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Top post on hn with 0 comments; seems fitting given the topic.

edit: welp, this comment is now completely irrelevant.

I expect many comments here will be made using new accounts.

imo hn is fairly moderate when it comes to social issues. I think the user base (being mostly tech/eng/stem ppl) approach social issues with a similar logical approach they use in their most aspects of their work/lives; sometimes they/we can be critical to a fault (but I'd take that over left/right political extremes any day).

Am I totally off? I'm interested to hear how others would rate hn on a scale of 1-10 (lower = more liberal).

Collectively, HN is more classically liberal than anything. There are some strong leftists and some strong libertarians, but generally Marx or Ayn Rand aren't regarded too highly. Centrist liberal enlightenment values are much more en vogue; think Biden, Macron, Trudeau, Merkel, The Economist, free markets but some government is useful, climate change is real. Generally anti-trumpism but also anti-"woke"/left.

A 1-dimensional scale is missing quite a lot in terms of politics. But if you mean classically liberal, it's a 2 out of 10. If you mean US liberal-conservative politics, it's a 3 out of 10.

I tend to agree with your assessment; 'classically liberal' is a good way to put it.

> free markets but some government is useful, climate change is real, anti-trump, anti-woke.

yep that describes me. However as a 'classical liberal' I personally like Obama's politics over Biden, Macron, Trudeau, and Merkel. Also I enjoy reading both Marx and Rand.

dang banned anyone with an original opinion from the right under the guise of civility

And yet he hardly needs to given that any such opinions will be flagkilled in seconds. It's pure spite.

This is why I view HN via a telegram bot that posts the top links. Let’s me see what was flagged.

You can also turn on "showdead" in your profile settings.

I always browse with showdead on.

Is that why every RMS post gets nuked from orbit no matter the comment count?

RMS?

Richard M. Stallman

That’s a little harsh. Politically charged arguments are just not in the spirit of HN in dang’s opinion

I agree with the idea of having a space where we aren't constantly culture warring, but you have to bear in mind that if you ban political speech then you still inherently permit status quo political speech. And the status quo here is California liberalism.

Posts that masquerade as “legitimate dissenting opinions just not getting a fair shake from the left by golly” but which really seek to undermine structures by which systemic racism can possibly be called out and held accountable for harm (like the framework of microaggressions) deserve to be flagged and shut down. They don’t serve any free speech or intellectual honesty purpose to preserve discourse and the psychological safety to disagree, and they are roundly disingenuous tools for filibustering actual legit discourse and progress. It’s just taking crass tools of hate groups and dressing them up with five dollar words and armchair discussion of academic freedom of expression, when really it’s just hostile noise jamming against progress.

I’m inclined to agree with you, but my sense of the status quo here is more libertarian than anything else. Might be confirmation bias.

I think some of the older membership is libertarian. I'm from the UK and my impression of California politics is that there's a strange mix of libertarianism, liberalism and leftism but that all three have strong socially liberal characteristics.

Nobody has banned politics on HN. There are a zillion explanations of this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Tedious, eternal flamewar is another matter. The point of HN is to have a place on the internet that isn't dominated by that.

As for "the status quo here is California liberalism", everyone thinks HN is dominated by the other side. The GP made the opposite claim (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26732300). In both cases it is imaginary.

I know you don't ban politics, that's why I chose the specific phrase "culture warring" - I think its a good policy. I think my phrasing after that point was just bad though as I didn't mean to b expand that scope to political speech in general.

Could well be confirmation bias on my part that this place seems to skew Californian in politics.

Ideologues of every flavor say that - they just swap in $hated-object to complain about. The irony is how isomorphic all these enemies are.

Plenty of examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870, and there are a lot more where those came from.

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