[tmnvix]

> Is it accidental or intentional that all political posts on this war are biased towards one of the sides?

You are presenting a false dichotomy. It could be that the posts are a reflection of the reality of the situation (i.e. one of the sides is 'more wrong').

[EvgeniyZh]

Why is it false? Either admins intentionally make only specific articles to appear, or they do not, i.e. it happens unintentionally/accidentally. What other options are there? If something happens it is either intentional or not.

Not sure what wrongness has to do with that either. In the first case it reflects the political preferences of the admin, in the other it reflects the preferences of HN bubble. Either could happen independently of who is wrong and who is right.

[tmnvix]

A (rather clumsy) analogy to illustrate:

"Is it accidental or intentional that all privacy related posts are biased towards individuals having a right to privacy?"

[EvgeniyZh]

I don't see a false dichotomy here and if there were posts against right to privacy that are flagged while posts for it were not (either with admin intervention or without) I wouldn't say "there is nothing to see here". I would definitely prefer to see both sides of issue and I wouldn't flag posts against privacy, though not upvote it either.

If you think it's nice when media is biased towards what you consider to be right, and that's the point of your analogy, I disagree.

[tmnvix]

I was making no comment on the flagging or moderation of posts, only their submission.

For example, more posts will be submitted that support the view that individuals have a right to privacy than the opposite ('more wrong') view.

You don't seem to be accounting for this outcome - no flagging or moderation, accidental or intentional, just a difference in the number of submissions for each view.

The sun doesn't rise by accident or design, it just rises.

[EvgeniyZh]

But you replied to comment that specifically pondered about flagging and moderation. There are enough users (though still in minority) to submit and upvote the stories for the opposite view. There are comments supporting "wrong" view that survive. There is no downvote so the only way to suppress the submissions is to flag then and this is indeed what happens.

Political stories are usually getting flag enough by people who don't want politics on HN, people disagreeing with it/believing it's not good content and eventual mod interventions. So if "accidental" framing bothers you, I can rephrase.

Either mods are not intervening, and HN consensus is strong enough to overcome the flagging on this specific topic. I would expect more stories on main in this case, but it is an option (what I called accidental).

Alternatively, mods do intervene, either by manually unflagging some stories, or manually demoting some, but not all of them (what I called intentional). In this case I'd want to know what's the argument [1] for it

And the sun either rises by design of whoever designed our universe or because the solar system appeared by accident out of initial conditions of the big bang.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906