Comment by a_conservative | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_conservative | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> HN commenters post views from every side of these questions, and as long as they do so thoughtfully and substantively, we don't moderate them.

It's the absence of action that is the issue. There is all kinds of left wing (I'm from the US for reference) dreck on here that receives no push back nor moderation. It's very common to see very low value statements on HN that disparage Republicans. People on here have said all kinds of nasty things about Republicans and conservatives. I rarely see any push back from you against these. It's pretty common to see people assume that Republicans don't care about people and state so, like it is an obvious truth without any supporting argument. How is that thoughtful or substantive?

I think your personal biases are blinding you to just how low value much of the accepted discussion here at HN is, when it is left-leaning

These perceptions are notoriously in the eye of the beholder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. The opposite side to you makes exactly the opposite generalizations. It's obvious that these claims can't all be right. What's less obvious, but I think also true, is that because they're so identical, there must be some common mechanism producing them. I think it's that people's perceptions are strongly conditioned by their passions.

In other words, while "I rarely see" is no doubt true, the reasons for that have to do with your own filters as much as the objective situation. This explains why the opposite side reaches the opposite conclusions from the same data: they have the opposite filters. It's the same mechanism in both cases, and there are more than enough datapoints to support every pre-existing view. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As you can imagine, what this boils down to is that all passionate political observers feel equally aggrieved and, ironically, all share the same perception that HN is stacked against them and they're being treated unfairly.

Thanks for the response. There is a lot of truth to what you say. I've come to notice that different articles seem to be magnets for different groups of posters. So there seems to be a little bit of a echo-chamber-like-bubble around particular articles, which probably enhances these effects of everyone feeling aggrieved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com