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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

(www.wsj.com)
370 points sillypuddy | 2 comments | 18 Feb 18 16:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.571s | source
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jstewartmobile ◴[18 Feb 18 17:04 UTC] No.16406941[source]▶
I hate to have sympathy for the devil here, but I see their point.

Hackernews is living proof. Pre-election, you could voice a contrary opinion here and have a discussion. Post-election, even the faintest wrongthink shibboleth gets silently downvoted into oblivion.

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dang ◴[18 Feb 18 19:40 UTC] No.16407835[source]▶
Only a small minority of HN users are in Silicon Valley, so your argument wouldn't apply here even if it were true.

When I see complaints like this I always look at the history. Usually the account in question has a pattern of posting flamebait and/or snark. In that case you needn't reach for political bias or 'wrongthink' to explain why the community downvotes such comments. They get downvoted simply because they break the site rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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kelukelugames ◴[19 Feb 18 00:19 UTC] No.16409792[source]▶
Are there user statistics? Would love to see them.
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1. dang ◴[19 Feb 18 21:13 UTC] No.16415800[source]▶
You mean geographically? We're probably going to look at that again this week. If you email hn@ycombinator.com in a week or two we could send you the info. I might write a post about it.
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2. kelukelugames ◴[19 Feb 18 22:05 UTC] No.16416131[source]▶
Maybe with even more detail. Can we do a survey like Stack OVerflow? If not officially then can I do one?