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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

This isn't true. It leans extremely heavily left-wing so you won't get an accurate crowd-source opinion that disagrees with left-wing politics. There are pockets of conservative views but it's generally heavily left wing and you will get banned from many subreddits if you espouse any views to the opposite.

EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.

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There are plenty of non political conversations on Reddit, it's a really big site.

Why on earth would you crowd-source your political views?

If by leftwing you mean neoliberal, maybe. The bans ive gotten over the years for posting leftwing views and ideals tells me it isn't leftwing at all.

Reddit is not left-wing. Could you define left-wing?

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You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.

90% of people might believe 2+2=5, but that doesn’t make them correct. Facts aren’t a majority rules scenario.

But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.

There's a saying, attributed to Max Planck: "science advances one funeral at a time". Sure, there's facts. Avogadro's number is a specific fact and is incontrovertible. But how about gravity? I mean, 9.8 m/s² is it and that's also a specific fact, but then you start looking up into the heavens and what's this dark energy and now there's dark matter and okay so MOND's been disproved?

Facts also have framing. If you pay attention to the incidence of crimes on the nightly news, it feels like society is falling apart, but then you look at the bigger picture and real statistics and things aren't actually that bad?

In the sloppy real world of facts that are messier than 2+2=4, we don't have anything to go on other than what most people around us believe, and because there's only so much time in the day, as humans we emotionally believe whatever we want. There are some crazies who have spreadsheets output facts for them to bet on, and they make a lot of money off of that, but they're a minority.

When is any discussion a simple fact? If it was, you could just list it on a static website.

I think the problem is that people get their incorrect world views from Reddit.

The comment was specifically about "opinions" not "facts".

It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).

During those thousands of years was there information showing the majority was incorrect?

Yes, they could see chemical reactions happening around them all the time, they just didn't understand what what they were looking at.

If you believe something and there's no evidence to the contrary that's understandable. The majority were wrong but they had no reason to think otherwise. They also lacked the formal science, like the scientific method (widespread) to properly investigate.

A person from the 1200s is not stupid for believing everything was made from four elements but a person from 2025 would be.

That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.

If I need an accurate crowd sourced opinion about the Dyson v14 Portable Vacuum I need to take politics into account?

Reddit is far from left wing, liberal maybe, but not left wing.

Yes exactly. Actual left wing communities get banned on Reddit (like Chapo Trap House did a while back and when I started visited it a lot less)

Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.

Being balanced and respectful doesn't make you correct.

But it leads to something more important.

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."

No but it puts you on higher ground to discuss differences of opinion like adults instead of trading insults and treating each opposing side as an out group

>EDIT: I don't know why I'm getting so many downvotes, nothing I said is controversial at all.

I personally found it off topic, the conversation was about using Reddit as a source of truth for product opinions/reviews and it’s unlikely that the absence of a right wing majority is relevant when purchasing a dishwasher.

It wasn't off-topic. His response was to this statement: "the most reliable place to get a general crowd-sourced opinion on the internet" - on which his statement was perfectly correct if he just sticks to Western forums.

Ok: "any forum where there isn't a direct motive for product/service recommendation or ideological bias (and absent the moderator having a bias or strong opinion on that topic)".

Yes, in a larger context of conversation about bootcamps opinions being manipulated.

The issue you're gesturing at is that "left" positions tend to be in touch with reality and coherent with each other. Whereas conservative positions tend to be out of touch with reality and often contradict each other.

This gives the appearance to people that hold positions that are out of touch with reality that the coherent narratives are an all-encompassing hegemonic echo chamber that covers the whole site. The incoherent conservative narratives fail to take root among a wider audience since they fall apart when scrutinized. The karma system om reddit's encourages this behavior among neutral subreddit to dunk on people when they say things that are nonsense.

So that's why you only see them being held in specific ideological echo chambers like /r/Conservative where you have mods that censor discussion that debunks or merely calls into doubt the narrative asserted by the moderation team.

Regardless of the positions held, I think that moderators and admins have a lot of control over the discussion on reddit, and a lot of subreddits and users just get banned for no good reason. There is a selection bias at play.

Just because an opinion seems to be popular there does not nessisarially mean it won the "marketplace of ideas". It's more like the "warzone of powermods". I think a lot of social media sites go through a phase of controlling discussion to suit powerusers, but this comes at the cost of losing long-term social capital.

I mean we are in the second term of a trump presidency. The climate on reddit is very left wing but in the real world, people are voting right wing (or more likely not at all). Reddit itself is now an echo chamber, and r/Conservative is just the echo chamber within the echo chamber.

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