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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

My suspicion is that, here on HN, the number has dwindled considerably, even as the number has risen among the most famous figures in tech.

HN really should conduct a survey, like StackOverflow does. It would be fascinating.

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I see that as wishful thinking. HN has always been very much right leaning. I very much doubt much has changed.

Fair enough. All the more reason for HN to conduct a survey. It would be interesting to find out.

HN has been right leaning? That seems an odd take. Most comments I see on here lean more progressive. Or are you talking about the billionaire tech class who are in their own demographic?

Progressive and right-leaning are not in contradiction with each other, in that corner you will find most libertarians.

Wonkish, pro free trade, knows who Murray Rothbard is right leaning, not populist modern right wing.

HN like a lot of SV / VC culture was more libertarian leaning than right leaning. Low taxes, minimal oversight, etc. - true largely of workers and capital alike.

The open embrace of the fascist / nativist right in SV has been more recent, and it has empowered this second Trump administration. The calculation is presumably that they can curry favor and consolidate power.

Industrialists have always benefited from aligning with rightwing authoritarian governments. SV has not shown as a whole to be immune to this. The parallels with historical occurrences is blindingly obvious, down to the speech patterns.

I also notice the commentariat here is progressive, but it seems the silent but pervasive downvote campaigns are dominated by, or more charitably, inadvertently aligned with those MAGA oriented views. I’ve come to think of the right wingers mainly contributing to the community with their downvotes. Perhaps they don’t feel they would fair well if they tried to engage in discussion? But it’s an interesting dynamic that a group of silent individuals only make their presence known through the conspicuousness of the censorship they leave in their wake.

> Perhaps they don’t feel they would fare[sic] well if they tried to engage in discussion?

Most of the time when I do see blatant “rightposting” it’s so misinformed and provocative to be indistinguishable from trolling / baiting, so I can’t even tell if it’s downvotes for disagree vs downvotes for suspected trolling.

The less blatant “rightposting” flies quite a bit under the radar, pretty much by definition, which is what the grandparent comment was probably referring to when they said they interpreted HN as leaning right. More like laissez-faire economics.

Those downvote campaigns could easily come from bots and not real users.

In light of that possibility, HN's voting system is probably too rudimentary, private and zero-cost for the modern world. Now I'm not sure if it's naivete, laziness or meant to allow opaque maligned censorship.

Most downvote bots still appear to be observing US office hours though. There's a marked difference in voting patterns between the hours that Australia wakes up and California wakes up versus the rest of the day.

HN is not perfect, but “right-leaning”? What the actual fuck are you smoking

> HN has always been very much right leaning.

By whose standards? I'm European, so for me the US Democrat party is too far to the *right* to be electable; but by historical American standards, the impression I've had is this site has been centrist.

Conversely, the current standard of the US right wing seems to be that Bush Jr and Cheney were lefty liberal wokes who undermined the US national interest by working with NATO and Europe instead of taking every opportunity to undermine both…

> My suspicion is that, here on HN, the number has dwindled considerably

What makes you think that? The number of articles that get flagged and the pattern of the flagging and down voting would suggest that not to be true even if the actual comments might have slowed

This is anecdotal, but two things have impressed me:

1) It is no longer the case when I criticize something Trump has said or done, that I instantly get downvoted into oblivion or flagged.

2) Until recently, when someone posted some moderate comment, someone else often replied with a variant of "HN is a liberal echo chamber" I haven't noticed those replies for a while.

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