The moderators at HN have banned every single prominent right winger.
If you are right wing and have not been banned - it is just a matter of time. I know some people tried everything to stay inside the rules and they failed.
I don't know that this pattern is the fault of Dan and Scott directly - I think there is something deeper at work which goes beyond the political pattern recognition of the people who talk here.
I won't jump into the topic here but I am going to iterate - there exist three powerful factions in our political system - the left, the right and the liberals. I believe if we don't hang together we will hang separately.
For one political philosophy to have a monopoly is the last thing we need. It is as moronic as one sex winning the War of the Sexes.
Look at how economists are now reconsidering the position on global trade - positions that seem incontrovertible get walked back in time - do we want to slow down that mechanism?
I don't agree. I got banned once and it was justified.
Asked for an unban and it was ok within the minute.
HN just tries to reduce politics here, which is in their right.
Can you mail me a full version of what you are trying to say here please? As a European, HN seems pretty right wing to me. You see a lot of people complaining about identity politics, complaining about too much (social security and empowering minorities) state while defending (property rights enforcing, military and security spending) state and about being persecuted by a "liberal media". Yes, you also have lots of what we would call centre left or "socially leftwing, fiscally conservative", but it is by no means leftist. So I'd be curious for some specific examples in a space where you won't have to fear being censored (email which can be found in my profile)
Left America is more like right EU. It's not the same.
For the one that downvoted me, I'm sorry you feel personally attacked /s
Please state facts.
An extreme right party in Belgium looks for better benefits for the poor than Democrats in the US ( cfr. Vlaams Belang in Belgium, i'm not approving them btw)
Their party programme was based on Denmark.
The most extreme is currently in Hungary and he is hard against immigration, but that's it.
I don't know how/why it happened, but most users here are left-wing now. This means that, if you post a right-wing point of view, you are likely to attract lots of responses. Posts that attract lots of responses are always seen as flamebait, and flamebait is flagged. Many flags will get you labelled as a troll and banned.
Whether this is on purpose (a system used by the mods to keep the site left-wing) or not (just a consequence of the times we live in + a desire by the mods not to have flames all day) is another matter.
Can you mail me a full version of what you are trying to say here please? As a European, HN seems pretty right wing to me, so if you have examples of statements which you feel get flagged/banned while not deserving so in a noncensored setting (my mail which can be found in my profile) I'd be grateful
Forgive me but I don't feel like writing too much about this subject, which is getting pretty old and tiring. So I'll type it here even if I get flagged.
The political compass can be separated in economical and social issues. Economically, HN is right-wing, as you say. It's full of libertarians. But socially, it's strictly left-wing. Things that get you flagged? Men and women are not the same, we should not turn the world around to appease to non-heterosexuals, perhaps people of different races/ethnic backgrounds/religions are fundamentally different (for better or for worse), all humans aren't worth the same, countries should have the right to manage themselves in any way they want without having human rights shoved into them by the west... Stuff like that cannot be discussed here.
And as I said, I don't know if it's a conscious effort by the mods, or those topics only incite flames so they have to be shut down. What I do know is that just yesterday we got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21365411 on the front page (which is, quite literally, left-wing political propaganda) but something that criticised those points would be flagged in minutes.
You are a very new user and may not know how the site works with regards to downvoting and karma. There are links to follow but the short faq is that regular users get access to downvotes and flags, and thus older users often will flag kill topics that they think will only be a flame war.
That, and there are automated things which identify when a topic becomes flame
I am not a very new user, in fact by looking at your profile I have been here for much longer than you.
Older/active users are predominantly left-wing and use their flag power to flag right-wing points of view, because they deem them as trolling (charitable point of view) or because they want to silence them (uncharitable point of view). Then, mods come and ban those who amass many flags because someone who's got many flags is irredeemably a troll.
I give you 3/10 as your profile say it was created 17 days ago and you made me look and reply. Nice run though! Very skillful
Look at yummyfajitas.
That's something of a special case in a lot of ways. And not someone we banned for political reasons. (Edit: I should have said: not someone we moderated for political reasons. We didn't ban him.)
Not irredeemably!
>Men and women are not the same, we should not turn the world around to appease to non-heterosexuals, perhaps people of different races/ethnic backgrounds/religions are fundamentally different
Obviously these examples are reductive by necessity, and both constructive and insubstantive/hateful posts can be reduced in these ways. Personally, the examples of such downvoted/flagged posts I've seen have almost always betrayed the latter quite unsubtly. (Your choice of wording is also kind of unfair - you've chosen reductions that are, again in my opinion, no-brainers to say "yes" to without context and assuming good faith).
What you're asking for is easy to test. I can send you a list later. You probably won't like some of the list - this will be you roleplaying as a right winger for experiment.
Europeans - I am one so I know - if they are Anglos - are heavily influenced by the American information-sphere. It is normal for a European to listen to NPR or watch CNN and think they're hearing neutrality because there's context in American politics we're not aware of.
The HN forum's population is now very different to what it was at the start. I'm convinced people like Paul Graham would get crucified.
There is a conformity - I don't want to label it leftist - it leans there at the moment but it will go the other way in future.
It is not anybody in Silicon Valley's job to moderate the population's speech - that our governments did not produce a public space for the online world was a strategic error. I suppose we could just take the China route but no amount of machine learning is going to stop Americans telling the other side to fuck off - that is a feature and not a bug.