Why is Hacker News like that? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Hacker News like that?

drewdevault.com

358 pointscaution173 comments

The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don't want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand. It's like every mention of an iPhone got a comment about poor conditions of Chinese assembly workers. These, and the Musk rants, absolutely belong on threads about those topics, but let's not turn every thread into a holy war - you're just pushing people that already agree with you away.

For the record, I vouched for this thread to keep it from being flagged, but that didn't seem enough. I think it's an interesting discussion.

But couldn't a bunch of posts that are just coming here to lift up one of Elon's products also be counter productive? You can never tell if someone is genuine when reviewing a product he put out. I think that is a big problem as well.

Absolutely. That's when I use my dang-given right to flag left and right. Or if that doesn't work, ignore. I don't think I've entered any Grok thread in ages. But I also can't say that I've seen a ton of them, so maybe the ecosystem is working?

True. I actually don't read or enter threads for stuff I know will piss me off. So yeah makes sense.

One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.

So what they're doing is leaving low value comments and then they're probably the same people flagging it as "controversial" or "flamebait" when there wouldn't be any of those things if they didn't leave those comments. It's incredibly bad faith behavior (by some of them, not you to be clear).

We're at the precipice of AI unravelling the fabric of society. Many tech issues now are so consequential that the politics simply cannot be ignored.

I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.

> I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.

This little part is the whole thing! Political discussion is really much more interesting than say, product advertisements or corporate announcements. And better aligned with the spirit of curiosity and hacker ethos too.

Why not flag both or neither as "trampling curiosity"? Inconsistency and hypocrisy is worse than any policy or preference could be.

Why no topics tags so that nerds/hackers/curious can sort themselves away from the hustle/biz/finance types? Well.. platforms do not want to empower their users.. they want to herd them and force-feed them and profit from the engagement boost that bad feelings create. And boom!, just like that tech is suddenly political again, now we can all pick a side, cue the cliches, vote with your wallet, if you don't like it leave, make your own why dontcha, and yada yada.

> people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things

I think that's probably overinterpreting. No doubt there's a long tail of weird behavior, but the fat part of the distribution is covered by a simpler fact: humans change when emotions get activated. People who have interesting things to say when their curiosity circuits light up have entirely different things to say when their amygdalas are inflamed.

Edit: their right amygdalas, that is! it isn't clear to me what the left one does but it's a puzzle why everyone says "the amygdala" when we all have two.

I mostly avoid this place these days, but there are certain topics where people hyperrationalize, i.e. they (silently) accuse others of being reactionary because an argument looks like reaction to them on the surface.

I started self-censoring on HN because I knew some very normal and on-topic things to say would be voted to oblivion because they had the shape of a controversial topic that the average HN commenter can not relate to except through some mainstreamed right-leaning cultural narrative. The mere mention that I was an affected party in some culture war adjacent thing was treated as if I had invoked a thought-terminating cliche. It was very... anti-curious.

So I principally agree on the conclusion, when emotions get activated this site gets worse. I just see the impact differently - anything that deviates from the libertarian-right leaning default is pushed away. I'm still relieved I had my pseudonymous account with a lot more HN internet points wiped and don't have to care about this site on an emotional level anymore.

> One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.

Interesting to see that others are doing this. I started this habit because I got curious to see what bad/downvoted/dead commenters would say elsewhere and noticed this same pattern. It’s not on all of them (some accounts seem to post comments that get killed in every thread they reply on which makes me think those are troll accounts), but it happens enough that it was noticeable. Not sure how I’d describe this category of user. They aren’t trolls but they are clearly doing this purposefully.

Firsthand data point, as of today: I set up a fresh account and immediately learned how sharply the experience differs from a seasoned one. Show HN is blocked site-wide right now (the /showlim notice), a plain story submission of mine was killed in about 15 minutes, and an Ask HN was flagged within 60 seconds of appearing — zero prior history on the account each time.

None of that feels malicious on the flags side; the spam load must be brutal. But the effective rule for a day-1 account is "flagged before read," regardless of what the content actually says, while a month-6 account gets judged on the merits. Worth knowing for anyone lurk-learning the culture: the trust is in the account history, not the individual post.

every thread has some “low calorie” comments. The only ones being flagged are the political ones

That's extremely untrue, look at thread about AI/models with showdead and you'll see tons of flagged low-effort comments (in both pro and anti-AI directions)

"I think it's an interesting discussion."

Except for comments you want hidden because you think they are "boring" or "low-calorie".

I have a hard time imagining a tech forum in my heyday doing anything with a Bill Gates press release other than giving it a giant middle finger.

Musk is several orders of magnitude worse than Gates, yet the HN community cheerfully feeds on his marketing content while flagging dissent.

This is not a forum for “hackers” anymore, if it ever was. OP is completely right.

> It's like every mention of an iPhone got a comment about poor conditions of Chinese assembly workers.

I would very much like to be reminded of and updated on the current conditions of those workers.

Much in the same way I'd like to be up to date on whether Mr. Musk has ceased to be a nazi. Seems not.

BTW, Anybody know if things have improved any on the Chinese assembly workers front?

This is a good example of a person observing a community, slotting the whole thing into one of a small handful of political categories based on the relatively tiny proportion of comments that lean one way or another, and then claiming that the community has changed or is hypocritical when it turns out people tend to have more dynamic opinions than that.

Yes. Just because this forum is frequented by loud Musk incels doesn’t necessarily color the whole community with some other label. This is a classic forum problem where extremist views are amplified merely by the enthusiasm of the extremists.

Tfa only spend a small amount of time using grok threads as a case study of the general views and actions of HN though.

I think this assessment is fairly reductive and doesn’t consider that the realm of start up tech is massive, the political affiliations and views of those at YC and the inherent stance that being “apolitical” actually ends up being.

I also feel that HN attempts to avoid these classic forum trappings and in my personal opinion it has failed. Either you are correct and this is a minority of people or it’s not a minority and HN is pervaded by extremists. Both are bad and if HN wants to continue to be good it needs to be solved imo.

Unfortunately moderated out of existence in 10, 9, 8, 7....

Yes in the sense that users flagged it, but not in the sense that moderators penalized it. I didn't see it until someone emailed a couple minutes ago.

The only thing I've done since then is mark the post so it won't be killed by excessive user flags. This means the thread can stay open for new comments.

I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction, though of course some users will have the opposite reaction as well; this is normal.

Wouldn't excessive/above average flagging rather indicate a post is controversial/counter narrative enough to warrant longer front page exposure? It certainly seems to have gotten the people going in the short time it was up, and it's not a secret that early vocal users can be quite generous with the flag button.

IMHO, for fairness, upvotes should be the vouches countering the flags. I think unless the amount of flags is really significant, they shouldn't have priority over the 117 upvoters (and counting) who are clearly interested to have this discussion here.

My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.

Flags having a stronger influence than upvoting is a necessary algorithmic check against genuinely bad behavior/brigading, not disagreement. In general it works as intended, which is the best you can do without something potentially worse.

> necessary algorithmic check

Are there any stats available on the weighting ratios such as flags to upvotes, likes and comments per post after flagging, average time to frontpage to flag?

(G summarises the following[0], but a definitive source would clear up what the necessary algorithmic checks are).

[0]: https://share.google/aimode/cs9cKsvGMNRHs8OG1

Upvotes do counter flags. It's just that in this case the flags overwhelmed the upvotes.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.

Perhaps, but the system has been so stable for so many years that I think it's balanced enough in practice.

We aren't opposed to tweaking and testing it, but the tweaks would need to be small.

