Comment by OrangeMusic
20 days ago
Over generalizations of what HN "is" or what HN "does" are always meaningless. It's a large group of different people who don't act as a single individual. For instance the comments and opinions in this post are very diverse.
Generalizations are just doing better than random guessing by just paying attention to base rates, or, equivalently, describing the majority / bulk of distributions. This isn't meaningless, it is just simple statistical summary in common language.
Also, with modern tools like sentiment analysis and other semantic analysis tools enabled by LLMs, it is pretty trivial to do empirical tests of claims like this (further proving how empty the claim that generalizations about a thing are "meaningless").
Being for paternalistic, censorious policies that restrict software behaviour so broadly is very obviously not "Hacker" (even if you agree with these policies), and this would have been far more surprising 10 years ago to see on HN. This is a "generalization" of the ideological shifts of HN, yes, but a meaningful one (which of course people are free to agree or disagree with).
The comment voting is very opionated though. It's like the same person up/down votes consistently. Obviously the people who vote are of the same opinion group.