zlacker

>>lordna+(OP)
I guess it is a perfect opportunity to thank dang and sctb for their unobtrusive and friendly moderation efforts.

The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.

>>dunkel+xc
Given the kind of people who frequent HN (lots of skilled, wealthy and fairly powerful people) there is a large incentive to game the system.

I assume that the mass upvotes/downvotes are exactly that.

>>radica+Hf
I'm curious why you think "lots" of skilled, wealthy and powerful people frequent HN. I think its lots of people who think they are skilled and wish they were wealthy and/or powerful.

>>goathe+Ni
The heavy startup focus of hackernews (like, it's an incubator's news agitator) + lots of successful tech-types, like FAANG employees with 200K+ salaries.

Lots of other commentators I've seen on here are experience pilots, engineers, etc. Maybe not Bill Gates money but certainly on the higher end of the bell-curve when it comes to education and pay.

I don't disagree that there is a lot of aspirational talk on here too -- they wanna get rich -- but again, it's the news site that's part of a startup incubator. What did you expect?