The power of local equilibrium

I'd hazard that someone is waiting-not-waiting, like Smaug, for a systems quant (bonus: lisper) to enter the cave to do equilibrium teleportation experiments on votes and flags

(I am secretly hoping that this is a silent-smoke-out-of-ears --and not self-extinguishing-- comment)

Almost any moderation system working under consistent rules will be stable, because the people and topics disadvantaged by the moderation will simply leave your platform.

Many protest that they are disadvantaged while continuing to participate.

All that would be needed is a properly sized delay to the post going dark.

A couple hours at least, would be my guess.

That, and flags have more weight than upvotes.

How does a vouch differ from an upvote in this context?

What's the reasoning for not having a vouch feature for stories like comments?

Vouching works the same way on stories and comments.

>I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story, so I've refrained from doing that here.

Exactly correct! That is the principle: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I applied it in this case by preventing the thread from getting killed outright, which would have closed it to new comments. This is moderating less than we normally would, since any thread that is flagged this heavily would normally get killed.

It's important to understand that "moderating less" means moderating less than we normally do. It doesn't imply "not moderating at all", and certainly not "always override user flags". Those would be loopholes that any internet provocateur could drive a truck through, as I've mentioned from time to time over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'm curious - Do you have a reaction to the specfic point of suggestions that were brought to you, per the article? Do you recall specific ones, and if they were considered/deliberated?

I haven't read the article.

Some community reactions are considered more authentic than others, it would seem.

I’ve seen so many shit articles and corporate announcements manually unflagged by the mods over the years. (Here’s a recent one, flagged to death very quickly before miraculously being resurrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602728) An explanation is rarely given.

Very apropos is this same author's post from a few years ago where they literally and explicitly support corporate censorship, albeit when that censorship was coming from a lefty perspective.

> Nevertheless, the system as it exists today produces outcomes which approximate both rationality and justice, and I do not stand in opposition to the increased application of private censorship under the current system, flawed though it may be.

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Should-private-platforms-engage...

Agreed, this article reeks of partisan seething behind a veneer of feigned professionality. I haven't seen much of Grok here anyway, so this feels extremely overly dramatic.

It feels like someone was mad that HN isn't constantly reinforcing Reddit tier groupthink.

> Very apropos is this same author's post from a few years ago where they literally and explicitly support corporate censorship, albeit when that censorship was coming from a lefty perspective.

I am fine with censoring opinions of the intolerant right wing. IMO antidemocratic opinions shouldn't be given a platform. Tolerant people shouldn't tolerate the intolerant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

That's great until someone else with a different definition of intolerance is in control.

I'd rather have a defensible tolerant system, to prevent such people in the first place. If they come into power, and are able to redefine the definition of intolerance/tolerance to such degree, they have many other means, like control over the executive or legislative to do whatever they like.

Arguments like these just make it so much harder for tolerant people to actually act against attackers of their system, to such a degree that they struggle to defend it. These arguments are about spreading doubt - in that way they are like propaganda, because only tolerant people will think about trying to keep this balanced out.

Ok well such a defensible tolerance architecture does not exist and would be extremely susceptible to capture. So I'd rather not. And in general I find invoking the Paradox of Tolerance to be an indicator of bad faith because it has been so badly abused by people who just want to shut down dialogue, e.g. the author of this OP.

This is almost comically backwards. HN is very pro-union, like reddit. In fact, it's pretty much the same users and political opinions as reddit.

It's funny he mentioned the grok discussion. The other day I saw grok got some new release, and although I don't use it, I was curious whether it is any good, and was pleasantly surprised people were actually discussing it and not all running to the keyboard to see who could get their EM comments in first. Like they really cleaned up the place.

This article complains that all their political comments got removed for calling Elon 'fascist', 'nazi' etc. - yes, that's the point; your useless, political opinions nobody else wants to hear, get removed.

The article is practically a meme, using every buzzword imaginable. Racism, sexism, nazi, hate, bigotry, wokeness, etc., they're all there. The person who wrote this article is practically an NPC.

[flagged]

Here's a great example (and I don't mean to pick on you personally, jmyeet).

You wrote "Elon "Sieg Heil"ed twice on national TV." as if it were undisputed fact. This "fact" been repeated here to the extent that "only Nazis could have interpreted it differently" is the default.

Well, I interpreted it differently. It was an (admittedly inartful) attempt to extend his "heart" to the crowd. This is further supported by his spoken words at the time of the supposed salute: "My heart goes out to you."

Perhaps I just like to assume innocence as opposed to malevolence, but this explanation makes sense to me. Elon isn't the most effective public speaker, so it's entirely reasonable to me that he was just trying to mime what he was saying.

You're welcome to disagree, but the fact that folks here just uncritically repeat "Elon is a Nazi; he even saluted" without any pushback is another example of the symptoms I describe in my earlier comment.

Everyone can have many explanations that make sense in their perspective. That doesn't make those explanations right per se.

Crediting someone's gesture of being only an inappropriate, forgivable mistake, or misinterpreted gesture is skipping conveniently his discourse (and actions) towards far-right groups, and the impact his discourse has on these groups (if only in Europe, where I can witness it). It didn't happen in a vacuum.

Someone with such wealth, power and extent cannot have the excuse of the doubt: they are waaaay over-equipped to know better.

I don't know Elon well enough to comment on his political views. My point was simply this: "Elon sieg-heiled showing that he's a Nazi" has become dogma around here, because nobody is engaging in constructive debate about it, because the opposing viewpoints are either not making it to the screens, or not being offered in the first place.

I don't care about Elon. I don't own or use any of his products, and I don't idolize men. I don't wish to engage in a discussion about whether Elon is a (literal or figurative) Nazi.

I care that Drew DeVault's assessment that HN has been taken over by right-wing posters does not match what I've seen here, and therefore maybe we as a community should re-evaluate the benefit of engaging in political discussion on this (technical) forum.

> My point was simply this: "Elon sieg-heiled showing that he's a Nazi" has become dogma around here, because nobody is engaging in constructive debate about it, because the opposing viewpoints are either not making it to the screens, or not being offered in the first place.

I think the subject is debated again and again each time it appears. There were tons of newspaper article debating the subject.

You say you don't know Musk and the context around him. Well, how can you know if there was constructive debate then? You basically say "I did not care to read any article discussing of Musk's ideology, but I conclude that if someone link Musk to one ideology, it's surely a superficial reaction".

(as for the need of having some political discussion when talking about technology, the fact that you admit not understanding the context around Musk shows that maybe in fact it is more needed that you think it is)

I think I understand what you're saying, but I have to disagree with parts of it.

Again, I do not wish to debate whether Musk is a nazi (literal or figurative). I don't own or use any of his products, and he is free to espouse whatever views he wants, as we all are. You are absolutely entitled to develop and hold your own opinions regarding Musk and I don't want to attempt to convince you to change them.

Where I both disagree and agree with you is your statement that "the subject is debated again and again each time it appears". This may be true in general, but my point is that here on HN, it has become a truism that Elon performed a nazi salute. My point is that you're right that other outlets present the alternative view that I mentioned above, but I'm not sure ANY substantive debate regarding this specific action ever happened here, and even if it did once, the fact that it has now been stated as fact that "Elon gave a nazi salute" at least twice so far in this thread without anyone bringing attention to the fact that others might disagree with that interpretation does not lend credence to Drew's assessment that HN has been overrun with right-wing bias.

> but my point is that here on HN, it has become a truism that Elon performed a nazi salute.

