Comment by tomhow
3 days ago
> HN sometimes seems to spend more energy decrying the current state of the UK than that of the US, despite the relative imbalance in user numbers.
I have to assume this perception has mostly to do with the time of day you're normally looking at HN. As someone who is looking at the threads for hours each day, there's certainly far more politics-related discussion about the U.S. than any other country.
There's more overall discussion of US politics for sure, but it tends to occur tangentially (as articles about US politics are pretty reliably flagged). To give a concrete example, the following article was not flagged and got quite a lot of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600194 I do not think an article on an obscure website with a similarly 'provocative' headline relating to current US politics would escape flagging.
Single instances and hypotheticals don't tell us much. That particular topic spent only four hours on the front page, and it was times that are peak for the U.K. and off-peak for the U.S. Plenty of stories related to U.S. politics spend at least that amount of time on the front page. People often remember the stories that are flagged that they strongly felt should have been given front page time, but forget about the stories that did get plenty of exposure.
I doubt you can point me to a recent story about US politics that spent four hours on the front page and had a similarly inflammatory headline. It would be as if this discussion were occurring under the headline "ICE thugs murder second US citizen" and linked to the website of a left-wing political organisation with an anonymous byline.
Unless peak US times are very late in the day, I'm pretty sure I do look at HN quite often during peak US hours. I'm only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast here. Gemini (ha!) tells me that
>...peak engagement hours generally align with US workday hours, particularly in Pacific (PT) and Eastern Time (ET). The highest activity typically occurs between 11 AM – 4 PM UTC (roughly 6 AM – 11 AM ET / 3 AM – 8 AM PT).
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