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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see the results of some kind of sentiment analysis on HN comments over time. My hunch is that HN's user base has gotten deeply more rightwing over the years, similar to what's happening in many other online communities. Related to getting more rightwing: I'd also guess (without knowing the data) that the flagging:user activity ratio has steadily grown over the years. HN users are no longer willing to simply downvote comments/articles they disagree with and move on. We are becoming more interested in attempting to silence these comments/articles via flagging.

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I'd like to see whether the perceived rightward direction is new, younger people joining, or older people changing.

Determining that scientifically is going to be near impossible.

Kinda like convincing people to adopt Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation lol.

Pretty much all the stats coming out recently show youth male vote has gone much more +R than in recent history, so could very well be the case of the next gen of SWEs joining HNs and being mad about affronts to orange man.

Some of it just feels like a small part of a constellation of cultural/society/business leader behavioral changes which are the natural pendulum swing overcorrection from peak +D sentiment in summer 2020 going back to the other end.

The natural pendulum swing of “Rs get in govt, f things up, so people get mad at them, elect Dems, who largely stabilize things, and so people forget they got mad at the Rs because they f’ed things up, reelect them because they’re better at lying about their promises, and then the R’s f things up and people get mad at them…”.

This cycle has basically continued ever since Reagan.

If you think about the last two R->D changes it was peak Global Financial Crisis and COVID .. Hail Mary passes to Dems to "please fix".

Yet there isn't much reward for any fixing.

Precisely my observation

> We are becoming more interested in attempting to silence these comments/articles via flagging.

Which as always, is such a tell from those supposedly all about free speech and no censorship. You have Elon banning whomever he disagrees with or makes him look like a fool, press kicked out or people/companies critical of Trump essentially blackmailed. It's dangerous.

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