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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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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