Comment by unknownfuture
3 days ago
It's an observation about prevailing libertarian values in the HN community that tend to attract upvotes while going unchallenged.
If you consider that part of a "culture war", then it seems that term has lost all meaning. Might as well just accuse me of being "woke" and get it over with.
I think this forum has a lot of values and don't think it's been libertarian in outlook in a long time based on what gets upvoted here so appealing to that is a bit silly but anyway I don't think this is a fruitful conversation so have a good day.
I think we're running into (or at least pretty close to) a Two Guys Fallacy here:
There's still a strong libertarian streak in HN posters, in a variety of ways.
However, there are also (mostly) different posters who have more vocally shifted the site's Overton window to the left.
These days, I find it fairly common to, for instance, make a comment that points out the very obvious problems the Republican Party has created in recent years, get downvoted to -3, and then upvoted to +5 (or vice versa), all within a few hours. This would suggest that there are contingents of posters (or at least voters!) in both camps.
I generally operate with the understanding that HN today has lots of groups, with an overall "left" lean (as much as anyone can flatten politics into a single axis.) Libertarians, leftists, liberals, nationalists, everyone is here. Appealing to one "enemy" group strikes me as a cheap blow; it's sure to increase engagement for your post with little added discourse value. IMHO at least.