Who are the 'real ones™' on HN with the vision to see something that is most often inappropriate or hard to communicate here due to downvoting or lame rules? Take the opportunity to let us know here.
You don't own this website or the people that are here.
So you can post whatever you like but you can't demand that the moderators allow it to stay nor can you expect that everyone should upvote you. Your freedoms can't usurp the freedoms of others.
Technology is inherently about making things better. Whether it's just making a tool easier to use, or fundamentally changing how people behave - it's all about altering what we do now. It's not really possible to be a technologist and a (small c) conservative - the definition being "averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.". Being "progressive" - by the dictionary "an advocate of social reform" - is at least compatible with the technologist mindset (although you could still be a technologist without any desire for social reform).
Obviously the values held by "Conservative" political parties are not simply about being "conservative" - but it's not particularly surprising that people who like the idea of changing things aren't a big fan of a political movement which is based on doing things the way we always have.
of course, amusingly, it's also well-known as a right-leaning forum too
i used to think that the fact that both ideas were in currency indicated that it was probably unbiased. I now think that it probably means that the "right-wing"/"progressive" indicators are too simplistic a way to describe the actual underlying biases.
Good point. It's probably more accurate to say it is biased to whatever opinions benefit the YC business model (which is understandable. It's their forum, after all). For example, speaking out against anything other than very lax immigration policy is verboten because driving down American labor costs benefits VC's. Saying anything positive about the previous president will get you downvoted immediately.
(This isn't related to my personal political opinions, I'm just using it as an example.)
There are definitely strands of HN popular opinion that strongly align with YC'S business model (the idea that funding and scale are barometers for success and YC's selection heuristics are actually how you should run your business) but I certainly wouldn't have picked migration as one of the example. If anything, I get the opposite impression when the notion of the threat to devs' one percenter status posed by underpaid and exploited visa recipients willing to wrap text in javascript for a mere 100k per annum comes up, especially if that's compared and contrasted with the general enthusiasm for the idea automating away everyone else's job and replacing it with a UBI. It'd be difficult to find anywhere else quite as hostile to the ads so many YC companies and their acquirers depend on either.
They are good examples of the GP's comment about the idea of a position on a line between left and right wing orthodoxy being the wrong way to describe how HN coalesces around ideas though...
If the SVB debacle taught us anything, it is that even the most libertarian free-market aficionados love their “nanny state” when it’s them who’s in trouble.
This place (commenters) is majority hard-left. Any perception that it's 'right-leaning' is because the moderators are tolerant of non-leftist viewpoints. This, as you may know, constitutes heresy in leftist circles.
Moderation and votes are two different things. Moderators only concern themselves with spam and outstanding violations of rules, that are mostly politeness rules. It's not like there are rules against certain ideology.
Commenters and voters are the same thing and if we were all hard-left, any different viewpoint would be downvoted into oblivion, no matter what the moderators could think.
My guess is that the people around here is a motley crew. Average would be leaning left, but much less than Reddit, to compare with something else.
