If as you postulate, there is an identifiable faction with a political agenda, then either user, moderator or software intervention would hardly be surprising. There are plenty of places on the internet where promoting a political agenda is considered fair sport. HN, for better or worse, is not among them.
Anyway, if it is Dang, then you can live with it or find someplace else for politically partisan posting.
Examples of users currently on rankban include larrys, eli_gottlieb, thinkcomp, DanielBMarkham, etc.
This is verifiable quite easily if you go into the comment history of these users. Take eli_gottlieb, for example. Sure, he often voices quasi-Marxist views, but why do his posts on technical things fall down so rapidly? Even below heavily downvoted trolls? Why did his post in 'Who wants to be hired?' so heavily sink to the very bottom?
Lastly, some users who have engaged with HN moderators via email were taken off of rankbans, so they have never denied that these rankban mechanisms exist, they generally remain silent when this is brought up, and try to force the conversation surrounding it to a private medium ("please email us at [email protected]", etc.)
That happened?
Ok, look, I don't count it a good thing, but I'd been assuming it was an automatic mechanism that kicks in when you take too many downvotes to one post. And my views are outright Marxist, not quasi-Marxist, but on some level, figuring out how to speak clearly across the massive inferential gap of "everyone else thinks Elizabeth Warren is solidly leftist and hasn't read all the same background literature as me" is my problem.
And besides which, I did get a number of emails based on that "Who wants to be hired?" post, and based on the "Who's hiring?" post for April I responded to an ad that ended up finding me a very nice new job.
So, overall, thanks for being angry on my behalf, but HN is really here for the business and technical stuff, for which it works well for me, and it really is my job to make my own points clear in a discussion.
Well, now I kinda do mind.
That being said, downvoting due to disagreement is currently deeply harmful to this site, but the mods seem to be fine with it. Since that's their stance, I've taken to being quite liberal in my use of downvotes. If that's the way it is, it's dumb not to do the same.
Okay.
Let's agree on one assumption: largely, comments on HN will be voted upon fairly. That is to say, trollish comments will be downvoted (and I'm sure you know of the basics, that heavily downvoted comments will sink down). And going further in this continuum, HN voters are intelligent enough to distinguish between good-faith, substantive posts from content-free, low-substance posts -- and vote as such.
By this logic, eli's more substantive posts in a certain comment thread should be higher than its sibling-level posts. But they're consistently not. They're either at the very absolute end, or one above the absolute end.
Examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9430757
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421905
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9370954
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371219
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358256
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9346313
Do you really want me to keep going? Because this is too easy. All I'm doing is going in his comment history page, picking out comments that are substantive, good-faith, clearly non-trollish, clearly non-partisan... and I assume they should be ranked above comments that are better than his by any reasonable criteria, and consistently you find they're either not or only barely above the negatively-scored comments. You can do this exercise for any other user on rankban.
> Let's agree on one assumption: largely, comments
> on HN will be voted upon fairly.
Perhaps some of these are "vendetta" votes against the individual, but I think most downvotes are based on the content and tone of each individual comment. While there are sometimes extreme short-term swings to the negative, I think the process tends to balance out with extra upvotes for comments the majority considers (rightly or wrongly) unfairly grayed out.
But in my opinion, the result is majority rule, rather than anything universal or conspiratorial.
I was going to make an edit note pointing out this change since having made my comment, but chose not to.
Trust me, the rankban mechanisms exist, some really smart users did some tests to confirm it, and a lot of people are in the know by now. We had this dispute about hellbans, shadowbans, and slowbans, that was much easier to prove. Rankban has been studied pretty extensively at this point, and everyone has been convinced of it. The current effort is to study the downvoteban and policy changes.
Huh, and here I just thought I took too many downvotes for expressing Marxist views on a site where everyone's supposed to want to be an entrepreneur (ie: petite bourgeois).
If there is a pattern what makes you think it's dang vs some other group pushing the opposite viewpoint?
I've probably emailed him a couple dozen times with reports of hinky stuff and never felt like he was protecting anything, I would give him the benefit of the doubt and ask him what's happening.