{"id":29535202,"user":"dang","time":1639355206,"time_ago":"4 years ago","type":"comment","content":"

None of this is accurate. HN doesn't "preach"—it isn't a person. It's a statistical cloud of users with all sorts of different opinions. Most generalizations that people make about that cloud are clearly artifacts of cognitive bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you feel like HN is 'preaching' to you, that's because you've selected a special subset of posts (most probably, ones you dislike—because those are the ones you're most likely to notice) and put the label "HN" on them. You could just as easily select an opposite subset, get an opposite picture, and put the label "HN" on that. Indeed, the people who have opposite likes-and-dislikes to yours do just that.

Racism and misogyny, in the tech community and elsewhere, have been extensively discussed here, and continue to be. For those who champion such topics—or really any $topic—it is never discussed enough (so we hear things like "censored out of existence", "immediately flagged into oblivion", "discussion suppressed", etc.), while for those who dislike that $topic, it is forever showing up too often (so we hear the opposite complaints: "it's overrunning the front page", "nothing else appears here anymore", "HN has become nothing but a $topic site"). These complaints are isomorphic: both boil down to "HN has too much of what I dislike and not enough of what I want". And that's no doubt true, because the frontpage is an amalgam of thousands of individual preferences and not any user's optimum.

An extreme, but otherwise typical, example was this thread last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623343. That user's perception of HN was "any mention of $topic [...] gets aggressively removed from discussion" when in reality it was overwhelmingly the most discussed subject on HN in the preceding months. As I said in that thread, when you're 10x bigger than Rust on HN, and someone calls that "aggressively removed from discussion", there's a problem with the perception.

I don't mean to pick on that user. This mechanism of perception is shared by all users who have strong passions for or against any $topic, and it's the passions that produce the perception in the first place. They couldn't disagree more with each other about which topics are the dominant ones vs. the suppressed ones here—but the (false) logic is exactly the same.

This is how we end up with complaints calling HN a "leftist SJW and socialist haven" [1] on the one hand, and "a right wing cesspool" and "toilet of reactionary racists" [2, 3] on the other. No, that's not a false-balance argument; that's a we-all-have-the-same-cognitive-biases argument. I could give you hundreds of examples just like these. They are clearly the product of some uniform mechanism even though (or rather, because) they make such contradictory claims.

Moderators do not "enforce a policy of removing content that is potentially divisive". This is the sort of perception people end up at when they're on one side of an argument and feel that the moderators aren't doing enough for their side. Meanwhile the other side feels exactly the way you do; they just want us to do the opposite of what you want. The irony is that people who can't agree about anything else have no trouble agreeing that the HN moderators are doing exactly the same sort of bad job.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23351311

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108776

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28539652","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"url":"item?id=29535202"}

Comment by dang