I don't think it's a correct formulation. The idea that this gesture was not a mistake is just the consensus. Here or everywhere else. Of course, "official" entities (like companies or official instance) will not openly take a position because it can hurt them. But it is just "politically correct" to avoid being clear on the subject, while the large majority, unofficially, know what happened.

Strangely, you seems to both saying that "political discussions should not happen here" and saying "people have political discussions and build their opinion also outside of HN, so if they present their opinion without redoing here the whole discussion, it is not valid". If people had discussions elsewhere and reached a conclusion, the fact that they share a consensus here does not mean that this consensus is a dogma.

In Elon's case who he funds is very revealing. The main anti-immigration party in the UK turned down his money because it came with the condition that they allow extremists to join. He now funds and supports those outright racists.

You know what people do when they make a comment or gesture that is widely seen as something horrible, even if it’s a misinterpretation?

They apologize.

And you know when someone deserves the benefit of charitable interpretation?

When they don’t spend their vast influence and wealth to very publicly and globally promote the abhorrent ideology symbolized by that “misinterpreted” gesture.

HN is nothing if not contrarian, which can lead to interesting discussions, but ehhh… this is not the thing to be contrarian about, especially given all the overwhelming evidence out there.

An interesting aspect is that not only the far-left is thinking it was a nazi salute, the far-right too, welcoming it and seeing it as Musk supporting them.

For me, the gesture is already quite suspicious (People have tried to cherry-pick similar gestures from other people, but they don't come close. The way the hand is flat at the end does not seem something that come "naturally" or "by accident", as it does not occur in others). But the reaction to the controversy is even more suspicious.

As I've said, far-right people were saying it was a nazi salute, and Musk never deny that to them. He criticized "far-left", or even instrumentalized it to attack people he does not like (for example, he attacked Wikipedia for just saying "some people compared the gesture to a nazi salute", which, according to him, is the proof that Wikipedia is part of the far-left conspiracy). He may have publicly said it was not a nazi salute, but it is clear that it is not enough to convince his far-right supporters it was not one.

So, yes, I think that "he has made a nazi salute" should be the default hypothesis. The data fits wayyyy better with this hypothesis than the one where it was an accident. No need to pretend that this hypothesis is favorised because of a conspiracy of biased people against Musk.

(Personally, I think that Musk did this gesture on purpose, in order to troll, trying to "trigger the woke". Does it make of him a Nazi? Well, some people supported the Nazi party because they were intrinsically "nazi" inside (whatever that means, probably something different for every single nazi). Some people supported the Nazi party just to troll their neighbour. They all ended up guilty of nazism all the same. So, while it can be an interesting nuance, it does not matter: if you are happy to play with the nazis, you are as toxic for humanity as them.)

> Well, I interpreted it differently.

Congratulations, you have political opinions. Despite your claims elsewhere, you’re not “politically neutral.” Nor do you believe, in practice, that political opinions do not belong on HN.

> Congratulations, you have political opinions. Despite your claims elsewhere,

Your underlying point is correct of course, but can you please make your substantive points without snark, and avoid the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

@dang - "Your underlying point is correct, of course". Could you please explain which statement of sheafification's, specifically, is correct (besides the fact that I have political opinions, which I do not believe is mutually exclusive with being politically neutral)?

Yes, happy to - but I'll be offline for most of the next hour, so it might have to be later.

I should mention though that I wasn't making a point about your comment (which I haven't really read) and certainly not about you personally. Rather, it's a general observation that has come up many times over the years.

With respect (especially for the work you do here), this isn't ok.

sheafification's reply was specifically to me and specifically personal. (Every sentence was directed at me - not something that I wrote.) There was no "general observation" that I can see in his reply. For the record, here is his reply in its entirety:

> Congratulations, you have political opinions. Despite your claims elsewhere, you’re not “politically neutral.” Nor do you believe, in practice, that political opinions do not belong on HN.

Where is the "general observation that has come up many times over the years"? What part of this response read as "correct" to you, and why?

From my reading, it was an ad hominem generalization based on a flawed understanding of my previous post designed to dismiss my opinions based on some perceived contradiction. What about this is "correct"?

I agree that that language was too personal. That's one reason why I asked the commenter not to post like that in the future.

The underlying point, as I understand it, is that it's not possible to be "politically neutral" or "apolitical" because what counts as "political" is itself politically contested. This is an argument that people often make in discussions like this—it has come up countless times over the years—so I was pattern-matching in interpreting the GP comment that way.

FWIW, although I happen to agree with that claim in general, I disagree with the consequences people usually try to derive from it (for example, that it is necessary to choose a single political position from which to moderate a site like this one).

None of that is pertinent to the moderation issue, though, which is that if people are going to make points like this in HN threads, they need to do it without snark, personal attack, or other flamewar devices. My moderation reply was about that, not "is it possible to be politically neutral or not"—it would be the same regardless of topic. I just prefaced it in this case with "your underlying point is correct of course" because (1) I like to say something to connect with the person I'm replying to, if I can*; and (2) it makes the "you're only moderating this because you disagree with my opinion" objection a tad less likely.

(* which equally includes you, of course!)

@dang - thank you for the explanation. I can see how you might read this into the post, but I think it's a real stretch to derive that conclusion from three sentences that ascribe motivation and belief to me personally. You have more experience with this than I do, so I'll respect your conclusion.

Thanks for flagging the personal attack.

Observe the force and facial expression. This was not a pleasant "my heart goes out to you", this was clearly a very agressive salute, even more agressive than how most real nazi's would do it.

So no, the gesture was pretty clear.

Ask Brittons, and Germans, about Elon interference

Supporting far right parties, stone cold racists and bigots. Spreading lies frankly and openly, doing his best to undermine the democracies

He does not live there, has no right to be involved in their politics. Interfering for sadistic fun, it seems

The damage he did (in a ketamine haze it seems) to federal programmes with such astounding carelessness...

It is no wonder that he has such a negative following. He is a genuinely bad person, and being so rich, powerful and hungtry for more he is news worthy

If it was the only thing Elon did, maybe. But there are plenty of examples of nazi and white supremacist dog whistles from his twitter posts.

I see a futuristics ban on twitter where the reason stated was that user got grok to say something obvious.

Like Facebook (but worse) they barely allow users to interact. The primary goal is to build profiles for other purposes.

I'm not sure how much HN/YComb really does put it's finger on the scale.

But the system itself so conveniently allows for just a couple people to suppress and deny, to shut down topics, that it systematically gives quarter to the very worst, to the motivated bad actors, and the other lesser plagues that befall humanity.

I really wish there was some accounting, some visibility, some consequence for this abuse of the system, this steering away from hackeryly inquiry & examination of the world. The act of cloaking & hiding shouldnt be so easy to do from the shadows; HN should at least make you do such moderation acts in public.

This doesn't mirror my experience, which is that most posts and comments criticizing the current administration and conservatives in general get significant positive engagement. There are few posts taking the opposite side, and those that try often get downvoted to oblivion.

As a recent example, anti-progressive themes (being supportive of Israel, for example) are nowhere to be found. Pro-Palestinian views abound with little counter-engagement.

In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome. HN used to be a respite from political insanity on both sides. Now some days it's no better than reddit.

From my (politically neutral, believe it or not) perspective, this site is extremely hostile to conservatives. It's interesting that progressives feel the same way. Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.

Yes. Flag everything political. From both sides. We are here for tech. Not Reddit level content.

But shouldn't anything about Grok be flagged as political then? (or rather: where do you put the threshold?)

