> how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective.

I can't say I know what that is, but are you sure about this? The HN community is overwhelmingly not in California, and comments about California seem to me to skew to the critical and negative.

I'm not sure, but I would eat my hat if it's not the single largest voting block. The influence is not about praise or criticism, but what is easily understandable or what resonates with lived experience.

There's a lot of different people on HN. I don't mean to say we're all the same. It's just that voting is a low-pass filter.

I was going to say it's for sure not the single largest voting block (but don't eat your hat! that can't be good for you). But I suppose it depends on how you define "block".

Inverting the question, do you think it would be possible to do accurate geographic clustering based solely on HN voting patterns (ignoring time of vote)? I'm doubtful. I think the problem with calling California the "single largest voting block" is that it's so far from homogenous. While California probably has a slightly different ratio of clusters than other states/countries, I suspect the clusters themselves are essentially non-geographic. It would likely be the biggest fiasco in the history of HN, but it would be wonderful to see what patterns could be pulled out of the private voting data if you were to make it available to researchers.