Everyone sees their own ideological nemeses in the HN user base, which is both a sign that things are working well, and a reason for us all to avoid ideologically-charged political discussions as much as we can. I promise, the "anti-US left" sees HN as stuffed to the gills full of US apologists as well.
Everyone's certainly prone to confirmation bias, but some information about the real numbers would be interesting.
Has no one yet developed a super duper machine-learning-based sentiment analysis system that could give us a more precise answer about HN's political leanings?
My comment is tagged with 'flagged' and set to the lowest score. Obviously these forums lean young and college students which subscribe generally to College identity politics which is very far left.
Meanwhile, extremely low effort posts of "Shut up, Socialism works, there's nothing to see here," are voted up uncritically.
While there are some issues, it's also often not what you say but how you say it.
I do dislike the fact that there is no way to "vouch" for flagged comments, and that -10 auto flag kills it.
While I can't comment much on the bias there is some sort of a group mentality to downvote comments that already have been downvoted once or twice, maybe people think they are helping to "clean up" the discussion.
I often wondered how things would work if HN would implement an "score hidden" policy for new comments (say first 6 hours) with the score not affecting the position or the font of the comment if that would reduce the amount of flagged comments on the board or not.