There is a big political aspect to Grok: it does not really bring much more technologically than any other model, its existence is mainly political in the first place. And talking about it / promoting it is participating to that: not everyone who does that does it for ideological reason, but a part of people doing it clearly does.

If only, but that won't work because a certain group considers dissenting opinions not as political but ethically deplorable speech and votes and flags it down while defending their own political stance which in turn is voted up more than down and remains in the threads. The result is a biased platform. Notwithstanding the article the bias is mostly (possibly performatively) "progressive" with some cave outs related to startup culture, venture capitalism and whatever PG has to say on the subject.

Right, I think it's basically just the permanent phenomenon that if a community is mostly politically on side A, then they over-perceive the presence of B-leaning comments and the downvoting of A-leaning comments, and vice versa. "Wow, HN is so B", says the A guy, because HN is 20% B. I've seen this exact same thing in conservative-leaning communities regarding liberal content.

When a person reads content that is more attuned to their political 'norms', it tends not to register as political information at all. When they come across opposing views, it creates friction, gets stronger attention, and becomes memorable. It can lead to the perception that "HN is extremely X biased" in either direction, based on who you ask.

Everything is political. It is impossible for it to not be. But it is easy to forget that when someone is espousing similar views, then the politics is just background noise and tuned out.

> Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome.

Maybe the volume is proportional to the impact each country has globally? (especially these years)

This might be true, but then you would expect to see some proportion of pro-US posts as well, right? I can't remember the last significant one.

Hmmm, it's a genuine, not provocative, question: as an outsider from the US, I genuinely can't say what the USA (as a state, as a government) have done in the past few years, that is unequivocally worth of praise?

Nothing any country/government does will be unequivocally worthy of praise. That's a goal too far.

My point is that proposed discussions about US policy that point to something that some HN user has decided is worthy of praise never seem to get traction here, while discussions that are objectively critical of the US seem to proliferate (with no substantive discussion in opposition in the comments section).

That's the real issue. Humans do not engage in productive discussion if everyone holds the same opinions. Find me a set of conservative opinions that has resulted in substantive engagement here and I'll be happy to update my priors. Until then, what I see in the political threads here is an echo chamber, with the (conservative) opposition either downvoted or reluctant to post. I can't tell you why others don't post, but I can tell you why I don't (and I'm not even a conservative):

1) I don't think HN should be a forum for political discussions in the first place; and

2) I'd probably just get downvoted anyway since the progressive bias here is so strong.

I agree also that HN shouldn't be a forum for political discussions, but I think that the political nature of technology, and the political nature of the decisions/choices made by the companies driving technology, should not be avoided/silenced.

I do remember of slightly better times, but the governments were also of a quite different substance.

It's funny and maybe it's my European-bias, because I'd label myself rather a progressive (coming from a very, very conservative background). But I don't perceive the HN vibe to be progressive at all, neither conservative. It's of a different kind.

I agree with you that the HN political slant I see defies single labels. On the one hand, there is a significant civil-liberty lean (personal privacy and gun rights, for example) which is not generally associated with (US) "progressivism".

On the other hand, automatic disdain for the hegemony is a pretty progressive lean.

This is why summarily labeling folks as "nazis", "racists", "genocide supporters", etc. doesn't advance the conversation; it shuts it down, and my feeling is that's why we're seeing the types of political threads we see on HN (that are dominated by like-minded individuals ranting against whatever cause they happen to espouse).

IMO, this siloing is not a sign of a healthy community. My preference would be to get back to more technical discussions and try to avoid discussion of politics insofar as that's possible.

But I don't speak for anyone else and can only control how I engage in discussion here. I choose to disengage in political threads. That other (non-HN-mainstream) voices do as well is probably one of the reasons why the self-reinforcing echo chambers exist in the first place.

That's my objection to political discussions on HN.

>This is why summarily labeling folks as "nazis", "racists", "genocide supporters", etc. doesn't advance the conversation; it shuts it down, and my feeling is that's why we're seeing the types of political threads we see on HN

We're all tired of fighting for survival, and under no circumstances will we stop calling a spade a spade. Beating around the bush is how we got here in the first place.

I've been around for awhile and anecdotally notice the same. There is actually a really good example just above where someone says this in their comment:

"US is basically tech-Hitler".

Now there might be a small amount of truth to this in it's own way, but this is a pretty blanketed Reddit-like statement and ultimately not a very high quality comment. This comment isn't fading at all, but other higher quality comments that I would consider progressing the conversation are fading away.

I've always thought it would be a fun project to run analytics on comments and sentiment here on HN over the years. I anecdotally noticed a convervative/progressive 50/50-ish split around the mid 2010s, and that's moved to a more left of center split in the mid-2020s. But I also have my biases so I really can't come to a conclusion without seeing the actual data.

I think the US, right now, is just exceptionally bad (not just the president, the whole culture, divisiveness, weaponized fake news, ...).

If a president is just being not competent, it would be normal that the majority of the posts are negative.

I wonder how it was for a "normal" president during a "normal" period. For example, Obama? From what I recall, the international comments were pretty balanced at the time.

Take what you dislike about the US and then compare it against:

- migrants in the UK and EU;

- slave labor in the Far East;

- documented genocide in Africa;

- military conscription in Russia;

- press freedom in Central Asia;

- crime and drugs in Latin America

This is not to say that the US shouldn't be criticized. Let's have that discussion. But why on HN? And why do these other topics never result in substantive engagement? My earlier statement that the US is a punching bag meant that relative to all other injustices in the world, the US appears to be facing the most criticism on HN.

On one hand, maybe it's because the expectations for the US are so much higher than other countries. On another, maybe it's because it's fashionable to criticize the hegemon. I don't know. But my experience here is that almost all "government does something bad" posts are about the US. This is, to me, evidence of a bias.

Not sure what is your point: all of these are also strongly discussed.

Interestingly, "migrants in the UK and EU" seems to even be one of the favorite subject of conversation of americans (especially conservatives), totally blown out of proportion with respect to the reality of the crisis.

But importantly, people react to the conversation that is already on the table. When you see people on HN criticizing the US government, it is in the large majority of the case when the US government is a relevant subject of the conversation while crime and drugs in Latin America is not. If HN was talking more about Latin America, maybe there would be more negative reactions about their crisis around crime and drugs. In the meanwhile, the US government actions that are discussed outside of US are in the large majority actions that has a direct impact on the people discussing. Tariff and petrol cost have way more impact on European countries than drug cartel in Latin America (and often way more than even migrants in these countries).

> But my experience here is that almost all "government does something bad" posts are about the US. This is, to me, evidence of a bias.

What about an evidence that the US government is exceptionally bad while also having a lot of impact on other people's lives?

In think you are missing the point with regard to immigration in Europe. American liberals have long talked about Trumps immigration policies and rhetoric as uniquely bad. They do not seem to known EU countries have border walls, or that the UK will separate families. Very few countries have birthright citizenship as broad as that of the US. This may have changed with the powers given to ICE but it was not true in Trumps first term.

Of course the right in the US talk utter nonsense about the British cities being dangerous etc.

I don't think it can be the point, as the point was "bad things happen in other places and yet people don't care about it, they criticize US because it's the current trend".

One of my reaction was that one of their examples (immigration in UK/EU) seems to be an exact counter-examples where US people are overestimating crises that are outside of US and point the fingers.

