Oh no, I didn't mean moderators are biased. I don't think that is the case at all.
I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case.
You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them.
Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.
I mostly understood that you were talking about the community, not the mods, but now that you mention it, I confused the two in my reply. The first two paragraphs were about the community but then the bit about refs was about the mods. Interesting—thanks for pointing that out!
> maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them
You may be the first person who has ever indicated that they've gotten that point!
Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.
No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").
Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the exi