> Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized

The active ingredient here is the phrase "I see". What you're seeing feels obvious to you because you feel strongly on the topic. People who feel differently have very different "obvious" perceptions. (Edit: like here, which was just posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351063.) These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver, and I do mean entirely—it is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN.

Because these perceptions are predictable from the passions of the perceiver, it follows that they don't tell us anything about the community. They only tell us something about you—namely, which position you personally favor or disfavor, and how strongly. That's why other users perceive the opposite bias to what you perceive. Their passions are producing their perception the same way that yours are—they just happen to have opposite passions. Consider these gems:

zero left wing chatter. instant ban by this fash site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302617

a community full of some pretty extreme opinions, generally right-wing and regressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439442

most of people on HN are ancap or fascists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958681

There are reams of this stuff, coming from all ideological tribes. Same community, incompatible perceptions—why? Because they're not actually incompatible. They only appear so if you take them as objective claims about the community. As expressions of the preferences of the perceiver, they're not only compatible, they're isomorphic. Whatever mechanism is producing these nearly-identical comments, it can't be "political skew on Hacker News", because the claims are coming from all factions.

Usually at this point someone objects, "so you're just claiming that HN is perfectly neutral in every way? the community has no biases of any kind?" No, that doesn't follow. I'm only saying that comments like yours and the 3 I just linked to don't contain any signal about this, because the feeling of bias tells us nothing about the actual statistical and demographic situation. (Well, it tells us that HN produces enough data points for everybody to run across some that rub them the wrong way. But that's not enough information to conclude anything about HN as a whole.)

It's incredible how deeply these feelings go and how convincing they are, so the mechanism is probably hard-wired into all of us. My hypothesis, which I call the notice-dislike bias (a terrible name), goes like this: because painful experiences make a deeper impression than pleasurable ones, we're all more likely to notice the data points that bring up dislike/disagree reactions in us (i.e. give us pain) than we are to notice the kind that we like/agree with (i.e. give us pleasure). Not only that but we weight the painful ones much more heavily. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), in which people are convinced that the community (and usually the moderators too) are overwhelmingly stacked against their particular views (for example, your view that communism is bad). It's easy to see that these generalities are false, because the opposite side has exactly the same feeling—they just perceive the bias the other way around, like the other 3 I linked to.

Usually at this point someone objects, "You haven't proven anything—just because somebody else has a wrong perception, it doesn't follow that mine is". Yes, a perception of this type may happen to correspond to the real situation, but only by accident—like a wrong solution to a math exercise that ends up at the right answer, but is still incorrect. What matters is how the answer is derived. The perceptions we're talking about are derived from the perceiver's internal pleasure/pain experience, and that mechanism is not capable of assessing reality accurately. Essentially, we are all projecting the inverse of our own preferences onto the outside world, and then feeling surrounded by hostility.

Normally I don't offer a verdict on particular claims about this, but I feel pretty confident in saying that there is no pro-communist bias on HN. The comments that you see getting downvoted are, in many cases, downvoted because they're breaking the HN guidelines. Any comment that makes grandiose, repetitive ideological claims is already breaking the site guidelines, and when people go after each other about communism (or any other $classic-ideological-flavor) they're nearly always doing that. I have to ask commenters to stop doing this all the time on HN—not because I'm a secret communist or secret-anything-else, but because these discussions are not interesting in HN's sense of the word. We want curious conversation here, and people bashing their $other-side with well-worn talking points (be it "communism killed x-hundred-million people!" or anything else of that nature), they're not having curious conversation.

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