As for the situation in UK/EU, a real reaction that happened in UK/EU is that if something like ICE was to happen in UK/EU, the population will never accept that (they may be wrong, but they are right that there is something there). Not because immigration laws are less unfair or less cruel in UK/EU, but because in US, there was not even the decency of pretending a due-process was needed. You can deport in UK/EU, but it is done by people who follow the rules and who are not particularly "against" people they deport. With ICE, it looks like cowboys who openly don't care about due-process. In UK/EU, the machine can be cruel. In US, there is no machine at all, just people openly showing they don't care.

> And why do these other topics never result in substantive engagement?

US politics has become so polarized, so trench-warfare-without-ever-giving-a-single-INCH-of-ground, that few people will actually listen to a point by the other side, no matter how valid. They will instead argue to the ends of the earth that the other side does not actually have a point, they have never had a point, on any subject, ever.

This leads to lousy conversations - both sides shouting at each other, and nobody listening.

Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic. I think that's made HN more political, more shouty, less having actual conversations. And I think it has hurt the character of the site, and the community around it.

I think you're 100% correct here. Thank you for expressing this point of view so succinctly.

> Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic.

That is inaccurate. The standard has remained the same ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and its focus to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. You can see there the original language: most stories about politics are off topic (note that the word is "most", not "all"), which is still in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Arguments about HN having gotten-too-political go back many years, long before the time you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that there are swings and fluctuations, some of which last for quite a while and give the misimpression that the site has permanently changed. Such swings are inevitable—they are caused by macro trends, which HN is not immune to: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

The other is that when people see a series of threads they don't like, or even a single thread they don't like—for example because it offends them politically—they rush to overgeneralize. This applies to all of us and has to do with how our emotions affect our perceptions and thinking.

The one exception to all this was when we tried a "no-politics week" as an experiment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. That experiment failed quickly—its actual effect was to make HN more politicized, so we canceled it after a couple days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), and reverted to the original tried-and-true (albeit unsatisfactory, in the sense that no one is really satisfied by it—there's something for everyone to dislike) standard.

At first I thought this experiment was what you were referencing, since to this day there are people who occasionally get confused by the fact that we briefly tried it. But when I read more closely I see that you were talking about 8 years later!

I seem to recall, at the time of the start of Trump's second term, some posts that were purely politics, and people flagging them as off topic, and you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics.

Now that you mention it, I remember the "no politics" week, and it's possible that I'm conflating the end of that experiment and "allowing more politics" and getting the time messed up. But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?

> But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?

Yes in the sense that we didn't change HN's standard or moderate differently. But of course there was a surge of that sort of content - this is what I mean by "macro trends" above.

> you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics

I don't think so! but if you can track down any post that sounded like that, it would be interesting to take a look.

Also, was it the case during Obama? If not, why? Right now, in other countries, they have negative impacts from tariffs, wars, economical crises, ... that seem all be linked to bad management from the US government.

So, yes, in HN, when talking about some subject, for example Grok, then, yes, the fact that Grok is instrumentalised in the culture war is _on topic_ and people will discuss it. This is not the result of a conspiracy against US. This is just the result of the fact that US is really shit right now.

>This is not to say that the US shouldn't be criticized. Let's have that discussion. But why on HN?

This is foremost a tech focused website, and currently the US is basically tech-Hitler for lack of a better term. So it makes sense we would come up in discussion as the current thread of techno-fascism works its way through all portions of American existence.

> but why on HN?

It makes sense to discuss it here since YC is largely US-based and the US has been such a large center of tech, VC-funding, etc. That impact obviously extends globally but I’m fascinated by the attempt to be “apolitical” on HN when those in charge of YC and nearly all of those in YC’s orbit are anything but.

I understand wanting to keep discussion curious and meaningful, but the influence of tech and these companies cannot be separated from either red v blue, capital-P Politics nor from small-p policy and politics on any level. It cannot, in my opinion be “apolitical” in the sense of “absence of politics”.

Either way, there clearly seem to be bubbles on HN. I’ve almost never seen pro-union sentiments here but other commenters indicate that the prevail view here is left of Marx. Evidence of bias either way is impossible with anec-data. I find the arguments about the actions and views of those in charge more meaningful than complaining about post and comment removal personally, but the discussion here is multi-faceted and prone to folks talking past each other.

Have you considered that perhaps the US is really doing a poor job lately, and so pro-US posts would be less common?

I really recall leading up to and shortly after the election the vibe here was decidedly pro-Trump. The tech right was ascendant, posts glazing Elon and other administration cronies were the rule, and criticisms were flagged/dead almost immediately.

I agree with the GP post that some of Drew's observations seem off today, but I think it's a relatively recent development. It seems to me that only in the past 6 months has a permission structure arisen that criticism of this administration has become accepted here.

> In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume

That might be a "grass is greener" effect. I know people from many countries who will tell you how terrible things are in their country.

> Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.

Any discussion here that touches on US politics becomes predictable and low quality.

I do not believe one can really be politically neutral. One can be blind to their political inclinations, but what would being neutral even mean? Everyone has their views and values.

“Politically neutral" is a phrase used to distance oneself from the largely American habit of slotting one's values into the red vs. blue dichotomy. One can't be truly politically neutral, as you say, given that politics is a system of dealing with others and not an electric charge. However, it's a phrase that is easier to invoke just as it’s easier to describe oneself as an atheist rather than an agnostic when explaining why one would not believe in God.

Thanks for the comment, I guess it could be seen like that. I still think that being ”politically neutral” is more like being disinterested in politics and/or lacking introspection.

I don't think leftists/progressives are nonexistent on this site. Maybe some of them don't want to bring politics everywhere because it's tiring and unproductive.

Regarding Musk and his antics, I just tune them out. His projects are vain and self-serving. Let them die, the community sooner or later will recognize them for what they are and move on.

I also don't think they are non existent. But there is also another factor of timezones. I have the impression that there are big differences between the continents. Like depending on time the most top comments might be leaning much more left or right.

The definition of leftists and their distribution would be a fun topic over drinks. Another thing you can consider if leftists in one timezone login at the same time as leftists in another timezone. The rabbit hole is ever deeper.

If you're far left the center is right, if you're far right, the center is left.

It's a business promotion platform from the very beginning.

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

By this metric, HN is not a business promotion platform.

It's a promotion platform for a specific way of conducting business, and for the liberation of these businesses from democratic oversight (if not the other way around). And in that perspective, that's politics.

I probably don't disagree with that.

However, that doesn't equate to what I believe was being implied: HN as a business promotional tool specifically for YCombinator.

It’s because people keep amplifying meta-discussions instead of focusing on the topic at hand. Hence, this article as example. I shouldn’t even be commenting.

Although Drew's points don't seem actually wrong to me, I would say that a far bigger problem for HN is the way in which the discourse is dominated by excessively confident and passively authoritative comments that are actually somewhere between "not really correct" and "not even wrong".

Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.

Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.

Upvoted for obvious achshtually Gell-Mann bait.

Yes—but a confounding factor is that someone who knows a lot about X usually also has strong feelings about X. This makes it hard to tell what part of one's reaction is to wrongness/ignorance vs. having one's feelings offended.

To mention some (hopefully safe) examples, I know things about certain programming languages, and smoke comes out my ears when someone who appears ignorant to me comments about how APL or K programs are "unreadable", or that Lisp macros lead to code no one else can understand.

The level of outrage in my inner self isn't a measure of anything particularly interesting, though.

Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.

When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.

Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.

Jensen Huang is neither a Nazi, nor far right.

HN has other biases that mirror the biases of the avg tech worker in the valley and those of the people called out in the article.

But they don't neatly fit into "far left" and "far right" buckets. People who use those terms usually are professional agitators.

https://youtube.com/shorts/h3dqFk3FcRk?is=uxh_cCfkuhj8yWBP

The irony of flagging this post should be obvious.

