"I know people who are primarily voting to preserve this FTC."
That would also be a grave mistake. Unfortunately, it is not possible to "vote to preserve this FTC" anymore. That possibility ended when Biden was pushed out.
Biden is a major reason, arguably the only reason, Khan and Kanter are able to do what they are doing.
Harris is pro-Silicon Valley, as in she has not taken any meaningful _action_ against it (cf. rhetoric). Biden is definitely not pro-Silicon Valley. He made the right appointments and nominations and "ordered" agencies to take necessary action; indeed they have.
I've seen three perfectly reasonable seeming submissions about this get almost immediately flagged.
Some serious dark forest shit, even for HN. It sucks that there is so little accountability for those who deny access to information here.
There's very little that's given me hope for government like seeing an FTC that's doing something, thats protecting consumers & making sure there's some competition. It's been so very long since Reagan so effectively stomped out anti-trust regulation, and my gut feeling is that much of the disenfranchisement today has roots in the seemingly ever growing imbalances Thomas Piketty so thoroughly detailed. The FTC is a key agency to keeping civilization bought in on our social contract.
That's because as much as they may not want to admit it, HN skews "techbro conservative". It's a large enough segment of the community here that when they chose to exercise their collective will, they can influence discussion on the site.
I definitely see some people complaining about liberal bias on social media getting voted down to heck. So yeah there are some negative voters on both sides. (personally it feels like there's been a stupendous lack of evidence & these opinions deserve the downvotes, but it at least is an example of downvoting going both ways.)
But man there is such a suppression of hacker spirit, of possibility, of everyday can do, of belief in the everyman and the barefoot developers. It's astoundingly how brutally malicious the conservative downvote squads are, and even more perniciously how much perfectly fine but inconvenient content gets flagged. It's hugely one sided; one side builds cases & tries to win hearts & minds, the other tears down, by any means available. So so rarely do I see conservative claims made on hopes or possibilities.
Personally I think downvotes & especially flags should be more open data. The ability for a small pack of people to so consistently come and downvote out things they don't like is lame & tragic. But to so readily suppress is especially rank & disgusting. There are some incredibly persistently techbro conservative voices on here, it feels like, leveraging their accounts with enormous widespanning consistency & frequency, to close down ideas & thoughts. And they get to operate entirely from the shadows, and that ain't cool at all.
At the very least there should be some way to see controversialness. It's hackerly to have some kind of data, to see pressure points! It stuns me how many things I have that are going up up up, only to have them get some down down voted. Seeing where there are these conflicts are, seeing that there strong valence both ways, I think would clarify a fundamental resonant truth of matters that right now is just cast away, lost to the losers of downvoting.
