I appreciate you taking the time to respond and agree with your point about the whole plausible deniability angle, and how problematic it can be. With regards

I appreciate you taking the time to respond and agree with your point about the whole plausible deniability angle, and how problematic it can be. With regards to the algolia link about the "Google diversity memo" that was actually really interesting to me for two reasons. First, I too am somewhat surprised at the number of upvotes some of those articles received, to be honest some of them seem really poorly reasoned irrespective of how one might feel about the whole issue, and secondly, because despite visiting HN daily, and usually checking in a couple of times a day, I can't remember seeing many of those articles. Is there any way to tell how long they remained on the front page? I don't want to imply that programmers sit in front of their computers all day and slack off browsing HN, but it wouldn't surprise me if many people who are in front of a computer do check in quite often. In my case, I usually only check in during the morning while I eat breakfast, and at night before I go to bed. I don't have access to the internet at work, occasionally I'll browse on my phone during lunch. And I usually only go through the first 50 or so submissions. From my experience, the type of articles that stay on the from page long enough for me to see them, read the article, read the comments, and formulate a coherent response, are either articles that are super interesting to the community or somewhat controversial, since these get the most votes. This obviously biases the kind of articles I usually comment on. I only bring this up to express that their may be a pattern in my commenting that would suggest I'm trying to push a very specific agenda, I hope this isn't the case, but that this might actually be greatly influenced by the kind of content I'm exposed to based on it's position on the front page. You make a very good point with regards to the difference in treatment between some of the people you list. I've noticed myself falling into that trap personally, and I think it was partially due to none of those people being particularly sympathetic in my eyes. This made it much more difficult to spot any bias that may be occurring in the comments.