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Ask HN: What is the political bias on Hacker News?

6 points by Layke1123 ↗ HN
I was just thinking recently about the political bias of different news sources, as well as various websites like Reddit, 4chan, BabylonBee, etc., and I was wondering what the consensus on here was? Is Hacker News liberal, conservative, or something else? Are the commenters one way but the posts another? Curious to hear our "collective" thoughts.

13 comments

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nibsfive
Most likely coastal cities smart person liberal, probably followed by moderate libertarian.
Layke1123
I agree with the general sentiment, but I'm suspicious of moderators and who runs the site to. I think I've seen an extreme bias against anything other than neoliberal capitalism for the most part.
yuppie_scum
Comment sections seem pretty right to me.
h2odragon
I don't think there is a consensus, other than that the purposes stated in the guidelines are sensible. I expect many are willing to argue either side and embrace hypothetical positions for the sake of discussion, without any intent to advocate political, moral, religious, etc views.

And then there's a lot of honest religious arguments about programming tools and such, so hail Eris and enjoy learning from the chaos.

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krapp
There is no single cohesive political consensus across Hacker News (and really, not across any large social media platform, despite rumors to the contrary.) If there were, political threads here wouldn't turn into dumpster fires so often.

What we have is multiple, violently overlapping political magisteria, with the consensus of any particular thread depending entirely on which hemisphere is awake at the moment, who posts first (and thus guides the thread in a particular direction,) and whose posse downvotes the opposition the hardest.

hindsightbias
glibertarian with a sprinkle of brogressives
sitkack
This is so much better than what I said, so I moved it.

> Libertarian, reductionist, pro-capital. Heinlein acolytes.

simonblack
Like most US-based websites, it's "American"

That is, if you're American, the bias is invisible. If you're not American, you can see the the 'American-ness' a mile off.

An analogy: When you speak, do you have an accent? Or is it only others that have a noticeable accent?

masonic
"I thought we were an autonomous collective."
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dragonwriter
> Ask HN: What is the political bias on Hacker News?

Complicated and shifting; there are a number of sizable factions that you can usually count on showing ip, but the relative prominence and energy shifts rapidly. (People who claim there is a consistent bias pretty consistently claim it's the position diametrically opposed to their own, but this misperception is pretty eqially distributed among the factions, so the current dominant viewpoint can therefore usually be determined by simply inverting whatever is most commonly described as the consistent bias.