From my perspective, having received a great many of these perceptions across the entire spectrum of HN users, I can tell you pretty confidently that the dominant variable here is your own feelings on the topic. That's not a criticism! It seems that all of our minds work this way.
I just mean that, when one's passions are engaged on a topic, there's a tendency to see the moderators as lined up against one's view. Meanwhile, people with the opposite view see the mods as lined up against them. It's the same mods in both cases; the variable with predictive power here is the passions of the perceiver. That is, if you tell me that someone's unhappy with the mods and you tell me what that person is passionate about, I can tell you what they think the mods' bias is.
I believe that the explanation for this is that we're all much more likely to notice the datapoints we most dislike or disagree with, and to weight them more heavily. If you had opposite priors (that is, if you disliked and disagreed with the opposite sort of story), then you'd be noticing and/or weighting more heavily the datapoints with opposite valence, and you'd feel like the moderators were favoring those instead. Indeed, people with the opposing view to yours do feel exactly that about the mods—just as the hypothesis would predict
p.s. From my perspective also, we're definitely not consulting the direction of someone's views about the U.S., or any other country, when evaluating whether their comment is breaking the HN guidelines. I realize that's not necessarily easy to believe, and of course unconscious bias is still a thing even when one is consciously trying to be even-handed. All I can tell you is that we're consciously trying very hard at that, and we at least have many years of practice at it.
I just mean that, when one's passions are engaged on a topic, there's a tendency to see the moderators as lined up against one's view. Meanwhile, people with the opposite view see the mods as lined up against them. It's the same mods in both cases; the variable with predictive power here is the passions of the perceiver. That is, if you tell me that someone's unhappy with the mods and you tell me what that person is passionate about, I can tell you what they think the mods' bias is.
I believe that the explanation for this is that we're all much more likely to notice the datapoints we most dislike or disagree with, and to weight them more heavily. If you had opposite priors (that is, if you disliked and disagreed with the opposite sort of story), then you'd be noticing and/or weighting more heavily the datapoints with opposite valence, and you'd feel like the moderators were favoring those instead. Indeed, people with the opposing view to yours do feel exactly that about the mods—just as the hypothesis would predict
Past explanations here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
p.s. From my perspective also, we're definitely not consulting the direction of someone's views about the U.S., or any other country, when evaluating whether their comment is breaking the HN guidelines. I realize that's not necessarily easy to believe, and of course unconscious bias is still a thing even when one is consciously trying to be even-handed. All I can tell you is that we're consciously trying very hard at that, and we at least have many years of practice at it.