For instance, the person who has the highest karma is in Brazil. Very few of the people I have met on Hacker News are in the Valley and San Francisco, but I have met people from North Carolina, Philadelphia, Portugal, India, Singapore, ...
If you're interested in both technology and business and you've had enough of the self-promoters promoting self promotion that dominate LinkedIn and other social media places, Hacker News is a refuge.
What is missing from Hacker News is a handful of sensationalist topics that dominate the mass media but lead to discussions that never go anywhere and never terminate.
That's what they are designed to do. Neither the democrats or republicans want the situation with guns or abortion to change dramatically because it would disturb an ecosystem where they can count on a large proportion of the population to vote for them automatically, thus they can get elected while promising less.
What both sides have in common is they look at a place like HN and think that their side is being discriminated against because they are special snowflakes who really have something to say that matters about fake controversies and they don't seem to be satisfied posting to the 99.99% of forums that are choked with that stuff.
The real difference between HN and the social media giants is the business model. I believe Y Combinator runs HN to extend it's reputation, attract startups to join Y Combinator and otherwise participate in it's ecosystem. To do that it has to have quality.
Facebook, Google and other companies based on advertising pretty much have to be merchants of outrage because that is what people click on.
I thought the article was pretty clear that Hacker News user base is predominantly North America and Europe, not just the valley?
I don't have any data to back this up, but based on the sources that are posted and gain traction in the community, I suspect majority NA & Europe is accurate. But that's just an observation based on my personal experiences that different regions of the world view information sources differently in terms of reputation and trust.
Has HN or anyone else ever tried to aggregate stats on content sources or user location data?
"Silicon Valley" is more of a state of mind that a physical location.
Japan is famous for its indigenous forums; Japanese people seem to sneak some English words into every anime theme song, but they do awful on the TOEFL.
When you look at South America and Africa I think that educated people are often good at English but even though there are a lot of people in those zones, the size of the "startup sector" or even the "modern sector" is small compared to NA/Europe. (e.g. look at GDP as a proxy)
From the sixth paragraph of TFA, while we're still in the introduction:
The site has become a regional export: ninety percent of its traffic comes from outside the Bay Area, and a third of its users are in Europe.
Very commonplace, especially at large tech firms.