Hacker News has a political bias, and it's getting worse
Why is Hacker News like that?
Drew DeVault argues that Hacker News, Y Combinator's influential forum, has a growing right-wing tilt. He traces it to YC's business ties, founder Paul Graham's essays, and moderation tools like flagging that silence progressive views. The piece cites a Grok thread where criticism of Elon Musk was flagged out of existence, and calls out YC's portfolio of surveillance, crypto, and defense companies.
Every thread about a Musk company or product needs a comment like this one. If we had the right values, every comment would look like this one.
- romanhn
The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don't want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand. It's like every mention of an iPhone got a comment about poor conditions of Chinese assembly workers. These, and the Musk rants, absolutely belong on threads about those topics, but let's not turn every thread into a holy war - you're just pushing people that already agree with you away.
For the record, I vouched for this thread to keep it from being flagged, but that didn't seem enough. I think it's an interesting discussion.
- happytoexplain
This is a good example of a person observing a community, slotting the whole thing into one of a small handful of political categories based on the relatively tiny proportion of comments that lean one way or another, and then claiming that the community has changed or is hypocritical when it turns out people tend to have more dynamic opinions than that.
- kdavis
Unfortunately moderated out of existence in 10, 9, 8, 7....
- adsharma
Jensen Huang is neither a Nazi, nor far right.
HN has other biases that mirror the biases of the avg tech worker in the valley and those of the people called out in the article.
But they don't neatly fit into "far left" and "far right" buckets. People who use those terms usually are professional agitators.
- baddie_twoshoes
This is almost comically backwards. HN is very pro-union, like reddit. In fact, it's pretty much the same users and political opinions as reddit.
It's funny he mentioned the grok discussion. The other day I saw grok got some new release, and although I don't use it, I was curious whether it is any good, and was pleasantly surprised people were actually discussing it and not all running to the keyboard to see who could get their EM comments in first. Like they really cleaned up the place.
This article complains that all their political comments got removed for calling Elon 'fascist', 'nazi' etc. - yes, that's the point; your useless, political opinions nobody else wants to hear, get removed.
The article is practically a meme, using every buzzword imaginable. Racism, sexism, nazi, hate, bigotry, wokeness, etc., they're all there. The person who wrote this article is practically an NPC.
- freeli
This doesn't mirror my experience, which is that most posts and comments criticizing the current administration and conservatives in general get significant positive engagement. There are few posts taking the opposite side, and those that try often get downvoted to oblivion.
As a recent example, anti-progressive themes (being supportive of Israel, for example) are nowhere to be found. Pro-Palestinian views abound with little counter-engagement.
In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome. HN used to be a respite from political insanity on both sides. Now some days it's no better than reddit.
From my (politically neutral, believe it or not) perspective, this site is extremely hostile to conservatives. It's interesting that progressives feel the same way. Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.
- juancn
If you're far left the center is right, if you're far right, the center is left.
- feverzsj
It's a business promotion platform from the very beginning.