Left-right seems like a false dichotomy to me. e.g. the reason to avoid cable news is not because of some sort of "left" or "right" bias (which is already nebulous), but because of conflict of interest: health care and military contractor ads sandwiched between pundits attempting to sway public opinion regarding health care and defense policy.
The biggest problem with cable news (IMO) is instead of presenting a news story and moving on to the next, they present a story and then give their personal opinions on it. Instead of letting the audience form their own opinions.
In other words, cable news has turned into a level of quality that’s no better than late night talk shows.
Alternatively, the real problem is that they are in the entertainment business more than the news business. On a good day, news is boring. Instead, on cable networks, everything is a panic. Cable news has ended up on the extreme end of sensationalism.
It seems kind of invalid to try and apply a media bias score to social media. What's the media bias of Reddit? It's going to be very different comparing /r/WhitePeopleTwitter with /r/PoliticalCompassMemes. Similar deal with Wikipedia, bias is more on a page-by-page or contributor basis.
The History of Philosophy book series has something like this in its intro (I’m butchering it up): everyone has their biases, so the best thing we can do is to state them upfront.
I agree that it seems kind of invalid but only kind of. Any site that has an editorial policy and/or a ranking algorithm for what gets more views will have some forms of bias. I agree that in the case of reddit, it makes sense to evaluate each subreddit on its own. Also, if a page where users make submissions that mostly lean in one direction or another, that could be useful information to know.
The idea that all of Europe is highly left wing isn't really accurate. Recall that Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and even Russia are all countries in Europe.
Anyway, pretty much every HN thread about anything Europe related will be full of top voted comments saying things like "Thank goodness for the wonderful EU regulating American companies, how ever would we survive without that?" and most of the comments will be all about how irresponsible those terrible US startups are. So I don't recognize the idea that this forum is libertarian. There are a few libertarians but they tend to get modded down pretty fast by the big government types.
For a different example go look at any discussion during COVID about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masks etc. Libertarians were consistently flamed and flagged to death here, as was true on every other social media site. Really I don't know of any forums where libertarians are the majority. If you find one please do let us know.
> The idea that all of Europe is highly left wing isn't really accurate. Recall that Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and even Russia are all countries in Europe.
Those countries are all very left wing in comparison with the USA.
Sure, the UK has a "Conservative" party in power, yet it is one that recognises that the overwhelming majority of the public supports universal public healthcare. It's also one that handed out hundreds of billions in support during the pandemic and has just handed out billions to the population to pay energy bills.
>For a different example go look at any discussion during COVID about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masks etc. Libertarians were consistently flamed and flagged to death here, as was true on every other social media site.
There have been quite a few successful posts I've seen here that have had an anti-mask, anti-vaccine, or anti-lockdown theme. These continue to exist now.
Calling Al Jazeera and The Guardian obscure sources? They could have used my website as example, not a soul would recognize it but it was on the front page on a few occasions. Interesting choice of evidence there
It also doesn't seem to take the comments into account at all, which is rather the point of HN unless I'm majorly off base here. If the sites submitted are religious extremist but everyone is laughing at them and posting replies based in atheism, you can hardly call the site a good source for religious content. Since they're just looking at the domains being used as "source" here, they might as well not have rated HN at all
IME, only ones negative to the US get moderated away. Users are free to spray gun against other countries all they like, under the guise of "curious" discussion.
So if I set up an aggregator that includes only positive stories about Democrats and only negative stories about Republicans, would you say it's odd to rate that?
There's a [dead] comment that I agree with, making the point that HN is mostly a tech website, and so it shouldn't be surprising that the stories are "neutral" relative to - I'd say orthogonal to - the (historical) left/right political spectrum. Mostly HN doesn't allow political stories - if you lurk on "new" you can find them, usually they don't get discussed or get flagged, but a normal user would just see some tech stuff.
The comments are a different story, I don't think I could pin down a clear average directional bias, but there are lots of different opinions, most of which get downweighted if they're too strong. But I don't think the comments are what the linked website is considering anyway.
A more moderate version of the other post: is lobste.rs politically biased?
