I feel completely the opposite. HN has become quite an echo-chamber. Diverse views are not celebrated and encouraged. I usually and deliberately poke popular opinions to get a good discussion out of it and it has been disappointing.
Perhaps it's apparent on some level to your audience that you're doing this to raise some sort response, not because you have a strong affinity for a particular position? The last thing I want to do is gorge on the junkfood emotion of false outrage.
Can you elaborate? Are they downvoted, or just not presented in the first place?
The main thing that gets downvoted is angry tirades without evidence, and it happens to most political views/religious views no matter what side they're on.
I only have an up arrow.
You apparently also need 31 karma to do so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437
Usually it's flame wars and nonsensical rants where the commenter appears to be off their medication
Meanwhile people are happy to have all sorts of conversations that will get you canceled elsewhere about gender, race, and vaccines (so long as the conversations are analytical anyway)
Try to see which comments are flagged and analyze why should they be flagged because of politics, spam, rudeness, ideology, not-factual, bigotry, etc. I'd say a significant portion of them are completely legitimate or interesting, just doesn't fit the ideology/politics here.
It's also possible to that I've changed, may be taken a red pill, I try to have a super sensitive self-introspection and try to objectively analyze what went wrong in flagged or downvoted comments.
Anyways, it's been mostly nice and to be honest, addicting. I still continue to visit HN, but will probably dial it back way down and just read weekly newsletters and avoid exposing myself to extreme-ideological positions here.
That's too bad! I usually find honing in on specific examples as the most effective way to explore a topic. But I understand the possibility that it could take the conversation down a rabbit hole.
> I'd say a significant portion of them are completely legitimate or interesting, just doesn't fit the ideology/politics here
I've yet to come across many flagged comments (or had any of my own flagged) but this feels like a strange motivation on its own. I feel like flagging should be reserved for comments that break the site guidelines?