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Media Bias Fact Check: Hacker News
- diziet 3y agoI like that typically political leaning topics get moderated away. HN is for technical/startup/hacker leaning news.
- panny 3y agoAgreed. The reason I stop reading tech sites is they always seem to devolve into evangelist articles about climate change.
- Freedom2 3y agoIME, 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.
- tpmx 3y agoOf course, HN achieves this by killing anything politically controversial via the flagging system. Next up, their analysis of the political bias of the Linux kernel mailing list?
- shusaku 3y agoAnd now this whole post is flagged…
- mysecretaccount 3y agoLeft-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.
- Moncefmd 3y agoThe factual levels and the bias analysis address the dimension you are mentioning in my opinion
- cj 3y agoThe 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.
- ghayes 3y agoAlternatively, 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dvt 3y agoImo, 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.
- cup 3y agoMy 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.
- flangola7 3y agoThat's a perfect summary of it!
- naasking 3y agoOn what issues has the Overton window shifted right?
- cupanimal 3y ago[dead]
- chatmasta 3y agoDoes 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?
- Manuel_D 3y agoIt 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.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoHN is essentially a single subreddit. But its a fairly specific/topical subreddit, where a left-right score is questionably meaningful.
- hgsgm 3y agoIs 0 an invalid score?
- hgsgm 3y agoWhat are talking about? HN is not Reddit. MBFC doesn't report on Reddit. Wikipedia has editorial leadership and enforcement.
- stephendause 3y agoI 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.
- version_five 3y agoThere'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?
- giantg2 3y agoSeems odd to rate HN given it's an aggregation of articles from other sources.
- clipsy 3y agoSo 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?
- barbarr 3y agoIs there a category for Rust, Deno, and CRDT bias? (Just kidding, of course)
- andreygrehov 3y agoWho is going to fact check fact checkers?
- tomrod 3y agoMore fact checkers. It's cool though, they tend to be spot on.
- jiggawatts 3y agoI don't see much of a left-right slant, but that doesn't mean Hacker News is bias-free. There are other types of biases! The Silicon Valley ex-FAANG startup slant is very obvious to me, as a foreigner working in an ordinary big enterprise setting. Examples of this slant: Microsoft is evil and Azure is just a myth. All servers are Linux by definition. Developer time costs infinity moneys, servers are free. Etc...
- gcoakes 3y agoCan 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")?
- jiggawatts 3y agoIt'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/Picture4.png https://cdn-blog.netwrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Pict...
- lucb1e 3y agoCalling 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
- reducesuffering 3y agoIt’s hilariously on point and expected from TFA that the comments equally bemoan HN for actually being too left or too right. Also expected that the right wing claims about HN being too left contain: “But you're a worse-than-an-animal, low IQ, mentally ill, incompetent leftie after all.” with no equivalent.
- daveoc64 3y agoAs someone from Europe, I'm quite surprised by this. HN is very far to the right by European standards, as even the Democrats are. That perhaps shows why "left" and "right" are overly simplistic labels.
- kaba0 3y agoIndeed! And very libertarian, where everyone should fend for themselves, and the solution to most problems is more capitalism.
- revelio 3y agoThe 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.
- daveoc64 3y ago> 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.