Imo, HN has moved from being moderately libertarian/right to today's slight liberal left slant as its user base aged from young, hungry, hopeful entrepreneurs to jaded senior engineers or VPs in large fortune 500 companies. I think the has also been an influx of non-US users over the past decade, which also tend to lean more left. I'd be curious to see if anyone else that's used this site regularly for the past 10+ years would agree with this.
I don't really agree with this. I think HN gets a pretty decent mix of all political viewpoints, just based on the percentage of times I see stuff that I agree with (politically) and the times I don't. If anything, the thing I really like is the stuff that feels blatantly tribal one way or the other is still consistently downvoted. To your specific points:
1. "as its user base aged from young, hungry, hopeful entrepreneurs to jaded senior engineers or VPs in large fortune 500 companies" I think that's a vast, and honestly unfair, over-simplification. I think a lot of folks have become genuinely disillusioned, and it really has nothing to do with changing with age (heck, if anything, I see young people as being more disillusioned than I am). For example, not speaking so much of any political change, but I certainly vastly underestimated how effective the Internet and social media would be as a tool of division. And I personally have some regret of some jobs I had that made this situation worse.
2. As HN has become more popular I've seen a large influx of more right leaning viewpoints. Of course, I think that's probably just because I consider myself more left/centrist, so it's hard for me to say if there has been a real change in direction, but I think I have seen more just blatant political takes, but again I still see informative, quality comments still bubble to the top most frequently.
My impression is that the site has gradually shifted right, but the Overton window has shifted right faster giving the illusion that it has gone left.
Edit: There is something ironic to be said about my very benign comment triggering someone to the point that they felt compelled to create an account and call me classically right wing slurs (subhuman, animal, low-iq). I think its worth considering that the internet/social media has contributed to a growing mental health crisis. Hurt, sick and lonely people seem to congregate online.
Are you saying the realm of acceptable things one can say had shifted to the right? I may have misunderstood because I've never heard that before. I can see that maybe one could claim the leftward shift has stopped and momentum is to the right, but I don't think the fever has broken yet, and I've never even heard anyone claim it has, outside of a few "tide is turning" twitter posts.
(I'm using left/right as I think they're commonly used now, the traditional split isn't really relevant)
> Are you saying the realm of acceptable things one can say had shifted to the right? I may have misunderstood because I've never heard that before.
I'm kind of surprised by your surprise, because i feel like for years now people never shut up about the realm of acceptable things shifting right.
Although personally i think its less a right/left thing and more extremes on both sides becoming more vocal with the moderates being squeezed out. Its always easier to fixate on the crazy thing the other is saying then to look at one's own side.
I feel like some of the eat the rich-type rhetoric you see on reddit would be much less acceptable a decade ago.
Edit: i misread your comment as the opposite of what it said and am confused. I am not claiming that i believe left-wing views that used to be acceptable are not anymore. I am claiming i see people say all the time that the right end of the overton window has expanded out so that right wing views that used to be unacceptable are acceptable now (which i agree with, but i think the same could be said for the left, maybe not to the same extent).
I suspect that if elections had the HN commentariat as the voters, it would result in landslide wins for most Democratic politicians. I don't think this has shifted much in the last decade.
That itself doesn't dispute your point, as I can sympathize with the idea that Democrats aren't particularly left-wing. But I'd also caution against using that as the yardstick, since most people do think of Democrats as "the Left" and it can result in confusion.
Broadly speaking, I'd say HN comments more or less center around the Democratic mainstream, but with a very high level of variance in political viewpoints compared to the general population. You get everything from unreconstructed Stalinists to Mencius Moldbug acolytes here.
> But I'd also caution against using that as the yardstick, since most people do think of Democrats as "the Left" and it can result in confusion.
The problem with reducing things to the colloquial US scale is it lets idiots dominate and control discussion and shits out people outside the status-quo.
Say I’m a radical right winger who’s not a republican or a radical leftist who is not a democrat, and I want to engage in a discussion.
There’s always some dumbass who will associate/accuse you of something you don’t actually believe because you’re [left/right] and therefore you must support Democrat policy X or Republican policy Y. Of course then you backtrack and try to refute them and it just becomes a pointless back and forth completely off topic.
Combine that with the general political illiteracy on this site and the fact that garbage seems not to get flagged if it’s within the zeitgeist of the thread’s current browsers and you get the political flamewars that aren’t supposed to happen here yet so commonly do.
