If you genuinely don't understand what's happening - it's the same reason that political discussion on Reddit became completely detached from reality. On these sort of topics you have a relatively small number of hyper partisans that aim to censor discussion through the abuse of flagging, and they're mostly successful. So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world, or even on e.g. Hacker News. I'm not really sure why anybody would want this outcome; I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
Anyhow, there's plenty of rich discussion to be had, but you increasingly need to do it in the real world, or on smaller forums/channels. This will likely be an even bigger issue in the future as LLMs will enable full automation of this sort of abuse that will ultimately probably be impossible to stop. In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
> So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world,
I don't see that at all. I am engaging with many voices on the other side [1] [2]. Those comments are voted down, yes, but not because "HN hates freedom" or some such, but rather because (a) those opinions are not well informed and (b) HN is broadly upper-class and educated, and therefore not tolerant of uninformed opinions. The only widespread bias I see here is towards constructive and intelligent commenting; and in the current political atmosphere, it's simply not possible to be both intelligent and Republican.
> I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
What I see in your comment is you are upset that you are on the losing side of an argument and so you're accusing the other side of cheating. Hey, that sounds familiar!
> In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
You are probably right, but for reasons entirely unrelated to dumb comments getting downvoted on HN.
> Trump supporters used to speak up on this site. Surely they still exist but all I hear is crickets
They are here. But their contributions are, let's say, not motivated by fact-based reasoning. Not surprising: it's very hard to defend what's going on in this country right now.
Hopefully they're embarrassed.
If you genuinely don't understand what's happening - it's the same reason that political discussion on Reddit became completely detached from reality. On these sort of topics you have a relatively small number of hyper partisans that aim to censor discussion through the abuse of flagging, and they're mostly successful. So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world, or even on e.g. Hacker News. I'm not really sure why anybody would want this outcome; I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
Anyhow, there's plenty of rich discussion to be had, but you increasingly need to do it in the real world, or on smaller forums/channels. This will likely be an even bigger issue in the future as LLMs will enable full automation of this sort of abuse that will ultimately probably be impossible to stop. In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
> So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world,
I don't see that at all. I am engaging with many voices on the other side [1] [2]. Those comments are voted down, yes, but not because "HN hates freedom" or some such, but rather because (a) those opinions are not well informed and (b) HN is broadly upper-class and educated, and therefore not tolerant of uninformed opinions. The only widespread bias I see here is towards constructive and intelligent commenting; and in the current political atmosphere, it's simply not possible to be both intelligent and Republican.
> I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
What I see in your comment is you are upset that you are on the losing side of an argument and so you're accusing the other side of cheating. Hey, that sounds familiar!
> In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
You are probably right, but for reasons entirely unrelated to dumb comments getting downvoted on HN.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545156
> Trump supporters used to speak up on this site. Surely they still exist but all I hear is crickets
They are here. But their contributions are, let's say, not motivated by fact-based reasoning. Not surprising: it's very hard to defend what's going on in this country right now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545156