/pol/ is around five times as active as /leftypol/.
8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here.
Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.
That is an unfair characterization. /leftypol/ may be smaller than /pol/ but it is definitely one of the top 5 largest boards on the entire site (just checked and it is in 6th place right now by a narrow margin). It has a consistently high PPH count and tons of active users (500 right this minute).
It is hardly fair to say that the left doesn't make up a massive portion of the site.
/leftypol/ is insulated. Mentions of it on other boards are usually hostile.
Its existence tells you a lot about the consistency of the free speech policy, but it tells you little about the political leanings of other boards, particularly /pol/.
I think /leftypol/ is important but I don't think it's very relevant to a claim that /pol/ is populated by the extreme right, which seems to be the context here.
They're not treated the same, though. Using /pol/ is considered acceptable, but posting as if you're on /pol/ often isn't. Using /leftypol/ at all isn't considered acceptable.
What I was trying to push back against is that the overarching culture of the site is right-wing. I don't know that it is, and as someone who uses the site, I don't see that. I would love to hear a real argument for why this is the case. The boards on the site have their own internal owners and moderators and it is those people who are actually crafting the content moderation. There are christian boards, technology boards, literature and philosophy boards, sports boards, islamic theology boards, cyberpunk boards, I can go on and on.
To say that the place is nothing but right-wingers and that any other boards that aren't are anomalies, is unfair. Further it shows you have never actually looked at the site beyond the front page, if that. The overarching philosophy of the site is one of free speech, which attracts people who are interested in odd things from all corners, not just the right.
I didn't put it clearly, and not entirely correctly either. Sorry about that.
To the extent the site has an overarching culture, it's right-wing. There are boards outside the overarching culture (I said there were only "few" earlier, but I don't know if that's right).
/tech/ is the largest technology board. It's part of the overarching culture. It has a clear political leaning, even if that leaning is not part of the rules or the stated topic or the moderation policy. If you look at /tech/'s catalog, there's threads like "Stallman Going SJW on us?" and "Apple - FULL ON JEWMODE".
/christian/ has a /christian/pol sticky that encourages people from all parts of the political spectrum to post but seems to have primarily right-wing posters in practice.
/lit/'s second non-sticky is "Race Realism/biological determinism Books".
Not everyone on those boards is right-wing, of course. Being right-wing isn't their defining characteristic. And there are other boards that don't have this.
But boards with a politically neutral moderation policy that get cross-posters from other boards are likely to end up with a culture that's right-wing.
/leftypol/ is explicitly left-wing, so even its cross-posters are left-wing. Some smaller boards mainly get users through other means, so they're decoupled from the site culture. Non-English boards might be insulated as well, but I've never used any of the large ones so I can't tell.
Large swaths of the internet are left-leaning zones. It should be no surprise that places without algorithmic controls enforcing viewpoints are going to counter-balance what they could otherwise find on normal sites.
8chan's overarching culture is right-wing. Some boards aren't part of the overarching culture, but /pol/ is, and people are talking about /pol/ here.
Note that triple parentheses are part of the site-wide markup syntax. /leftypol/ is the odd one out. Even most of the popular nominally non-political boards lean right.