This comment is a very measured critique of the article but one need not be so kind. I imagine you may not be doing it our of mere politeness, I get the sense some comments are bending over backwards as a means to not play into the perspective in this article. I won't be so kind: the author imputed every bias they have about a community they know nothing about and played on stereotypes from the beginning and didn't even shy away from
saying it:
> Picturing the moderators responsible for steering conversation on Hacker News, I imagined a team of men who proudly self-identify as neoliberals and are active in the effective-altruism movement. (I assumed they’d be white men; it never occurred to me that women, or people of color, could be behind the site.) Meeting them, I feared, would be like participating in a live-action comment thread about the merits of Amazon Web Services or whether women should be referred to as “females.” “Debate us!” I imagined them saying, in unison, from their Aeron chairs.
Imagine wanting to write a piece about any group or any community and having such coarse ideas of who they are and what they believe before you interview them. Do journalists not care about things like biases, cognitive or otherwise and how they can color your opinion of the subject you write about? The sheer lack of self-awareness is part and parcel of the larger problem both people on the right and the left have with the news media in general.
I'm a leftist personally, I tire of the neoliberal bent towards this place too but I have some sense of context and at least try to be aware of how my own worldview can affect the way I understand others. It's always disheartening to read articles, even if they are opinion from authors that really don't even try, even a little--especially when organs like the media, just like tech companies, have a large amount of power and ability to shape public opinion. You have to be looking for toxic and overly reactionary opinions to find them; they do flare up but are generally downvoted/flagged, and given this experience I have, this article really serves as a great example of the Gell-Mann effect as others have pointed out.
Altogether, there are some interesting bits, I had no idea of the personal life stories around dang and sctb, but it was rather painful to wade through the constant recitals of tech bro stereotypes.