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Well, if HN primarily and accurately reflects the mood of US workers and industries, and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the la

Well, if HN primarily and accurately reflects the mood of US workers and industries, and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/presidential-election-2024-red-shift.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/p... then you’d expect a red shift in posts and responses. If external agents want to manipulate HN opinion away from that right shift, then you’d expect posts, flagging, upvote/downvote, and posting patterns by such agents with an objective of achieving that. I’ve seen evidence of both. But these are all just bits on a screen…I try not to get too hung up on seeing rabbits in clouds. The HN community is a tiny slice of the US, much less the World. I try not to let any echo chamber distort the larger picture, so that I don’t make the same political errors in judgement that led to the recent Democrats performance failures in the last election.

paulpauper 1y ago
All my comments for the past month have 1, 0, or negative votes. These are perfectly reasonable comments. This never happened, until the past few years. So I think something has changed. Getting an upvoted comment means having to write the Magna Carta or something, and this assumes someone does not later downvote it. It does not matter if left-right wing. Someone will downvote. For this reason I have done much less commenting in recent months.
rsynnott 1y ago
> and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years It didn't, though. Like, as the site you linked says, you're talking about a shift of on the order of 5%, and it's largely a reversal of a slightly smaller shift in the other direction 4 years ago. That's pretty much noise, and you wouldn't expect it to make a substantial difference on this site.

paulpauper 1y ago

All my comments for the past month have 1, 0, or negative votes. These are perfectly reasonable comments. This never happened, until the past few years. So I think something has changed. Getting an upvoted comment means having to write the Magna Carta or something, and this assumes someone does not later downvote it. It does not matter if left-right wing. Someone will downvote. For this reason I have done much less commenting in recent months.

rsynnott 1y ago

> and the populace of the US made a strong swing to the red/right over the last couple years It didn't, though. Like, as the site you linked says, you're talking about a shift of on the order of 5%, and it's largely a reversal of a slightly smaller shift in the other direction 4 years ago. That's pretty much noise, and you wouldn't expect it to make a substantial difference on this site.