The general culture has gotten a lot more polarized. I'm not sure there even is a singular Overton window any more; the set of things you can acceptably say to either political tribe is narrow and they've pulled apart so far that there's no overlap in the centre.
Climate change, healthcare, education, deregulation, tax cuts, the military budget and accountability, manufacturing, immigration, criminal justice, the justice system, whistleblowers, etc.
There are entire states now insisting that child rape victims carry their rapist's baby to term, threatening any doctor that may assist even in other states. That's insane, and it's what "the right" have been systematically working toward for decades.
The planet is on track for immolation; irreversible and catastrophic global warming, but the Overton Window doesn't allow protestors to throw paint on the perspex screen over famous artwork.
Apologies if that wasn't actually a serious question; Poe's Law, yaknow?
The way your reply is phrased, I'm not sure if you're talking specifically about HN's Overton window, or the more general political climate.
On the general political climate, I don't think the right has really changed their positions on most of those issues, except a bit for the military budget recently where some on the left and right have almost flipped. Edit: and I should mention that younger Republicans have shown more concern about climate change.
On HN's political lean, I can see an argument why it might have started out more left, given its silicon valley heritage which then may have grown to reflect the more general population as its popularity grew. Having perused here for 12 years, I recall always seeing a diversity of opinions on all of those topics though, including the ones you list. Then again, my memory ain't what it used to be.
> I don't think the right has really changed their positions on most of those issues
The facts have come in more and more regarding the effect of deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, illegal and self-destructive wars, and especially climate change.
So, conservatives have had to swerve the Overton Window very hard indeed to maintain such positions in the face of recorded reality.
And that all filters through to here, eventually, in countless ways. The jarring difference between the reality we need and the reality people are cynically pummeled into believing has ripple effects across culture, here and elsewhere.
I don't see what the factual status of any of these policies have to do with the topic at hand. They're immaterial to the question of whether the Overton window has shifted right.
From what I gather, you seem to agree that the right has been and continues to argue for the same policies now as they did decades ago, and for basically the same reasons, and therefore, you must agree that they have not shifted the Overton window on those issues. The only issue they arguably expanded slightly rightward was abortion, and only very recently.
On most other issues it seems like the Overton window expanded to the left while the right side has not changed much.
Does it even make sense to say the Overton window shifted one way or another? The claim is meaningless without also including whether the window widened, narrowed or stayed the same width. The whole point of the window is that it defines the left and right bounds of acceptable discourse. So does "shift right" mean that both the left and right edges shifted to the right? Or that the left stayed in place while the window widened to the right? Or that the right stayed in place while the window narrowed toward it?
I would say that the window has shifted on at least the following topics:
* vigilantism and militias - the Jan 6 rioters, George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse are widely celebrated in right-wing media, I don't think this really happened in the early 2000s
* overt racism - racism scandals from the 90s/2000s, like the Willie Horton ad or the "Macaca" incident seems rather tame compared with what I've seen from figures like Trump or Tucker Carlson.
* the mainstream Republican view is that the Democratic party manipulated the election results and 2020 was a fraudulent election, I don't remember anything like the mainstream acceptance of this kind of conspiracy theory after the 2008 or 2012 elections.
> * vigilantism and militias - the Jan 6 rioters, George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse are widely celebrated in right-wing media, I don't think this really happened in the early 2000s
I don't think Republicans changed their stance on militias. This has always had conservative support because it's literally in the constitution.
As for rioting, I suppose it depends on how you frame the Overton window. The left has always tolerated and even justified rioting, eg. I remember way back to the 1992 LA riots over Rodney King. So "rioting over perceived injustice" has always been within the existing Overton window, it's just new that the right did it this time.
As for vigilantism, I dunno. Self-defense and gun rights has been a core value in Republican circles since forever. Agree with the framing or not, self-defense is how those cases are presented in conservative circles.
> * overt racism - racism scandals from the 90s/2000s, like the Willie Horton ad or the "Macaca" incident seems rather tame compared with what I've seen from figures like Trump or Tucker Carlson.
Hmm, maybe. I've found there's too much silly pearl-clutching with Trump and Carlson generally speaking, but I'm not familiar enough with the racism scandals in that time period to compare.
