Its funny. Even after this happens the comments continue to keep the echo chamber going instead of wanting to understand how this happened. Until the DNC has an honest conversation with itself this will just keep happening.
Current DNC leadership needs to go. It's not enough to be on the right side of the issues - you have to also win.
I hope this is a giant wake up call that causes them to clean house. The current leadership and strategists are clearly horribly disconnected from the average voter, and they should be replaced by a team that actually enfranchises its base by pushing for robust primaries (unlike this year), without putting a thumb on the scale (unlike 2016).
You can't win with a backroom of overeducated analysts putting together a "platform" of issues that they feel like will appeal to the median voter, then trying to shove a pre-screened, crappy establishment candidate down everyone's throats.
The best way to figure out what people want to vote for is to hold an actual vote.
Social media upvoting/downvoting that results in comments being hidden is the reason for this. Even a small imbalance in one direction or the other effectively silences one side. Perfectly legitimate, well-reasoned comments will get angrily downvoted into invisibility. Echo chambers get created and enforced. This is particularly bad on Reddit (low karma can get you banned from a sub) but even on HN I'll give anecdotes that go against the "party line" and I'll get downvoted.
Problem is, this is the best way to increase engagement because it gives the most people the most compelling content. So this will never change.
I agree but i think HN does a somewhat Ok job with the upvoting system. Well at least compared to reddit which is in a full blown meltdown because their bubble popped.
Some ideas I'd like to see implemented (in no particular order):
1. Eliminate anonymity by requiring real names and profile pictures attached to usernames. This humanizes users and encourages accountability, as attaching a real name can act as a natural filter for behavior.
2. Introduce a cost for downvoting to make it a more thoughtful action. This could involve a quota based on account age and karma, or my favorite option—having each downvote cost a bit of karma or an upvote on one of your own posts.
3. Discourage bot accounts by requiring a hard-to-obtain token, like a verified phone number, which is straightforward to implement and would reduce low-effort accounts.
4. Higher barrier to entry to join an online community. This doesn't parallel how communities work IRL. You need social credit to join a community.
I’ve already seen people posting absolutely unhinged comments on Reddit. They think they need to go further left, more extreme, completely ignoring the rightward shift of every group but white women.
They don’t want to understand why so many people see the appeal of Trump but not the Democratic Party. They are so caught up in whatever their personal ideological take on some fringe issue is that they miss the big issues and the popular support for change away from the status quo on those issues.
It seems like what happened is that voters without economic knowledge think the president controls inflation, as opposed to it being the inevitable consequence of price rises worldwide due to a worldwide pandemic.
They don't like that eggs went up in price so they elect the opposite party. They think Trump will bring prices back down because he's a businessman, even though his tariffs will be hugely inflationary.
I'm not sure what kind of an honest DNC conversation would be able to address this.
I think this had very little to do with it. From the people I have talked with and also just looking at the latino vote i think people greatly underestimate how many people actually want our immigration system changed as well as being absolutely sick of identity politics.
Also your view that dumb voters led to this is counter productive and insulting. It is what I am seeing in almost every reddit post as well. “Well people are just too dumb to know what they need”… yeah ok.
In what way? In 2016 I did have people approach me for being brown. I live in a liberal white enclave in NE Portland, so this is fairly common for me. Yes, it's extremely weird.
Yes, people approaching people on the streets of a major city due to their skin color to offer their condolences is unhinged. I didn't call all democrats unhinged, just the ones that do weird shit like that.
I'm not questioning your experience at all—the trouble is that you have a lot of context pre-loaded into memory, which readers of internet comments completely lack. If you don't want to come across the wrong way, you need to account for that beforehand. Basically how I often put it is: the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. That's especially true when it comes to your intent, which is something only you have access to.
