Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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I'm confused. "That post" is the OP or your comment?

I was responding to your claim about HN being politically biased. One data point doesn't demonstrate anything about that; people post all kinds of things. However, one post can easily trigger feelings of bias, and frequently does. I believe that's because we're all inclined to put weight on the data points we dislike, and meanwhile don't notice so much the ones we like or agree with. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

What I'm saying—perhaps I didn't read you correctly or didn't express it clearly—is that your perception that HN is massively biased towards the right-wing is (a) untrue, and (b) a consequence of your own political feelings. People with opposite feelings look at exactly the dataset and derive precisely the opposite perception. There are dozens of examples of this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870, and countless others floating out there. What's most remarkable is how such comments, though making opposite claims which cannot both be true, resemble each other perfectly in every other respect. That is evidence that some common mechanism is producing them. I don't know if it's the notice-dislike bias or some other mechanism, but it definitely isn't accurate assessment.

Your post listed a bunch of political positions and tropes from two rough areas: far right and centrist. It’s true that the two camps are particularly upset at each other in the US over pointless culture differences despite having little disagreement materially.

You didn’t list any examples of anyone even railing against left or far left positions, either real or perceived. No seizing of means of productions, forming worker’s councils, arming the working class, general strikes, abolishing private (not personal) property, black nationalism, revolution, etc. Not even just trade unions.

You can argue all you want that the two camps you described both perceive HN to be biased against them, but both you and them entirely ignore the existence of actual communists. The range of your comparisons stops well before going that far left. So how can you even analyse whether HN is biased towards the (global) right if your range of politics doesn’t even extend to the left past the US mainstream?

Aren't you assuming your conclusion? There are many socialists, social democrats, and other leftists here. If you call 'centrist' anyone who isn't an 'actual communist', ok, but that's nonstandard. By the same logic, someone on the right could argue that HN consists of 'far left' and 'centrist'.

If your complaint is that HN is skewed to non-communists, that's obviously true, but not interesting—what large population sample isn't? Actually there are indeed 'actual communists' on HN—not many, but we have our share. Who's ignoring their existence? I think they're interesting!

I didn’t say that there are no communists, I’ve seen a few comrades. However I’ve mostly seen liberals (conservative or otherwise), quite a few fascists (sometimes mask-on) and sometimes socdems (who are centrists). Rarely socialists, communists or even just genuine anti-imperialists, and generally more downvoted than the fascists.

Surely a fellow Marxist would understand the overall ideological superstructure of western imperialist societies and furthermore the material base of a community focused on yeoman dreams at best and bourgeois domination at worst?

I wasn’t even complaining, just pointing out fascists are more welcome here than anti-imperialists. After all, the post by an anti imperialist that I replied to is now removed.

> fascists are more welcome here than anti-imperialists

Alas, we're going in circles now. That's certainly not true and a classic example of overgeneralizing from skewed data.

Can you really not understand why we'd moderate a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26368582 without appealing to ideology? It plainly violated the site guidelines, and the account had been breaking them aggressively (and surely on purpose) even after repeated requests to stop.

That's bog-standard moderation based simply on trying to keep the forum alive for interesting conversation, as opposed to flamewar and scorched earth. Interesting HN conversations can and do contain interesting comments with anti-imperialist ideas...but this case was obviously not that.

The only data I have is what I’ve seen. What quotes you provided described the two sides of the US political spectrum, which is widely understood to be significantly skewed to the right with respect to the rest of the world.

Moderation policy is itself an ideological choice. Seeking civility and avoiding meta-commentary doesn’t affect all political stances evenly.

That's true, although seeking civility is not the issue here. We dropped that language years ago because it leads to wrong associations.

The issue is that we don't want the site to burn itself to a crisp (the well known default outcome of internet forums). If you've got a better idea how we can achieve that, I'd love to hear it.

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