I just watched the Willie Horton ad on Youtube and read about what happened, and I'm not sure why that should be considered racist. Horton was probably the worst outcome from that policy, and he happens to be black. Using the worst outcome of a policy your opponent fought for seems like fair game to me.
> * the mainstream Republican view is that the Democratic party manipulated the election results and 2020 was a fraudulent election, I don't remember anything like the mainstream acceptance of this kind of conspiracy theory after the 2008 or 2012 elections.
Democrats played up Bush v. Gore as a stolen election.
Democrats also played up the 2016 election being stolen by Russia, and the President's practically treasonous collusion with that foreign state to do so.
I think you're being way too easy on the Democrats here. Furthermore, Republicans have been trying to restrain voting rights for years with talk of fraudulent votes. Talk of "stolen elections" has definitely been within the Overton window for some time now.
I mean everything has been around but we're talking about mainstream acceptance. Trump said that the elections were stolen and the violent riots were justified. What major figure from either party supported anti-government violence before?
Voting fraud was a talking point going back at least to Von Spakovsky under Bush but this was a minor figure who wasn't taken very seriously at the time. Now it's supported by the party leadership.
The moderate Republican party elites were in control up to the tea party movement. This was what the tea party itself was saying: our views are not being represented. Mottos like "America First" and "Drain the Swamp" were relegated to third-party candidacies like Buchanan 2000.
BTW there has been movement on the left too, I'm focusing on the right because that's what you asked about. The 1990s were a moment of remarkable elite consensus with the centrist DLC in control on the left and the more moderate GOP factions on the right. This led to memes about "both parties are the same" like "Kang and Kodos" (1990) and "Giant Douche vs Shit Sandwich" (2004). Since then American politics have polarized and the parties have moved much further apart. The concept of an "Overton window" doesn't even make as much sense anymore, because many people take offense at mainstream views of the other side (e.g. "trans women are women" or "Jan 6 was justified because the 2020 election was stolen by Biden")
Transgender healthcare and transgender existence as a whole is a particularly overt and luminescent example. We have always been seen as weird, but for decades I could generally expect to be able to go to a doctor and have it covered by insurance. Now in some states the government and its police forces would imprison that doctor for providing treatment and imprison my wife for teaching in a K12 school. We didn't have a lot of explicit rights in the past but we also didn't have these kinds of massive targeting and demonization campaigns by elected officials.
> We have always been seen as weird, but for decades I could generally expect to be able to go to a doctor and have it covered by insurance.
This might be a good example, but I admit that the insurance situation in the US is so bizarre that I have no intuitions on this, re: insurance covering gender transition. Is insurance no longer covering it or something? If so, is this a legislated restriction?
It is true that states are banning this kind of care for minors, but consent around minors is pretty tricky, and some people like to ignore the nuances for simple soundbites.
It's not clear cut because it's a sort "new" topic, so it's hard to gauge where conservatives stood. For instance, abortion is a clear example of something that was "settled" in a sense and almost everyone had moved on, but the GOP blew it open again. Clear rightward shift of the Overton window.
I agree the pushback on books and school topics might count towards a rightward shift on the Overton window. Banning the teaching of evolution has always kind of been a hobby horse of the extreme right though, so not totally unheard of. It is more widespread, so kind of fits the mould of abortion.
> We didn't have a lot of explicit rights in the past but we also didn't have these kinds of massive targeting and demonization campaigns by elected officials.
Agreed, but we've also seen a rapid demographic shift over the past 10-15 years [1]. I think the massive leftward push on these issues over the past 10 years, coupled with an alarming lack of caution on these demographic shifts, has led to a corresponding rightward pushback because of numerous preventable failures.
> This might be a good example, but I admit that the insurance situation in the US is so bizarre that I have no intuitions on this, re: insurance covering gender transition. Is insurance no longer covering it or something? If so, is this a legislated restriction?
"Insurance is arbitrarily evil" can be used to explain many phenomenona in the US, but it is increasingly legislative, yes.
> It is true that states are banning this kind of care for minors, but consent around minors is pretty tricky, and some people like to ignore the nuances for simple soundbites.
