fit the picture with material drawn from our own imagination, we end up recreating our own demons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
I puzzled over this for years: why do internet commenters have such a perfect ability to push all my buttons and drive me crazy? Eventually I realized: the only person who knows where all my buttons are is me. I'm experiencing other people as an evil-genius button-pushing nemesis because I'm creating that picture of them. Everywhere we encounter opposition or conflict, and lack objective information to check our perceptions, we're prone to recreating and re-experiencing our own shadow. Other people are doing exactly the same. What does this mean? It means that we're a forum of demons experiencing other demons.
Thus it's a wonder that this place survives at all, and it may destroy itself before long. The intention on HN, from the beginning, has been to try to stave that fate off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
I don't know what to do about this, other than try to clearly explain the dynamics to people. I guess the model is that if enough of us can gain enough awareness of how these biases are at work in ourselves, we can get a little freer, and a little more able to help fellow community members with that same process. At that point maybe one would start to see a social effect. I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of this model actually working, as of yet.
I still think it’s a great place, fwiw. It’s not intended as wholesale condemnation. Every community is bound to have a leaning, and I’m part of some others that lean more progressive / leftist.
It's just that, given the circumstances, staying apolitical can almost seem like a deeply biased thing to do.
But having rowdy political flame wars on a computer-focused site isn't super great either... tough choice for moderators I guess!
It seems that, up to one standard deviation away from their own views (or sense of the norm), people's response to a different view is "huh, that's interesting". But when you get to two or more deviations away, the responses start to become "that's disingenuous", "who paid you to write this", "you're a communist party shill", and worse. (I'm using 'standard deviation' metaphorically—I haven't measured this. But I bet one could.)
In reality, though, there isn't a norm, and there are many more deviations than expected. HN has the look and feel of a cozy forum, not a public square, let alone a network of public squares all over the world. This perception gap between what people expect and what's objectively happening is the source of nearly all the perceptions of astroturfing, shilling, manipulation, brigading, botting, and spying that I've personally investigated on political topics—especially when it comes to accusations of government manipulation.
How do I know this? First because I've spent countless hours studying the data and countering abuse and manipulation on HN, and I've basically never found anything that looks state-directed. Of course it's possible that governments are clever enough to fool us whilst leaving no traces in our data (even while posting comments that some users consider obvious propaganda). But we can only go by what we can objectively look at. If we just toss out the need to have evidence or data, all that's left is imagination, which is what dominates internet discussions about these topics.
Second, the users that other users make accusations against turn out to be real people, often with long histories on HN, who simply have opposing views. Often those views are because they grew up in a different country or their families come from there or they spent time working there, and so on. I've looked into many of these cases personally, and what I've found is that the accusations were deeply unjust and that the accusers, unintentionally, were behaving like a mob. This is distressing. I don't have to agree with the users being attacked, or support whatever side they may belong to, in order to feel like they don't deserve this. Indeed, I'm sure you and basically every other HN user would agree and feel the same way. Nevertheless, it happens anyway, because these things happen unintentionally and collectively. It's an ugly dynamic, and people have actually been hounded off of Hacker News because of it. This is how we turn ourselves into a community that none of us would want to be part of. The only prophylactic I can see against this is for us as individuals to become more conscious of how these dynamics work, and what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like.
I wrote about this extensively when this came up the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495490. There are a lot of links there to past discussions of this topic.
On the matter of "what the situation we find ourselves on HN objectively is, as opposed to what it feels like", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
I will say that from my own experience (by definition anecdotal) on HN that there seems to be a quick, reflexive downvote for anything mildly critical of the Chinese Communist Party, that then sometimes then gets voted back up, sometimes not.
Since, by the nature of the platform where anything downvoted becomes less visible, comments so downvoted quickly may never even get the chances to be upvoted back to visibility, unless readers go out of their way to look for and correct the issue.
Speculating on why that is, is necessarily low-data in an anonymous setting, but I wish mine had been true, that it was state sponsored. The alternative that HNers are deliberately siding with the Chinese government in relatively large numbers is sad.