Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression is that the site has gradually shifted right, but the Overton window has shifted right faster giving the illusion that it has gone left. Edit: There is something ironic to be said about my very benign comment triggering someone to the point that they felt compelled to create an account and call me classically right wing slurs (subhuman, animal, low-iq). I think its worth considering that the internet/so…
I suspect that if elections had the HN commentariat as the voters, it would result in landslide wins for most Democratic politicians. I don't think this has shifted much in the last decade. That itself doesn't dispute your point, as I can sympathize with the idea that Democrats aren't particularly left-wing. But I'd also caution against using that as the yardstick, since most people do think of Democrats as "the Left…
The problem with reducing things to the colloquial US scale is it lets idiots dominate and control discussion and shits out people outside the status-quo.
Say I’m a radical right winger who’s not a republican or a radical leftist who is not a democrat, and I want to engage in a discussion.
There’s always some dumbass who will associate/accuse you of something you don’t actually believe because you’re [left/right] and therefore you must support Democrat policy X or Republican policy Y. Of course then you backtrack and try to refute them and it just becomes a pointless back and forth completely off topic.
Combine that with the general political illiteracy on this site and the fact that garbage seems not to get flagged if it’s within the zeitgeist of the thread’s current browsers and you get the political flamewars that aren’t supposed to happen here yet so commonly do.