I've heard opposite complaints about what that slant is (I think entirely from people making their claims in good faith). And of course, both could be correct: there could be a particular mainstream and everyone whose views are outside of it in any direction might find a somewhat chilly reception.
> far too many people would rather down vote than refute an argument
Another challenge is that there's not always a consensus about what downvoting is appropriate for. (Disagreement, tone, bad faith, personal attacks, poor logic, off-topic, etc.? Or just "too controversial and not likely to lead to a good discussion, even though it might well be correct"? For that matter, people can't quite agree on what is or isn't on-topic here.)
I sometimes wish HN had downvote reason metadata so that people could understand more about what was prompting other people to downvote them. You can see that people are often genuinely confused about it, but the site rules discourage people from complaining about it, and it's hard to distinguish a confused question from a complaining question when people ask why they were downvoted. But we don't really have any challenge for people to say "I was offended by your view" vs. "I think you treated someone else in the conversation disrespectfully" vs. "I don't think HN is the right place for this argument", etc.
I tend to downvote lazy arguments or loaded questions which can be easily answered in 10 seconds by looking them up and have regularly appeared on HN, devoid of new content.
It's fine not to know something, but the threshold to comment should be slightly higher than that; a quick Internet search shouldn't already answer your question / remark.
If I'm not careful I start writing an answer to these, only to realize that I've already done so for the same remark several times already. At that point I just dismiss my comment and downvote instead.
I think we're kind of missing a HN FAQ which we could assume is common knowledge. Obviously I'm talking about technical topic where there is a clear answer.
That's fine, but it's not a norm here. HN explicitly allows downvoting disagreement; a downvote is less noisy and disruptive than the "I disagree with this" comments that we'd get if you couldn't.
How people view the "slant to the politics here" is determined by (1) their own political slant, and (2) how intensely they hold it. This is one of the most reliable phenomena on HN; there are countless cases going both ways.
Edit: here's what I mean about examples going both ways. In this corner:
"overrun by fascist trolls", "bubble of ignorance and right-wing terrorism", "mostly middle class white male libertarians", "chilling effect on discourse from leftists", "definite right-libertarian bias", "Dang has gone to great lengths to ensure that only far-right [etc.]", "Anything critical of the far-right tends to wind up flagged", "The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively", "cesspool of terrible far-right ideas", "Nazism is pretty popular on HN", "HN has had a problem with bigotry and white supremacy for a long time", "a forum made up of primarily right wing users", "very CLEARLY pro white supremacist", "forbids saying anything against the R Party", "commentary which questions capitalism or america is verboten", "Non libertarian views are not tolerated", "a very specific techno-libertarian Silicon Valley type outlook", "excessively pro-capitalist and woefully dismissive of social justice", "utterly filled with alt-right scum", "overly capitalist ideological Silicon Valley moderation", "the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset", "rampant right-wing / libertarian / crypto-fascist", "insurrection apologists in your disgusting community", "HN is a right wing cesspool", "HN as a whole has a conservative tilt", "right-libertarian-leaning HN", "leans right-wing politically, under the guise of being apolitical", "has HN ever been anything other than right-leaning?", "HN has always been pretty far to the right", "entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros", "You simply cannot criticize capitalism", "Can you imagine the kind of slime this forum is managed by?"
and in this corner:
"HN socialist apologia", "the mods are SJW", "socialist-leaning mods" ,"Hacker News the SJW Hole", "you can't be anti-liberal here", "radical leftists appear to have taken control", "tends to be more liberal so you will be downvoted", "a liberal echo chamber identical to all other social media", "this SJW cesspool", "it's ALWAYS the case in HN that any opinion that's not 100% politically correct && strictly SJW standard compliant is suppressed", "HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats", "you fucking insane sjw", "leftist filter bubbles", "left-wing propaganda", "leftist totalitarianism prevalent on HN", "anti-western and extremely anti-capitalist", "Dang is a totalitarian liberal thought policeman", "banned every single prominent right winger", "extremely left-winged", "most people on HN are liberals", "socialist hell-hole", "this site leans left", "leftist bots", "always politically left", "skews quite left", "Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda", "the level of wokeness is just absurd", "leftist ideological echo chamber", "run by radical leftists, so no surprise", "You aren't allowed to go against the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party", "ideas here are ignored, down voted, flagged, shadow banned if they question the left ideology", "a very anti-libertarian echo chamber", "a heavy socialist lean, you are not allowed to have a differing perspective", "only liberals are allowed to express their political opinions on HN", "capitalism bad", "flaaaaaming, communist level liberal", "shows how much of a leftist website this is", "dang is an SJW cunt"
Links available on request. Quote quality 100% guaranteed, or your clicks back!
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, thanks! I haven't gotten much feedback on it and it's as close to the heart of the dynamic here that I've yet been able to get.
