zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News:

Click your username at the upper right:

Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")

There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.

>>Albert+dY
HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead.

HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.

>>sangno+501
The HN crowd like reddit leans massively progressive/democratic. As such any thinking outside normal or contrarian views are massively suppressed. Classic contrarian (to HN) around WFH, Capitalism, Elon Musk, Tesla, Regulation is downvoted and even flagged

>>zooq_a+T51
The HN crowd is far right but they would never admit it. Most people are unaware of how political parties shift in composition and ideology over the decades.

The contemporary American software engineer resembles the professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the suburbs in the 80's and 90's.

>>hnpoli+x61
The HN crowd is far left but they would never admit it.

Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections.

There was a time in America where the notion of an income tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your home were considered far-left authoritarian and unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property, the government surveilling our communications and finances, government oversight and permission required for all activities.

Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and people's notions of what those terms mean is variable. But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.

In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal progressives "won" and became the center and the establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist today.

Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I can think of where America has stayed the same or moved right since WWII.

>>bodiek+Kj1
>But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.

Ronald Reagan gave 3 million illegal immigrants permanent resident status.