There's not any nuance to it, they're straight up taking consent away from kids. The kid knows and consents to it, there's doctors and therapists and medical staff willing to help, and parents (though they shouldn't matter either way) are often glad to sign off on it too. The only entity not "consenting" is the state, and it's none of its business in the first place. Taking away someone's right to say "yes" is just as bad as taking away their "no." I have friends who would have made it to 18 if they couldn't transition.
>I think the massive leftward push on these issues over the past 10 years, coupled with an alarming lack of caution on these demographic shifts, has led to a corresponding rightward pushback because of numerous preventable failures.
Can you give some examples of this? I am humbly unaware of what you are specifically referencing.
That's an interesting observation, but I think it depends on time period you look at.
A few years ago, the discussion certainly seemed more Left-ish than now, especially around BLM/trans/women-in-tech issues.
HN of 5+ years ago was a mix of libertarianism/pro-business on the economic side but I'd say center-left socially - ie generally supportive of social support programs
Now, I think both econ and social have both moved towards the center. The libertarianism is still there, but is more "pure" in that it's far more skeptical of business ethics. There still seems to be a decent contingent of hardcore socialists and communists, too. Politically, I think the "woke" stuff is being seen through a more critical lens (or at least, people are more comfortable expressing that criticism) than a few years ago.
On cultural issues I agree this site leans progressive, from a US perspective. (from my international perspective, politics in the US seems to be between far right and religious fundamentalism).
But arguing for more regulation, consumer protections and limiting the influence of corporations or wealthy individuals has never gone well on HN. Which is understandable, given its origins and owner. It's really slanted towards business/entrepreneurship.
I think it's shifted somewhat in a US-specific authoritarian-left direction as that becomes a bigger force in US tech culture. I don't think people are more cynical than before, but it's expressed differently; the live-and-let-live culture has vanished under polarization and toxic positivity, and again I think that's a strongly US phenomenon. I also think that it's partly an explicit top-down shift, particularly with dang taking over and having an explicit policy that is anti- particular kinds of negativity even when that negativity is correct (e.g. telling people they're wrong is moderated a lot more harshly than before).
Can you please point me towards someone using non-linux servers in a production environment? Besides naturally vendor locked developer tools (my company uses them to build Windows desktop software), I'm genuinely confused why someone would want Windows Server. Same is true for MacOS except my company definitely doesnt use them. Are you referring to BSD's? Or, maybe IOT or industrial things with sel4 (which doesn't seem to meet the term "server")?
It's hard to tell if you're joking or not[1], but in a typical enterprise setting, easily more than half of all VMs will be Windows Server. At every large (>10K user) enterprise or government org I've worked at, there will be typically 1K-6K Windows Server virtual machines.
First of all, there are hundreds of thousands of software vendors that have written Windows-only software. There's an enormous amount of inertia behind that. Tiny dev shops especially can't afford to rewrite their software for another platform on a whim.
Second, ASP.NET + Microsoft SQL Server was and is an excellent platform for web development, especially for internal-use apps[2]. If you're paying your dev staff $100K or more per annum, the cost of licensing is comparatively unimportant. Sure, ASP.NET Core now runs on Linux, but it's relatively new and there is no direct upgrade from the Windows-only .NET Framework.
Third, Linux-compatible databases used to come in two categories: proprietary and garbage. Using something like Oracle or IBM DB2 is basically "the same" as Microsoft SQL Server. Just as closed source, just as proprietary, just as expensive. MySQL was a hilarious joke outside of startups and remains so in the minds of anyone working in a real enterprise. It's the Microsoft Access of the Linux world. PostgreSQL is very good now, but wasn't really in the running until a few years ago.
[1] The fact that you've even asked this question rather confirms my point about the extreme level of bias seen here.
[2] E.g.: seamless single-sign-on from your desktop to a web app is literally just a boolean "Enabled"/"Disabled" config option in IIS! Doing something like this on Linux is... sucks breath in through teeth... a lot of work. https://cdn-blog.netwrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Pict...
Not joking. Thank you for the perspective. I'm still unconvinced about ASP.NET + Microsoft SQL Server being superior to the other options available today. PostgreSQL or even sqlite seem like they would be superior for an internal-use app, if you were making the choice today. Maybe that's just my ignorance of ASP.NET talking, but from where I sit, Linux soundly won the server market.
