I believe you're bias towards centrism and the belief that the truth is somewhere in the middle, the cited people are wrong, and their perception of this site having a socialist lean is precisely what demonstrates their own bias. Believing that other people disagree with me proves we must both be wrong is ridiculous, you can in fact be wrong along with the people you quoted, rather than the sole voice of reason in an irrational site.

I made that statement because I saw the thread the other day about the same topic and all the top posts were people who think any store owner should have a right to remove problematic references to medical drugs. Including many posts about how the person in question should just give in without protest. Because of strong tyranny of the majority effects intrinsic to systems like Hacker News, once an update put the view that the person should "just give in" in a bad light, the slim majority of posters stopped posting and the slim minority of posters who were critical of apple thereafter posted with confidence. The reason you see so many people with differing views is that the community actually has a great diversity in its views, but still has slight biases, which are amplified by the site format, not the fact that everybody who notices these slight biases are bias themselves.

The thing is, the people on the other side say identical things about HN, just with one bit flipped (which political side they identify with). The comments are otherwise so similar that I don't think it's plausible that one set is accurately analyzing HN while the other set is just wrong. Rather, some underlying phenomenon is giving rise to both sets.

You can not only predict people's politics from what they claim about HN bias, you can predict the level of intensity they feel about it. At scale, it's a mechanistic phenomenon. The question is what's the mechanism. What I call the notice-dislike bias is my attempt to explain the mechanism.

I'd be very interested in any other explanation, but it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side is good and has good views and sees HN accurately, while the other side is bad and has bad views and sees HN completely the wrong way". Even though the commenters in question all seem to think that.

It's common for people to interpret the above argument as a defense of political centrism, but that's a non sequitur. You can't derive a centrist position or any other political position from what I'm saying here, which is an empirical observation about social psychology on the internet.