Is HN Politically Radicalizing?

For what it's worth I don't think things have changed much over the time I've been reading it (I was reading here before I made this account and have used other accounts). The topics have changed but not the political tenor. Maybe it was different before that but I'm not sure.

I do agree I've been a little surprised at some of the comments and submissions sometimes. There are topics that would have been flagged before that are now allowed to remain (so maybe things have changed?), but I also think topic boundaries have become fuzzier.

My general sense is that many traditional science and technology topics have become politicized themselves in a way they used to not be. COVID is a prime example of this in some ways; trying to approach it from a "purely" biological-scientific perspective is probably impossible. Some of the controversies surrounding the 2016 and 2020 elections, at least in the US, are other examples: regardless of how you identify politically, it is true that issues related to tech were critically involved.

I guess I just see the world as being a different place than 5 years ago even; ignoring certain topics just because they involve politics would be strange in some ways.

I think the more telling issues are whether tech and science are disappearing from HN, and what the nature of the comments are. I'm not sure that those have changed much, but that's just my personal opinion. I can think of ways that comments in the past were moderated that seemed pretty brutal to me, in many of the same ways comments are now.

If someone really wanted to address this, I suppose they'd have to do some kind of topic-sentiment analysis on HN posts and comments. Doable, and interesting, but not of interest to me enough personally to be worth it to me to do.

Everything is about perspective.

I'm from Europe, and to me this site is incredibly conservative, but I see a lot of people from the US that think the opposite.

It's still a far more adult discussion than reddit. At least two sides are generally present and seem to get support. There are lots of examples of unfair moderation, but it seems like more often than not it ends up being at least partially corrected, and non-mainsteam views still get included

Circa 2018 I saw the main problem was "gender activists" (left leaning) who had the m.o. that they would never let you get the last word in a discussion. One of those people got in the face of a cop in San Francisco, was asked to leave, refused to, and never understood why they got arrested.

By 2020 you had what I call "beer beer" activists. You know that part about "free as in speech" vs "free as in beer?" well in their case they want "free" speech in the sense that somebody else has to pay for it. So maybe they are really just into beer. And yeah, they lean right.

By 2022 those people had gone in the direction that a free printing press wasn't enough but now it is awful that people can downvote their comments. If nothing intervened I predicted that soon these people would be complaining that we're not upvoting their comments, soon they'd be livid that we aren't clapping and grinning like idiots at everything they say.

Then the Ukraine war intervened and displaced most of the usual BS... For a while.

It certainly does feel like Reddit sometimes. I think that's exactly it. A wider range of people are now using this site, and resultingly you get a wider range of opinions. Don't forget it tends to be the loud minority that you're seeing, the majority probably is just clicking links and not even interacting very often

It is bad, but I'm hopeful that the pendulum may be swinging back to common sense and a tolerance of diverse (esp conservative) views.

Read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Especially the last paragraph.

People change, old people leave, new people come. The tenor of a site can change for all of these reasons. My impression is that what you are feeling is mostly for the third reason - new people come.

Maybe I'm idealizing the way things were, but it seemed that 6 or 8 years ago, someone could say something that people disagreed with, but say it in a way that was thoughtful. Now, much of the time, it will be said in a way that is not thoughtful at all, but only strident. But I don't think it's because people changed. It's usually newer people who post that way.

I think as HN became more popular, it became a more attractive target for those wishing to do ideological battle. (Why bother doing propaganda on a small, non-influential site?) This drowned out the thoughtful posts. And, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop, some of the older folks quit or posted less frequently.

I see too many conversations where it's obvious that one side isn't really listening, but only arguing. That's not an interesting discussion. It's like beating your head against a brick wall to be a part of, but it's also uninteresting to read if you aren't a part of it.

In my opinion, this is still the best site there is, but it's less than it was in 2014.

Politics has grown (far?) more volatile over the life of HN, as it’s a contact sport now. Thus, anything leaking into the feed reflects the environment. Also, as the audience has exploded, a tech forum —> social media shift has occurred.

I don't know if the site is inherently polarizing or not, but I don't think there's any doubt that the tenor / tone here has shifted a bit. I'd say there are two aspects to that:

1. "Political stuff" (however you want to define that) now seems to be generally more accepted in general. I believe there are discussions here now that just didn't happen 12+ years ago.

2. The political bias seems to have shifted a bit away from the "techno-libertarian" view and more towards a view that, in American terms, might vaguely be described as "left leaning" - that is, more anti-capitalist, pro-big-government, etc.

Whether these developments are good or bad things is subject to debate of course.

It was different when HN was mainly "by engineers, for engineers".

Then it was flooded with pseudo-intellectual leftists and things went bad quickly.