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Comment by educar | Hacker News Reader

> HN always has very extreme, and usually very negative reactions to any kind of tracking, integration, promotion, analytics, etc - and rightly so, with governments and corporations eroding our privacy at every step, we have to be on guard.

My understanding of this phenomenon is that only people with extreme views comment. I mean HN is filled with slack, apple, github, google etc fanboys. None of these are opensource and they all track users.

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> My understanding of this phenomenon is that only people with extreme views comment.

I believe so too, we have much more positive feedback from new customers from the exposure this post has brought than we have negative.

In either case I'm glad for the opportunity for HN to discuss how to monetize FOSS, to see what people consider fair and unfair and to learn a little bit more about people's standpoints.

> My understanding of this phenomenon is that only people with extreme views comment.

Definitely not only, but you've put your finger on an important point here: such people are far more likely to comment, making the threads a distorted image of the community.

I feel like this is one of those phenomena that has a well-known name, but can't think of it. Anybody know?

Were you thinking of "vocal minority"? Seems to fit here.

I've had something on the tip of my tongue since seeing the parent comment last night - I think this is close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence but it doesn't seem to say too much about when the majority behave this way, maybe it's a disparity between perceived like-minded group size and actual group-size.

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