If you're not already, I strongly recommend using [algolia](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...]) to view HN. That way you can still find content that is ordinarily rudely shoved out of view.

Another irony: using algolia, I've come to see most of HN users as refreshingly liberal. So it's the site itself that buries opposing views.

https://hcker.news/ seems to show flagged posts also by default. This post is on the front page too.

"I hold views that are acceptable and conventional in most elite/academic circles. There's an organization and network of people who hold different views from mine. I don't like theirs. They don't seem to like mine, and sometimes say so out loud. Also, they have a website that looks like it's from 2005 but is popular, at least among them. For these reasons, I'm big mad."

>Progressives have, on the whole, abandoned the forum.

That's news to this progressive from Indiana, a deep red state.

Interesting screed, but I mostly don't buy it.

I'm deeply thankful for DanG and the other moderators who keep the noise down, and actively push to keep discussions from bogging down in AI slop, cheap posts, and off topic rants.

It's wild to get a glimpse into the bubbles some people live in

Terrible article

"Progressives have, on the whole, abandoned the forum." -- No they haven't. There are plenty of pro-union, left wing messages posted here everyday and often upvoted to top.

And the so called flagged comments he mentions-- they are correct to be flagged. I dont this site to turn into Reddit /r/politics (or indeed any subreddit) where the same messages are posted everyday, so much so I dont know who is a bot. And where only one type of view is allowed, and you get 10,000 downvotes for the smallest disagreement

The takeaway from this is very important, and always missed: the people at the top were, are and always be intentionally political, ideological and conspirational in their activities (Drew does a good job proving that). And what benefits them the most is exactly the kind of asymmetry which is created when everyone else keeps politics out of their conversations.

> Please don’t use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

And enjoy the anonimity of downvoting this, for now. But don't fool yourself that your complicity isn't noted.

>the system at Hacker News amplifies right wing politics and bigotry

I can't say I get that impression. You don't get any Trump is great kind of stuff and Musk gets slagged off. I suppose it depends on what you think is right wing.

There's plenty of "Trump is great" stuff on here. Things have quieted down a good bit since the election, as it's pretty much impossible to rationally justify Trumps course.

But before the election, discussions about e.g. Project 2025 were impossible, as the threads and comments would get piled on by Trump supporters using flags and lies.

Hear fucking hear.

Maybe this article will finally grant me the strength to leave this decrepit place. It’s 90% AI articles and press releases anyway.

The far left owns this forum and everything I post now is flagged. The site used to be libertarian and now is far left both in administration and in users.

Shadowbanning is an extremely evil and inhumane practice that should be discontinued if it is still done, not just here but anywhere. Human beings need to be treated like human beings, at least deserving of a regular ban. If you don't understand, then wait until it happens to you.

When an account has an established history, we tell them that we're banning them and why. Examples:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

We use shadowbanning (i.e. banning an account without saying so) in specific cases such as spammers and serial trolls. I don't think that's inhumane. In the case of spammers, telling them would only lead to more spam. As for serial trolls, they are usually aware of which of their stable of accounts have been banned yet vs. not.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

But when you say "wait until it happens to you", I'm curious if that means that we banned one of your accounts without telling you so? It would be interesting to look up, if so.

If there is an established history of at least two prior accounts of an identity being banned via a regular ban in the last two years, I can then see the justifiable reason for a shadow ban. Without these strict criteria, I think it doesn't give the person a sufficient opportunity to remediate.

I have heard from users having as many as a thousand karma points that were shadowbanned without warning.

Fwiw, I do not have any other account on this site, and I haven't had any other account since this account was created. I had a different account many years ago, the login for which I had fully lost.

> I have heard from users having as many as a thousand karma points that were shadowbanned without warning

I don't think that can be true, at least not in the last 12 years. Far more likely is that someone incorrectly concluded that they were shadowbanned. But if anyone wants us to check a specific username, we'd be happy to do so.

People come to all kinds of mistaken conclusions, especially when they're upset about something that we or someone else did on HN. Self-reports of this kind, especially about being banned, are mostly unreliable.

though there must have been backroom warnings, the disappearance of breckyunits feels a bit Soviet

Considered that it seems intellectually valuable (~nontrivially eutriptic) for an outsider or breck(/g?????m) to understand what part of his value system was diametrically opposed to the spirit of HNtopia

The humaneness seemed at worst ambiguous but that's not the issue.. maybe self-compassion was?

Breck is well aware of the status of his account on HN, so this was not a case of shadowbanning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013861 was the end of a painfully lengthy process, not all of which was public.

By Soviet I meant more of inscrutability: [unsatisfactory] window into _why_ someone was thrown out of a window, not how.

Apparently that "unsatisfactory" does have (imagined) personal component for me. The process, for you, was less imagined.. so.. okay. I should be more careful next time

Btw I might have made a mistake of searching for "breckyunits".

Now I remember benreesman.. but maybe the last flagged comment is beyond my search-fu?

(I remember these two oldtimers because I sympathize with their "far-left" anticorpo yet agentic vibes)

« We use shadowbanning (i.e. banning an account without saying so) in specific cases such as spammers and serial trolls. »

All my comments are stillborn, dead by default. I guess that means shadowbanning has been applied. I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll. Some people flagged my comments, and the more substantive and factful they were, the more they seemed¹ to be flagged. Some people appear to have licence to drive their political agendas, and others who oppose these views are charged with “trampling curiosity”. HN does not seem to live up to its purported ideals.

[1] There is zero transparency so I cannot see who flagged what how much. What I can see is that the more substantive a comment is the higher the risk it runs of being flagged and made invisible, which practically means automatized censorship (not calling it such would be hairsplitting).

Your account wasn't banned per se but software was killing your posts. I realize that's not much of a distinction when your posts are getting killed, but from our side the difference is significant.

> I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll

Ok, but when you break the site guidelines (e.g. "Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670568), and use HN primarily for political/ideological battle—which the guidelines ask commenters not to do [1], and which is a line at which we start banning [2]—it ends up amounting to the same thing.

Having skimmed your comments, I have mixed feelings about how the system [3] functioned here. On the one hand, you have been breaking the site guidelines and not using HN as intended. From that point of view, the software wasn't wrong.

On the other hand, your account was arguing for contrarian positions which caused it to get penalized by the community (which by definition disagrees with those), and eventually by the software, more than it would have if you did not have a minority view.

From an HN point of view, this is a thorny patch. We want to hold space for minority views and have no taste for the smugness of majorities, nor the brutal way they behave when contradicted. We know that creative ideas tend to come from uncommon sources, and since such things are what HN exists for, it would be foolish to cut those short. We want the long tails of most distributions to extend longer here than they get to do amid the large-group dynamics of most places online.

But was also need HN discussions to remain intellectually curious and not degenerate into flamewars. The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. They come into a discussion already feeling embattled and surrounded, and start out swinging. This pre-emptive hostility obviously has a defensive function. It is understandable when people have a background of seeing their views being silenced or treated unfairly. But it guarantees an aggressive response from the majority.

When that response inevitably comes, the minority account often then retreats into righteous indignation about being censored, banned, or squashed. But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try.

We want HN to be a space where minority views have a fair chance, but we can't have people breaking the site guidelines with flamewar, battle rhetoric, and so on, regardless of their views. We do try to cut them more slack than if they were coming from a dominant position—that's why I'm replying to you at such length—but not so much that we'd end up with two sets of rules.

