> HN sometimes seems to spend more energy decrying the current state of the UK than that of the US, despite the relative imbalance in user numbers.
I have to assume this perception has mostly to do with the time of day you're normally looking at HN. As someone who is looking at the threads for hours each day, there's certainly far more politics-related discussion about the U.S. than any other country.
There's more overall discussion of US politics for sure, but it tends to occur tangentially (as articles about US politics are pretty reliably flagged). To give a concrete example, the following article was not flagged and got quite a lot of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600194 I do not think an article on an obscure website with a similarly 'provocative' headline relating to current US politics would escape flagging.
Single instances and hypotheticals don't tell us much. That particular topic spent only four hours on the front page, and it was times that are peak for the U.K. and off-peak for the U.S. Plenty of stories related to U.S. politics spend at least that amount of time on the front page. People often remember the stories that are flagged that they strongly felt should have been given front page time, but forget about the stories that did get plenty of exposure.
I doubt you can point me to a recent story about US politics that spent four hours on the front page and had a similarly inflammatory headline. It would be as if this discussion were occurring under the headline "ICE thugs murder second US citizen" and linked to the website of a left-wing political organisation with an anonymous byline.
Unless peak US times are very late in the day, I'm pretty sure I do look at HN quite often during peak US hours. I'm only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast here. Gemini (ha!) tells me that
>...peak engagement hours generally align with US workday hours, particularly in Pacific (PT) and Eastern Time (ET). The highest activity typically occurs between 11 AM – 4 PM UTC (roughly 6 AM – 11 AM ET / 3 AM – 8 AM PT).
The story you're talking about was on the front page mostly between about 1pm and 3pm U.K. time, then hovered around the bottom of the front page and dropped off as most of the U.S. came online. And you're talking about one article but asserting a trend or pattern.
Here are recent stories about U.S. politics with inflammatory titles that spent multiple hours (over 22, in one case) on the front page.
You're really comparing these to the following headline?
> The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management
All of your examples focus on specific events and factual claims, not sweeping doom and gloom claims about the state of the US. I'll leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.
By the way, we're both making claims here based on what we've seen of HN, not some kind of objective scientific analysis. I asserted a trend and gave an example of the trend that I was talking about. It's silly to complain about that when you are doing the exact same thing.
You've cited one example and claimed it to be evidence of a trend. But you haven't shown evidence of a trend. One-offs happen all the time on HN for all kinds of reasons – randomness as much as anything else. I've provided five examples I could find quickly. I'm not getting further into a debate about the definition of “inflammatory”. When discussions turn into debates about definitions of inherently subjective terms it's definitely time to stop.
The point is that we are both basing our point of view on our accumulated experience of reading HN and then looking for examples to illustrate that point of view. It's a misreading of the discourse to complain that these examples aren't strong 'evidence' for the points of view in question. Of course they are not; they are merely illustrative examples. And realistically, you don't even really want me to send you a 100 page evidence dossier, do you?
Your specific examples are not very convincing, but as I said, anyone reading can compare the headlines and judge for themselves on that point.
I have to assume this perception has mostly to do with the time of day you're normally looking at HN. As someone who is looking at the threads for hours each day, there's certainly far more politics-related discussion about the U.S. than any other country.