[nameismypw]

It doesn't seem appropriate to discuss a Quillette article without mentioning that it's an alt-right publication. We must not normalize it, and I strongly encourage people to flag the submission.

A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles. Posts like these are low-key attempts for Quillette to legitimatize itself.

[dang]

It's penalized on HN the same way we downweight all mostly-political or ideological publications. But such sites do come up with the occasional interesting article, and on HN we care about the article, not the site. Same with Jacobin or something like that.

[depr]

"ideological" meaning not matching the HN ideology of course

[dang]

Leftists think HN is rightist, rightists think HN is leftist. We moderate on both sides of the ideological abyss, in the hope of preserving HN for intellectual curiosity rather than ideological battle. One can't have both.

That doesn't stop anyone from perceiving bias, indeed obvious bias ("of course"). It's the instant reflex that every ideologically committed user experiences, but it's in the eye of the beholder. People's own views determine how they imagine HN's bias or mods' bias—not only which polarity they perceive, but how intensely they perceive it. If you tell me what bias you perceive in HN, I can tell you what your own politics are. This is perhaps the most reliable phenomenon we see on HN.

[pvg]

Maybe if Jacobin published articles on Lysenkoism and denounced rootless cosmopolitans.

[dang]

I haven't examined their corpus. But actually the worst articles aren't particularly relevant. On HN we're interested in the good articles. Bad sites sometimes produce good articles, and those are the ones we want here. Conversely when a good site produces a bad article, we don't want it here.

Going by article quality rather than site quality works well for HN and has been this way for a long time. We have various penalties for various lower-quality (for HN) sites and various ways to override them.

[tptacek]

Where do you draw the line? People have submitted VDARE.COM links, and, in fact, more of them have survived flagging than not. I assume there's some kind of threshold past which we're not accepting articles no matter what their quality.

Non-racialized Quillette articles, by the way, have mostly served to endumben HN. See, for instance, "Sokal Squared" and "Mathematics Intelligencer".

(Jacobin doesn't belong here either!)

[pvg]

[flagged]

[amazingman]

Quillette is not an alt-right publication. At “worst” it is a center-right publication, and if you can’t see the value of such a publication existing then you should probably question your own epistemology.

Re: the “cement milkshake conspiracy”, the Portland police’s official twitter account posted a warning about cement milkshakes. For a (short) period after that, it was entirely reasonable to mention it as a real possibility.

Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Quillette pieces (~50/50 for me), it should be obvious that it is a legitimate, even valuable publication. If you’re having trouble seeing this, perhaps you’ve been caught in a social media echo chamber.

[nameismypw]

Quillette is strongly associated with "the intellectual dark web," which is associated with the alt-right. Quillette publishes prominent alt-right individuals. Several articles on the front page, including the one you mention, favorably portray alt-right individuals.

You seem to be familiar with them, so I think that you're aware of this, to be honest.

[amazingman]

The “intellectual dark web” isn’t a real thing. Outside of Eric Weinstein, who coined the term, those who try to trade on being part of it (e.g. Rubin, Shapiro) are largely the reason why the term has become associated with toxicity. Indeed some of the other “members” of the IDW (e.g. Harris, Rogan) find the whole idea to be a bit silly.

I’ll also point out that you’re calling me “disingenuous” in one breath while broadly painting several individuals with wildly different politics, audiences, and personal ethics with the term “alt-right” in another.

[chance_state]

>Quillette is undeniably associated with "the intellectual dark web," which is undeniably associated with the alt-right.

You state this as if it's fact, instead of just your opinion.

People who consider themselves public figures from "the intellectual dark web" have time and again made clear that they have virtually nothing in common with the alt-right (Sam Harris on countless occasions, for example).

In your OP you say,

>A preliminary search will turn up plenty of reprehensible authors and plenty more reprehensible articles.

Can you list some examples please? This hasn't been my experience as a casual reader of Quillette.

[Aloha]

It seems more to have a libertarian bend rather than a populist alt-right one. So citation please.

[rainyMammoth]

Quillette is not an alt-right publication. It probably doesn't feed easily into your liberal world-view narrative, but they are the other side of the spectrum of publications like the NYT and it is more needed now than ever.