In the end, we often have to ban such accounts despite knowing how difficult it is to take a minority position and in that respect sympathizing with the account holders—not because we agree-or-disagree with their views but because they're so clearly breaking the rules.

I've posted about this many times [4], usually in a context where I see this dynamic showing up and want to try to help by explaining it. What a minority view-holder needs to do differently, if they want a different outcome, is to remain neutral, resist the temptation to lash out, and field the majority responses (which are often rather shallow and predictable) with some understanding of where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic.

What this means is that there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position [5]. It may be unfair, but it's intrinsic to how majorities and minorities interact.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[3] By "the system" I mean the entire system of Hacker News: community, software, and moderators.

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thank you for your comprehensive, cirumspect and considerate comment, thanks for overruling “the system” and resetting my -16 “karma” score.

Of course I understand the problem about minority and majority positions. Creating majorities, minoritizing dissent, and inciting the (gregarious) majority to actively trample opposition (by mere quantity, not quality; by mass and weight, not argument or intellect) is the bread and butter of how propaganda works and operates. It cannot ever succeed in convincing everybody, but it can succeed in effectively shutting down opposition, which is the purpose.

As for my comment 49670568 (“Incredibly stupid …”), if you read it in context with parent and gp 49668588, you'll see I was echoing to Rob's “Incredibly arrogant/racist take” wrt to Adrian, whose comments I'd been subscribed to via RSS for a couple months prior to creating an HN account, and whom I've never seen posting anything akin to what Rob alleged, and so I was simply taking Adrian's defense (because I felt someone had to).

True, there was a provocative angle to my comment in the last two paragraphs, exacerbated perhaps by being also analytical. People from the US, in my experience, often don't realize how arrogant their self-content attitude in political matters comes across based on how much the US is trampling on other countries (and by trampling I mean to kill and destroy, to cheat and deceive, to plunder and tax, and then to justify or deny).

« The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. » — I usually try to remain factual. Trouble is, facts often are not welcome because psychologically and psychosocially, persuasions dictated by propaganda prevail, and there is pressure to “conform” and “comply”, and to even dismiss dissenters as “whacky” (example 49711252, in context 49708657).

« But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try. » — I will try. But I have to say that the majority view is very often expressed “in battle mode”, like the bully making it clear there can be no other view, which, again, is simply the result of how propaganda works, by creating the vocabulary and talking points (“global war on terror”, you might remember, “Russian annexation of Crimea”, “pilot suicide”, “Hamas terror”, “Russian war of aggression”), which then are repeated over and over again, and have to be repeated precisely because they are either total lies or meant to suppress the true story, which is much more complex.

« where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic » — Yes, I know, a lot of people are frightened, which is also an effect of propaganda. Some, however, and these are the most vocal, do enjoy being in the majority because they enjoy trampling, which could be observed and experienced in real life during the CoVID hoax.

« there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position » — I can see this is the pragmatic conclusion that I would probably also arrive at from your vantage point.

Thanks again for taking the time to elaborate on this meta topic (which I understand is the mainstay topic for you). I might include a reference to your statement in future controversial comments I might make so it gets a chance to be considered by a wider audience.

Finally, on a meta level, the field of propaganda and psychology is interesting in its own right, an important part of social (or perhaps rather post-social) life as shaped by technological mass media, and therefore certainly not unworthy of many a hacker's curiosity, attention, and perhaps even investigation. — Best, Michael

When it comes to submissions and comments, "political" or "controversial" is what you disagree with. As the article notes, capitalism (as just one example) is taken as a given. Anything else is "political".

Shouldn't intellectual curiosity challenge norms and assumptions?

What's changed I think is that Big Tech are essentially defense contractors. You can put Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the same bucket as RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

A huge portion of HN is simply after their bag. The idea of the countercultural almost beatnik "hacker" like early Steve Jobs (yes, yes, I know, he's not the tech guy) is long dead. We saw this with crypto dominating HN. Crypto is just a bunch of people who are hoping to be the first to do the rug pull. Now it's AI.

Silicon Valley itself grew out of the military industrial complex. It's simply returned to its roots.

Silicon valley is weird.

Just so. Thanks Drew. Good to to find another one that can see ;) They live!

I wish n-gate.com was still active and posted regularly to the comments sections.

We lost a mirror in n-gate that was reflecting some of the ugly faces here back at some people that really needed it.

It's because those comments insert politics and character attacks in threads they don't belong to. They just derive the discussion.

>>There’s often frustration that every thread related to a Musk company includes a discussion about Musk, but Musk himself caused that by being the only tech founder to actively campaign for Trump.

Supporting Trump is a perfectly normal political position hold by around half of the voting population. If you can't see how reasonable, smart, hard working and honest people vote for Trump you need to adjust your world view. I suggest getting out mor and talking to people. "Musk is a Nazi" nonsense it just pure brain rot.

So those are low effort nonsense comments which don't belong.

There are two high level takes on Trump.

One is that he's just a normal US politician, within the range previously seen, he was elected president via the usual mechanisms and will leave office and be replaced by someone else, again via the usual mechanisms. His policies and actions may (or may not) be more extreme than most previous presidents, and many may disagree vehemently with them, but that's the nature of representative democracy.

The other is that he's a major departure from previous elected presidents, via a combination of his corruption, illegal behavior and openly racist and sexist language. People who see Trump in this way also likely feel that the SCOTUS has aided and abetted him in acts that are plainly unconstitutional (despite overwhelming numbers of decisions by lower courts against him). They fear that his language around elections, and particularly even his raising the possibility that he would run again, mark him as having crossed a line that makes it impossible to consider him an ordinary elected president. Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.

If you hold the second view, then the fact that around half the voting population view him as a "perfectly normal" politician is itself a substantial and terrifying issue.

The point is that "Trump bad" or "Elon Nazi" are brain rot and pollute a lot of online discussion. If one wants to discuss any of that they should make their own thread in their own space and invite people to discuss instead of poisoning discussion about rockets, robots, AI or what not.

>>Many people who feel this way believe that Trump and others in his administration are openly fascist and are working to bring about a fascist form of government within the USA.

That's an assertion which a lot of reasonable people disagree with. Just don't insert it in threads which are not about politics and all will be fine.

I rarely see it inserted into threads on HN where it is not relevant.

Also, I'd say that "Trump bad" and "Elon Nazi" are, in that form, shorthands for a much longer argument that most people don't want to rehash.

The whole article linked in OP is about such cases.

>>Also, I'd say that "Trump bad" and "Elon Nazi" are, in that form, shorthands for a much longer argument that most people don't want to rehash.

Yeah and others don't want to hear them because they are not relevant to the discussion about say xAI product, Tesla or something Trump endorsed.

But Elon Musk didn't do a Nazi salute nor is he a fascist? You can call him a techno-feudalist, technocrat, billionaire asshole, scammer, scum, narcissist, idiot, nationalist, chauvinist, thief, political meddler, etc. etc. and I may or may not entirely agree, but when you just make extreme things up to align with a particular political ideology it makes me angry, and I won't flag it but I understand why others do.

I understand that a lot of people are motivated to think he did a Nazi salute, but he didn't. He just accidentally made a major social faux-pas as nerds tend to do.

So, please go ahead and attack him and Trump and all the other avatars of "the other side" using the abundant real rhetorical ammunition they give you. I draw the line when delusional takes are supposed to be taken seriously though, because it makes an ass out of you and me.

As for your "personal favorite" comment that got flagged: I agree, that one probably should be allowed. People attack Microsoft, Meta, and Google all the time in threads related to their products.

