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Viliam_Bur comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) - Less Wrong
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That brings up some interesting questions. The last survey placed self-identified neoreactionaries as a very small percentage of LW readership (scroll down to "Alternate Politics Question"). Progressivism appears to be the most popular political philosophy around here, with libertarianism a strong competitor; nothing else is in the running.
That's not the first time I've heard LW referred to as a neoreactionary site, though; once might be coincidence, but twice needs explanation. With the survey in mind it's clearly not a matter of explicitly endorsed philosophy, so I'm left to assume that we're propagating ideas or cultural artifacts that're popular in neoreactionary circles. I'm not sure what those might be, though. It might just be our general skepticism of academically dominant narratives, but that seems like too glib an explanation to me.
Could this be explained by the base rates?
Imagine a society with 10 neoreactionaries and 10000 liberals (or any other mainstream political group). Let's suppose that 5 of the neoreactionaries and 500 of the liberals read LessWrong.
In this society, neoreactionaries would consider LessWrong one of "their" websites, because half of them are reading it. Yet the LessWrong survey would show that neoreactionaries are just a tiny minority of its readers.
That's a heck of a coincidence, but it would explain a perception among neoreactionaries. It wouldn't, however, explain perceptions among (to use your example) liberals; unless the latter spend a lot of time reading blogs from the former, they're probably going to be using an outside view, which would give them the same ratios we see in the survey. Out in the wild, I've seen the characterization coming from both sides.
Although the graph in the ancestor is from a neoreactionary blog.
While I'm not sure what "neoreactionary" refers to specifically there are lots of reasons that certain types of liberals see LessWrong as reactionary: