Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway287391 | Hacker News Reader

I get why you'd think it's rude/unnecessary, but I don't think it's a generalization to say it's very unlikely that anywhere near half of the audience of a blog post like this is on Team Trump. I'm sure there are Trump supporters that read and digest this kind of content regularly, but any familiarity with the typical cultural attitudes and media consumption patterns of Trump supporters makes it obvious that that's far from the norm.

View on HN

You're taking a characterization of Trump supporters created by the media for entertainment assuming that is the world writ large.

Really? You genuinely think it's plausible that roughly half of the readers of this blogpost are Trump supporters? I'm really not taking an outlandish stance here... this post will have most of its traffic driven by HackerNews and Reddit, where California is an outsized plurality of the American audience, which went overwhelmingly to Clinton in 2016 (and even more overwhelmingly so in the densest parts of California where the overwhelming sub-plurality of HN/Reddit traffic comes from: the Bay Area and LA). Even if you believe that, all else equal, the average Trump supporter's media diet is about the same as the average non-Trump-supporter's, the demographics of these aggregators alone makes it more or less statistically impossible that what I'm saying isn't true.

Would you please not take HN threads into repetitive political back and forths? They're tedious, and don't gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity (the purpose of the site).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I must have misunderstood. I'm not saying anything about the readership of HN, only that the characterization of Trump supporters in your post is based on media narrative and not fact.

> long-form data driven thinkpieces

That's not the same as "content posted to HN and Reddit".

TBH, you're probably right that this article is going to have a viewership where supporting Trump is less likely.

The pushback you're getting is that you didn't make that claim, you made a claim that implied the Trump voter base was not interested in "long-form data driven thinkpieces", which is a brand of hubris that many are getting tired of.

Ask yourself this: how do you know what the average Trump supporter's media diet consists of?

I know that every Trump supporter I know gets a hell of a lot from Fox and Facebook. They tend to spout off talking points about how Liberals are bad and this is bad and that is bad, without solutions or actual, practical proposals on making the country better.

The status quo on healthcare is not an option. Deporting every "illegal" is not an option. Banning Muslims is not an option.

I don't think Trump supporters are un-American, but I think they've forgotten some American values if they continue to support Trump the man. His leadership is the antithesis of America. If you're conservative, that's one thing. To be a Trumpian is to have missed civics class.

Do you ever stop and check how closely the things you believe line up with reality, or if there might be some things you're overlooking?

Everyone should, mistermann.

Yes they should!

I've read internet comments from many of them, met a few of them, and am friends with one. My friend regularly sends me articles from Brietbart and other conspiracy mongering outlets who write entire articles based on Jason Wohl tweets. People who consume /r/The_Donald, chain emails, and propaganda outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and the like are Trump's base. They are typically not podcast-listening thinkpiece-reading latte-sipping yuppies.

Here, watch this BBC video [1] where they interview Trump voters about their views on the "mainstream media" (by which you quickly realize they mean anything that doesn't deal in pure pro-Trump anti-librul propaganda). Here's an article [2] on a study showing that pro-Trump people specifically like to consume fake news shared via Facebook.

But personally I didn't really need a study to tell me any of that -- how do I know? I live and breathe and observe the world and people around me...

And yes, this is a generalization and not true of every single Trump voter. Obviously. All I really claimed was that Trump supporters will definitely be a minority of readers of a blog like this.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-38191313/no-tr...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/06/sharing-f...

It's funny how all the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the news were homeless, all Obama supporters were welfare supported, and all Trump supporters are ignorant rednecks. Socialists are all unemployed and look lazy.

So weird how they all find their way onto the news. It's almost as if they were selected by image to fit a story.

What's even funnier is how easily even intelligent people on intellectual websites like HN can fall for such bush league propaganda techniques. I don't know how we can ever fix this problem if even smart people aren't able to see it.

There's plenty of Trump supporters in silicon valley. We may be democrats previously, but we really like what Trump did against China, even though the large corporations (who owns mass media) hated the move. Trump rejuvenated the economy, increased competitiveness of American firms, and helped to increase jobs and wages for American workers. He stood up against dictatorship China and is winning the trade war. He is a very flawed man, but he did great for America

He didn't "rejuvenate" the economy. He doubled the deficit and the economy is still growing more or less as fast as it was under Obama. His actions are going to make the next recession worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com