I have never once thought of this place as getting attacked by the far right.
I do personally find HN quite uncomfortable when discussion strays into social issues. I obviously don't feel that unwelcome here as I've been here since 2009. But there is a lot of bottled-up hostility to certain groups of people that can be released when the discussion takes a certain turn. And my subjective perception is that this has got much worse over the past decade.
Extremist comments usually get flagged eventually, but lots of people have already read them by the time that happens, and you can post outrageous things here without actually getting your account banned. It's galling to be a member of group X, see an unambiguously hateful comment about group X, and then see this same account continuing to post for years afterwards.
With tech being a space that attracts everything from VC/finance/business people (usually a bit righter-wing), academics and journalists (usually more left) and hackers (who knows/free thinkers), I’m fairly surprised at the overall level of cohesion here.
One thing I’m more or less convinced of is that the tech world has changed a lot from the millennial era of “free thinker”ism and Obama-era liberal optimism. We now skew older, more conservative than 2009 (not necessarily right wing, but less “move fast and break things”), and, in some cases, more disillusioned with the trajectory of tech from a cool, nerdy backwater (pre dotcom boom) to a major cultural and economic engine.
As a side note, there are several good articles and documentaries that track cultural trends in HN, 4chan, reddit, and other online spaces in the transition from the wild-west to the walled garden. Will post links if I can dig them up.
You can really see it in any comment section that even tangentially touches upon topics like immigration.
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> pretending there isn't a large self-labeled intersection in the furry and aspergers communities
Also, we probably shouldn't call it Aspergers, because naming something you are after the person the Nazis hired to decide whether or not you needed to be 'healed' of it[0][1] is kind of... really terrible? Like, I don't know how we let Hans Asperger get away with this shit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger#World_War_II_(19...