HN is a place that attracts professionals of a particular enough field that it has avoided any internal siloing (i.e. Subreddits). Within Tech you can see nearly every political view represented - within SV in particular you'll find a very strong neo-Libretarian movement that's sprung up (in part) due to opposition against taxation - this group in particular is quite strongly anti-socialist.
It has (at least for the last five years while I've been here) always been this way - there is a very wide spectrum of humanity represented here.
I have been here for a few years, there are definitely some areas of groupthink. HN knows it's tech, but it's politics aren't generally as well thought through.
Lots of people outside SV are interested in those things—many more than are in it, actually. And a topic list doesn't say whether readers identify with or against SV, "tech culture", and so on. The HN users who dislike all of that are just as active in discussing it. More active in fact.
If you know of a place where a more informed and intelligent response is being crafted I'd like to know about it. The type of people who frequent HN are the same people who work in Silicon Valley and other high tech areas where much of this technology was created and promoted. Most regular folks I know don't know what to think about it and are waiting for leaders to come up with a rational and measured response that offers some push back.
If you don't think SV tech (which HN generally represents) has a moralizing utopian political bent, you haven't been paying attention. It's a massive problem.
I do not come to HN for political discussions, so I'd prefer less of them. When a techie is involved, it's worth a mention here, but I'd much rather read about startup related issues on hn.
I suspect the signal to noise ratio on any such discussion would be high. There are knowledgable folks in HN on non tech topics (as well as users living in Ukraine and Russia, presuming either are still able to access the site) but any discussion would likely be overrun with folks that have no particular knowledge but strong opinions they want to share instead.
HN isn't a tech-only place. There's plenty of politics, business & investment (with an emphasis on startups for obvious reasons) and other non-tech topics here all the time.
For the most part, HN is still relatively politics free. Those spaces are few and far between nowadays.
Unfortunately, that's changing. It has a lot to do with the fact that so many people here have livelihoods that depend on the "Silicon Valley" ecosystem, and that system is showing cracks in the facade. You can see it in the shifting of the public perception of Tech; the hoi polloi are sick of it, and politicians are scared of it.
Any community is going to be an echo chamber around something.
HN is generally a "tech is good" camp, given that we're all in tech. We might recognize boundaries and nuance in there, but most HNers generally believe tech solves problems (myself included).
The concern imo is when a network, say your Facebook friends, ends up becoming a secret echo chamber without understanding it. Instead of realizing you are engaging in a biased group you assume you have a representative sampling and that people who disagree with you are the outliers.
That's massively untrue and a good example of the kind of thing people imagine and then project onto HN.
In fact a plurality of this community is critical and skeptical of Silicon Valley (which is fine when the criticism is substantive and not when it isn't, as with anything else). And certainly the vast majority of HN users resides far away from SV.
HN has a hard liberal slant. There are a lot of bleeding hearts in SV, so not much of a point to bring political views into tech discussions.
I try to avoid any "technical" convos on what people fear may happen when legislation doesn't even exist in the planning phases yet.
Too many irrationally scared people to have those exchanges.
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