Comment by dang

When I go through these points I don't think we're disagreeing much! It seems more of a difference in style. For examples:

HN doesn't lack for criticism of the tech BigCos. If it's true that HN influences the public discourse (which I doubt, but let's assume it does), all that influence was gained by being the same HN with the same bookish* titles and preference to avoid flamewars as we're talking about here.

I agree, politics can't be divorced from the topics discussed on HN, and it isn't (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That's not necessarily flamewar, though such topics are more likely to turn flameward.

Yes, many people have the impression that HN is biased, pushing one point of view over another, etc. But people will have that impression regardless. It's in the eye of the beholder, and there are many angry beholders, so we get accused of every bias you can think of. This is baked into the fundamentals of the site.

I don't think moderators' personal tastes are all that intertwined with issues like baity titles. For example, I like Lisp but if someone posted "Lisp crushes its enemies into execrable dust", I'd still edit that title to "Lisp macros provide a high degree of expressiveness" or some representative sentence from the article.

* pg's word about how he wanted the HN frontpage to be