Users that comment on a post are not a random sample of the community at large. So you can't draw conclusions about the community by looking at a biased sample of posts, because it just projects that bias into the comments. This is a truism of most online platforms, e.g. Twitter.

> HN is not a hivemind.

Big claim. Add the keywords "Rust", "Webasm" or "Burnout" to your title and your chances of making it to the frontpage increase significantly.

Maybe you are just closer to the group that gets triggered by these keywords. And that is OK. But my point is that these 'opposing' sentiments are always present in those threads. Which begs the question: where is the hivemind?

Also make sure you note somewhere in your post:

* that MBAs and VCs are useless leeches

* but rich tech founders are folk heros and visionaries

* that all regulations are just market capture by entrenched players

* Europe's government health plans work great and America's private one is an embarrassment

* but that also government cannot possibly be an efficient provider of services and the only true answer is pure libertarianism

> what sorts of posts are likely to elicit reactions from a particular group

Also: given such sorts of posts, once one seeming/presumed group acquires dominance in a thread of comments, that "others" may self-select out of commenting on that particular article.

I think the question is why you apparently see rather few people show up in adjacent threads. You see this with many topics. There's the people who complain about Apple's monopoly, and there's the people who say Apple is dying because they have no marketshare, but you might reasonably expect both groups to fall under the umbrella of people interested in Apple's marketshare.

Lurker here. Made an account because fuck it, why not.