This is the real reason for the dynamics that you and throwawaylinux are talking about—not cultural or ideological bias by the mods. That's just the reason people tend to reach for because it's simpler and feels like it must be the reason.
We do what we can to mitigate such effects but there's only so much we can do. In the end, this is one big community system and people are responsible for the effects they have on it. That's one of the more counterintuitive and little-noticed aspects of how things work here.
Here are a couple of older comments explaining more about this, in case anyone wants more.
The expected value of a post includes the subthreads that it generates: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... You can't just evaluate each comment atomically and then sum up the values of the atoms.
This is the real reason for the dynamics that you and throwawaylinux are talking about—not cultural or ideological bias by the mods. That's just the reason people tend to reach for because it's simpler and feels like it must be the reason.
We do what we can to mitigate such effects but there's only so much we can do. In the end, this is one big community system and people are responsible for the effects they have on it. That's one of the more counterintuitive and little-noticed aspects of how things work here.
Here are a couple of older comments explaining more about this, in case anyone wants more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932445
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19277858