Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

Where is elsewhere?

The big online communities I'm a part of are twitter, reddit, hacker news, and facebook.

It's true that hacker news seems to be different from those when discussing culture war topics. With hacker news being father to the right than twitter and reddit, and more center right than my facebook feed.

One conclusion is hacker news exists in a right wing bubble. The other is that twitter and reddit exist in a left wing bubble. Given that the median voter in the last election voted for Biden, but just barely, and maybe voted for a republican senator. And even the people arguing her being let go was justified are probably pretty center or center left. I would guess your "elsewhere" exists in a ideological bubble that is much stronger than the one hacker news exists in.

View on HN

> I would guess your "elsewhere" exists in a ideological bubble that is much stronger than the one hacker news exists in.

I am in a bubble where I mostly talk to college educated people and people who have educated themselves in a similar tradition or are well-read. Perhaps it is snobbish of me, but I am mostly okay with that bubble for discussion forums.

Conditioning on that type of person, who make up most people on HN, Reddit, and Twitter, HN seems like it is in a right-leaning bubble.

> Given that the median voter in the last election voted for Biden, but just barely, and maybe voted for a republican senator

Your assessment of the median voter is being super distorted by the geographic layout of the US, btw. The median voter did not vote for a republican senator.

You are self-aware enough to acknowledge you are in a bubble in that respect (as most of us are but not everybody likes to admit); you should consider going a step further and understand that the larger community you talk of ("Conditioning on that type of person, who make up most people on HN, Reddit, and Twitter") is itself a bubble that is perhaps rather more liberal leaning than society as a whole - or at least not as sympathetic to the more activist types being discussed here.

Even if in the long run it turns out your position becomes the mainstream, that isn't necessarily nearly the case now.

This is why your original "elsewhere" is being questioned as it's likely not a representative baseline in that regard.

Whatever HN is, it certainly isn't right-leaning.

> I am in a bubble where I mostly talk to college educated people and people who have educated themselves in a similar tradition or are well-read. Perhaps it is snobbish of me, but I am mostly okay with that bubble for discussion forums.

> Conditioning on that type of person, who make up most people on HN, Reddit, and Twitter, HN seems like it is in a right-leaning bubble.

If most of the people you talk to are college educated people who live in a city than you most definitely exist in a bubble. Remember 47% of the country voted for Trump(I doubt Hacker news came anywhere near this number). Of your friends how many voted for Trump? As an example I'm a college graduate in his 30's who lives in the city. 0% of the 20 people I talk to most often voted for Trump, and maybe 4% of the the extended 200 people I know, voted for trump. And of that 4%, 3/4ths voted for him begrudgingly. And I live in a southern state that voted for Trump. So when you look at hacker news and encounter opinions that are different than your own it might seem like Hacker News exists in a bubble, but I think it's far more likely your life exists in a bubble that's stronger than hacker news.

> Your assessment of the median voter is being super distorted by the geographic layout of the US, btw. The median voter did not vote for a republican senator.

The median senate voter would have voted for a Republican but that's mostly because California and New York didn't have senate races this year.

> you most definitely exist in a bubble

Why am I getting so many comments like this - I am pretty explicitly stating that I am aware that I am in a "bubble", my social circle isn't perfectly representative of America. That said, I think that restricting the forums I frequent to one's with primarily people who are well educated is a defensible practice.

My claim is this: among the sort of forums where people are actually having discussions about Timnit Gebru's firings (ie. highly educated crowds of people who pay attention to the goings ons in AI ethics, Google, etc.), HN skews right-leaning.

All this talk about the "median American" is irrelevant to what I'm talking about because I don't really care to be in a discussion forum with the "median American", particularly post-Thanksgiving.

> My claim is this: among the sort of forums where people are actually having discussions about Timnit Gebru's firings (ie. highly educated crowds of people who pay attention to the goings ons in AI ethics, Google, etc.), HN skews right-leaning.

There are two groups of people who are interested in this firing. People who are very interested in race and race relations. These people skew extremely left wing.

And people who are interested in technology, ai and machine learning who are probably center left.

The machine learning subreddit and hacker news are both part of this second group and only look like it's skews right leaning because the other discussion skew so far left leaning.

Yeah this is simply not true, the median American did not vote for a Republican senator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com