Comments like this one make me angry. You presume to objectively know the inner workings of Musk, and go on to accuse everyone who disagrees with your assumption to be "making extreme things up to align with a particular political ideology".

Because we cannot truly gauge Musks motivations, it is simply not possible to objectively determine whether he meant it as a Nazi salute. But we can look at his other actions to try to approximate his state of mind, for example by looking at what his own reaction afterwards. If Musk had apologized and clarified that it was not meant to be a Nazi salute, I would give him some leeway. But that did not happen! Instead he publicly responded with Nazi- and Holocaust-related puns.

This is already enough to reasonably conclude that it was no accident, and we haven't even taken any of his many previous blunders into account. I mean come on - it's really a total coincidence that the guy with nationalist views, who is also pumping millions upon millions into propping up extremist-right movements across the globe and whose AI just happened to start spewing white supremacy propaganda, did two salutes and joked about it after?

I can't understand how anyone could reasonably arrive at the conclusion that it was not a Nazi salute, yet I don't have to accuse you of making anything up to state my position.

I think we both know that we've had plenty of time to figure out the situation, understand the context, address our own biases, and come to a sincere conclusion about this issue. We also both know that one of us is obviously, insanely wrong - so either someone isn't engaging in that process, or there's something deeply wrong with sense-making in general.

You're not going to convince me, and I'm not going to convince you. All I can say is: good luck.

> We also both know that one of us is obviously, insanely wrong - so either someone isn't engaging in that process, or there's something deeply wrong with sense-making in general.

No? It is possible for people to disagree on a question which has no objective answer. I disagree with your position regarding this question, but I don't think you're "obviously, insanely wrong", because there is simply no way to objectively measure the correct answer. And on the same note, I also don't assume that I must be obviously right.

I can accept your position without throwing around accusations that you're "mak[ing] extreme things up to align with a particular political ideology". Just because I disagree doesn't mean your take is delusional, even though you have not supported it with coherent arguments - which I have unquestionably done for my position, yet you call it "delusional".

A well-reasoned position can survive without pretending anyone who does not agree must be making stuff up.

>>> "You presume to objectively know the inner workings of Musk"

Unfalsifiable and hypocritical, considering you're trying to do the same thing. You're inferring his intent from what you saw.

>>> "If Musk had apologized and clarified that it was not meant to be a Nazi salute"

He did clarify it was not meant to be a Nazi salute (https://people.com/elon-musk-says-he-didnt-do-nazi-salute-at...), but did not apologize. You have to realize that at that moment in time, a large part of the online culture decided that you should never apologize for controversies because people will attack you for the apology as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25NYjVgpJ50), which is the policy that Musk supported and took. Additionally, he didn't feel he even did anything wrong, and he considered the claims to be a dirty attack on his character.

>>> "Instead he publicly responded with Nazi- and Holocaust-related puns."

How does that make him guilty, as opposed to mocking the people who made the claim?

>>> "This is already enough to reasonably conclude that it was no accident"

In what way? His reaction to the online attacks prove that his gesture was premeditated? I see nothing anywhere that suggests he wanted this reaction and was ready for it, nor any explanation of what he'd even gain from that. Evidence please.

>>> "it's really a total coincidence that the guy with nationalist views"

Nationalism isn't fascism (see: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism)

>>> "who is also pumping millions upon millions into propping up extremist-right movements across the globe"

You're probably talking about the Afd in Germany, Reform/Restore in the UK, and the Fdl in Italy - among others. There's no evidence Elon Musk poured any money into these European parties. He has voiced support for these parties online, on his own platform. He supports the European parties with the rationalization that the neoliberals in Europe are losing their minds and populism is better than the status quo. That would make him a populist, and he likes some bad political parties.

>>> "and whose AI just happened to start spewing white supremacy propaganda"

Interesting, that happened in 2025 - over a year later. And the white supremacy propaganda was: "white genocide" (talking about the ongoing murders of the Boer in South Africa at the time - by driveby posting links to this video in X threads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMD_7DwuQDY), and... Grok calling itself "MechaHitler" (not gonna bother with this one, lol)

This is a pointless argument and I feel stupid for even engaging with it, and I blame you for pretending that you don't know - or seemingly failing to know. Like I said, we've both had plenty of time (2 years) to figure out this specific issue. But I'm hoping the meta-argument here actually gets across to literally anyone else.

>>> "You presume to objectively know the inner workings of Musk"

> Unfalsifiable and hypocritical, considering you're trying to do the same thing. You're inferring his intent from what you saw.

Come on.

No, I don't claim that I'm objectively correct and you're objectively wrong. That's the entire point of my initial critique AND of my follow-up, which you just replied to!

In my reply, I really tried my best to point this out to you. In return I get baseless accusations and insulting generalizations hurled at me - all because your anger blinds you to all words opposing your view. Once you've determined that I'm part of the group you dislike, you assume my critique must be exactly that one opinion you dislike so much.

Please, try to reflect on this comment chain. Just now you were unable to process enough of my argument to notice that I'm not arguing what you think I'm arguing, even after I explicitly tried pointing it out again. Looking back, at what point did your anger stop you from critically engaging with arguments actually relating to the opinion you dislike?

If it was just the nazi salute, maybe we could say it just looked like one. But there's plenty of nazi and white supremacist dog whisles twitter posts by him, so its not an isolated accident. And it doesn't mean he has the same goals as nazis, there are plenty of others in project 2025 that admire nazi administrators and what they did to take over the state.

This should not be flagged and I veto the decision. This article is spot on.

HN has a massive problem where it's low key fostering right wing ideology with inadequate moderation. I'm flagging what I can.

So, only left wing ideology is allowed on the internet? See the issue here?

It's OK to foster right-wing ideology, or left-wing ideology. That's clear even if it's true that one of them is "more correct" or "more moral" on average. But regardless, it should go without saying, and it's disturbing that you are implying otherwise.

Maybe you forgot to add the "far" to "right/left wing", since that's usually what people use as shorthand for "the bad stuff on that side"?

>It’s no surprise that Hacker News favors capitalism, opposes labor, and objects to questioning the privileges of its largely white, male, middle-class audience. It’s “political” and “ideological” for it to do anything else.

Why are anti-capitalists like that?

Leftism, progressism or wtv tries to remove all social value from individuals for their beliefs. Leftists tried to make the world lose respect for people like J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk and recently DHH. If some people say something that is not illegal but is deemed to be offending by leftists, they go tribal gang on that person and try to devalue all they work. I myself prefer to live in a world where people is free to express their thoughts even if they are being retarded at it.

Then they start to use their "well-earned" money to bend the world to their worldview, but "it's their right!". Of the people you bring up, i've been affected just by Musk (his endeavours are a net contributor for global warming), I'm still suspecting you should get fucked with your freely expressed opinion.

I think it's a mistake to put Musk in that category. It harms your entire point. The other two express real human opinions (that one is free to strongly disagree with). Musk purposefully makes himself first and foremost a troll. He negatively affects our society, socially speaking, and it's only human to hate him. He invites it willingly.

[flagged]

disagree

Yup. With public service like this? https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596826

Quite the choice to say he doesn't deserve attention. Doing a public work to raise some much needed attention, to give people a basic heads-up what they are stumbling into.

Once again here Drew just letting the fishes know what particular brand of wet the water is.

Knew about most of these but not Jeff's old blog posts. God damn this sucks.

I've done my part. Make sure you flag and do yours.

Does any one else get confused between this guy and BurntSushi?

[flagged]

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, no matter who they're about. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com