I derogatorily call this website "the orange website." That doesn't make it an echo chamber. For as many awful opinions on political topics or type systems there are on this site, there are people who object to them and comment that they do. Hacker News has a tendency to let people say offensive things; this doesn't make it an echo chamber. It doesn't make it good (about 1/5 of the threads are good), but it doesn't make it an echo chamber. Even things that should be pretty much just echoes, like threads about people who killed themselves, often aren't. Because even when someone has killed themselves on this website, people will always come out of the woodwork to say that it was their fault, in contrast to popular opinion. It's not an echo chamber, it's an amplifier.