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> Is this really about discrimination against Asian-Americans? It's not at all. Unsurprisingly, East Asian and South Asian community groups have by and large g
by chimeracoder 9y ago
> Is this really about discrimination against Asian-Americans?
It's not at all. Unsurprisingly, East Asian and South Asian community groups have by and large gone incredibly far out of their way to distance themselves from this lawsuit. It took Blum a comically long period of time even to find people with standing who were willing to participate in it.
You won't find that to be the predominant sentiment on HN, but HN has never been particularly representative of other populations when it comes to political topics, especially race and discrimination.
- ithilglin909 9y agoSincere question: what do you mean by "other populations"?
- chimeracoder 9y ago> Sincere question: what do you mean by "other populations"? HN does not provide a representative view of any group other than "HN readers". It doesn't even do a great job of representing programmers, or people who work in tech. So if you come to HN and expect the things you read to be representative of any group broader than that, you'll end up pretty far off the mark.
- mrep 9y agoNitpick but it actually represents "HN commenters" because there almost certainly a lot of people who do not comment and those people don't necessarily have the same view as the commenters.
- ithilglin909 9y agoThanks? I really don't know why I would have the expectation that the views expressed on HN would be representative of the views of a group other than "People who comment on Hacker News". Same goes for any other site that people comment on...
- caligarn 9y agoMy sense would be they are just implying that HN is overwhelmingly white, which wouldn’t be surprising.
- moomin 9y agoNot OP, but I’ll just observe that HN does have a recognisable political slant. Not everyone on it shares the views of that slant, but if you haven’t noticed it’s presence, it’s probably because you do share those views.
- ithilglin909 9y agoI'm not sure how that's answering my question...?
- dang 9y agoThat "recognizable slant" is in the eye of the beholder. On divisive issues, the community is simply divided, as is the society at large—or rather, the societies, since HN is a majority-international site. But that's not how it feels, because of this effect, which a reader pointed out yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751922 I guarantee you that readers with opposite views to yours have opposite views of HN's "recognizable slant". Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16397133 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407769. Or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134205 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16750306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16750306. And so on.
- thraway180306 9y agoHN is a majority-international site Sorry, but is this claim based on pageviews, or the origins of the comments being posted? It's not like guardian.co.uk/international is in fact international news and opinion.
- dang 9y agoI mean that no country has a majority of the users hitting HN. In terms of posting comments it's a bit more than 50% from the US. The point, though, is that people coming here are coming from many different countries, so opinion is more divided than it would be from just one. There aren't only political and ideological divides, but national, cultural, and linguistic ones. Understandably—because the information isn't available—people don't take this into account. That unfortunately leads to a lot of misunderstanding and even ill will.