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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Most of the [dead] post are just spam. Some are just off topic. If you see one that is not spam, you can vouch them, and if it is really great you can write an email to the mods. (It's a manual process, so only write about the very good post.)

There are some corner case, like people that make very simple technical post like "How to sort a list in Python using the standard sort function", and submit every day one of them. A good discussion about different sorting algorithms is nice, but a two lines post about [1 4 2 3].sort is not.

It would be nice if you link 2 or 3 examples.

View on HN

And anything political that doesn't meet the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset. At least those who downvote and flag posts and comments, tend to effectively cancel particular views a lot.

Pretty sad state of affairs, as the hivemind remains a political bias, as new users don't have the same rights to manage visibility. Even on Reddit the Hivemind can't kill a comment completely. IMO comments/posts should never fall below 1 karma points, karma shouldn't be visible, just affect ranking, and comments only be removed by moderators, with an explanation, which community rule was broken.

This is an inaccurate view of HN. It has to be, because the people on the opposite side have an identical view, only with the high-order political bit flipped. That is, they're wrong in an exactly symmetrical way. Here's a taste—there are many more where these came from:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427915

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615692

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779614

In reality, HN is divided on any topic that is divisive in society at large, including all the variations across the different countries represented here. That's a lot of variation.

Once you get over how both $X and anti-$X users pronounce HN to be an "echo chamber" (or "cesspool", an old favorite) controlled by their opponents, it's a bit of a puzzle how that is even possible. How can people come up with 100% opposite views of exactly the same thing?

I think these false feelings of generality are generated by the mind because the comments one dislikes make a much stronger (and more painful) impression on it than anything one likes or agrees with. The more one dislikes those, the more pain they cause, and the mind responds by creating an image, almost like an organ might secrete a membrane to protect itself. This explains both why these views are so identical (except for the high-order bit) and why they're most often posted by the people who have the strongest feelings for or against $X.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Unfortunately this creates a situation where everyone with strong passions feels like the site is dominated by their enemies and they're basically surrounded by demons when they spend time here. That's not so good for community.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

In reality, HN is probably less hostile than similar places of comparable size on the internet. It's just that it's organized in a way that keeps everyone together, so you're much more likely to randomly bump into remarks that you passionately disagree with. On other sites people protect themselves from this by subscribing or following or connecting primarily with users of their own tribe, and come into contact with the other tribe only when going out on skirmishes. I wrote a mini-essay about that if anyone cares:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

And yet these comments are not downvoted or dead. Just the claim of bias isn't evidence of bias. I would also confidently say, the nature of the comments you linked are very much different: I didn't merely stated "but the other side!1!!", but argued about the inherent power dynamics of HN's workings. Let me ask you, should my comment be flagged and downvoted?

The right has adapted a generalized "No U!" line of discourse, most prominent in the moral panic of "cancel culture". It's always based on the distortion of semantics and therefor false equivalency, ignoring context.

Please show me examples of actual arguments leaning politically left, which got upvoted and tolerated by the Hivemind. Please, try it yourself.

It is not both sides. There is a difference in intention and semantics.

The comments I linked to above were downvoted and dead. I unkilled them so that readers who clicked on the link (and don't have 'showdead' turned on in their profile) could read what they were linking to.

> Let me ask you, should my comment be flagged and downvoted?

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903933, of course it should! It breaks more than one of the site guidelines, e.g. the ones that ask you please not to use HN for ideological battle and please not to go on about downvotes.

I'm sorry, but the phenomenon I'm talking about could hardly be clearer: the hivemind, to use your term, has both right-leaning and left-leaning devotees, some of whom are extremely passionate; the deep irony of the situation is how much they resemble each other. Both show up a lot on HN—their presence in the comments is likely far greater than their numbers in the community, because passion makes one more likely to comment on the internet. Both deny that their side is as common or as influential as it really is, and both make out that the other side is the dominant one and that therefore HN is under its control or in its pocket.

All that is just empirical observation. Whether the psychological mechanism I'm proposing to explain it is true or not, I don't know, but the empirical observation is the important part. No one can look at these things objectively and not see the similarity, indeed the isomorphism, between them.

Fair point about the unkilling.

Otherwise, I guess we have to agree to disagree.

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