Watching the front page through the historical lens of hckrnews.com was very insightful. By default, hckrnews shows articles which have made it onto the front page for at least a little bit of time. Then it would continue to display those, highlighting them in HN orange if they were still on the front page, or turning them black when they fell off (even marking them as dead with a faint grey font when appropriate).

Pro Trump articles (and anti Clinton) would appear on in the sea of other articles, but they were always black or grey within a minute or two of their appearance. Pro Clinton articles were about 50/50 throughout the day, some staying, some being voted off.

I attribute a lot of the lost articles to the feeling of "keep HN clear of politics", and a lot more to fringe/fanatical news sites making being flagged, but the overall trend of preferring Clinton to Trump was definitely visible. Bernie Sanders articles were ones which stayed up even longer than the others combined.

So, long story short, yeah, HN is still quite the political echo chamber. It's understandable: many of us share both general job descriptions and life goals; I'd hazard a guess that most even share an age group and fall within a handful of ethnicities.

It is fascinating the extent to which smart-ish coastal city liberals cannot conceive of an intelligent or even highly intelligent Trump voter. There are plenty of them.

Really?

When I read HN, I got the feeling, most political comments that get upvoted are phrased like "I know everyone here is a liberal leftist, BUT I have to tell you about my conservative right opinion right now, even if you don't wanna hear it!"

But I never really encountered these "liberal leftist" majority here. Just in places of the Internet that don't have anything good to say about HN.

I think the difference with this site is that enough of us recognize that the world isn't black or white, but grey. It seems like most sites don't have the majority of people that think like that.

I'm not sure that this is the case. But I am sure that the majority of people here like to think of themselves as such.

Word! (btw. Sanders would have won |-)

An echo chamber can include dissent and still be an echo chamber. In fact that's what keeps them alive long term.

Is the same 5 or 6 conversations over and over really any less of an echo chamber than 2 or 3?

Why is it surprising?

I like to come up with my own conclusions, which may - or may not - be what my demographic group "expects" me to.

48% of the country voted for him, not a surprise to see his supporters represented in any group with 2 or more people.