> Because HN doesn't have opinions on things.

HN is actually one of the most homogeneous public communities I've seen.

And judging by how few downmodded posts are around, self censoring.

Don't confuse basic manners with homogeneity. Just because the rest of the Internet is a dumpster fire, doesn't mean people posting here have limited range of views.

HN sprouts weirdly localized hiveminds - every post is its own little hivemind, where a "correct opinion" is formed, and opposing opinions downvoted and/or ridiculed.

But then the next day a different post on the same topic could have an entirely opposite hivemind, often no discernible reason.

It often depends on the first comment which gets traction (>5 upvotes)

> opposing opinions downvoted and/or ridiculed.

I'm not so sure this is a huge effect. I often express "incorrect opinions", and get some amount of downvoting or ridicule, but not usually to a significant degree. When I've had my comments dogpiled, I can see that it happened because of how I stated my opinion more than because of the opinion itself.

For evidence, the occasionally highly-upvoted Jacobin Magazine here at ground zero of popular capitalist discourse: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jacobinmag.com / https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jacobin.com

Sometimes the same story will be flag killed one day, front page the next.

It's almost as if calling HN "homogeneous" is incorrect.

>And judging by how few downmodded posts are around, self censoring.

Look in a thread where China is mentioned and you'll see the real face of many HN'ers - if they aren't removed before you see it. Luckily the MOD'ing is pretty good.

I don’t understand. China is just a country. Real face? Usually I feel like the problem with HN is that every one assumes they are right or that everything is mostly subjective except the few things they view as objective. Then if you aren’t civil you are somehow wrong. Finally, if you’re espousing far left or far right opinions, you get a bad reception.

Unfortunately since most people aren’t experts on most things, this turns into a bunch of fugazi. People who are financially or academically successful in business or engineering or marketing think they understand politics too.

This is what happens with topics like China. I don’t care about China much. So I end up defending it because the negativity towards it by the Global North is staggeringly inconsistent.

"Everyone I know who's right agree with me!"

Okay. Anything of substance?

It was just a humorous way of agreeing with the point you were making. Sorry to bother you.

Interesting. How were you agreeing with me? This doesn’t make sense.

HN has an average opinion. If 90% of comments on one article say capital punishment is bad and 90% of comments on another article say that paedophiles should be lynched then the overwhelming likelihood is that they are being hypocritical. The idea that it happened to be a completely different subset of HN's audience commenting on each case is statistically implausible.

> The idea that it happened to be a completely different subset of HN's audience commenting on each case is statistically implausible.

This doesn't seem obvious to me at all. It seems not only plausible that this could be the case, but unsurprising.

Almost nobody here reads every story in the feed. Any given story on HN is going to be read by a collection of people that differs from story to story. And most of those people won't make any comment whatsoever. It seems unsurprising to me that a story on, say, capital punishment could get a large number of people who are passionate about that topic, and a story on pedophilia could get a large number of people who are passionate about that topic, and the majority of commenters in both could hold opposite opinions without even one of them being hypocritical.