Pretty much just Reddit leaking into HN.

Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism.

On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvotes), which reinforces the behavior and the underlying mindset. The HN community is better, but still not immune to this. I'm convinced that the "gamification" of online discussion over the past ten years has pretty deep impacts that future generations will look back on someday.

I don't think this has much to do with Reddit. "Randroid" and similar terms as a derogatory way of describing a certain cluster of ultra-free-market views has been common on every online discussion service I've been on, dating back to Usenet. Although this may be partly because actual, honest-to-god Ayn Rand fans are also surprisingly common on online discussion forums (and were especially common on Usenet).

It predates even usenet, eg FidoNet, BIX, CompuServe.

My gamer and geek friends have been spewing libertarian flavored Randian nonsense since middle school, circa 1983. I never imagined that worldview would prevail. It was just so puerile. Not so different than the tortured coming of age fantasies embraced by the other subcultures (stoners, metalheads, preppies). Though maybe the nerds were more aggrieved, seeing themselves as an oppressed minority.

Of course, none of us knew about the well funded propaganda machine pushing the whole Austrian/Chicago school of economics. Young Republicans, trickle-down economics, John Birch Society, Hertitage Foundation, disaster capitalism, Grover Norquist, etc.

Edit: TL;DR: Mockery is the only appropriate response.

Getting off topic, but while I'm not a fan of any of those philosophies, I'd be wary of conflating too quickly these different varieties of free-market supporters. Rand fans who got into the whole Objectivism thing via her books, parts of the SF scene, etc., vs hereditary billionaires who are attracted to Heritage-Foundation-style free-market economics (whose political expression in the U.S. is mainly as "business Republicans", though sometimes as "corporate Democrats"), are fairly different groups of people. There's the occasional overlap, but it's mostly different people with different motivations.

True.

During the aughts, I attended many of our local political parties. Socialists, Dems, GOP, Libertarians, etc.

All these cliques, for lack of a better word, are mostly defined by what they're not (in opposition to other cliques).

The exception was our local Green Party. Their members were defined affirmatively, by what they stood for, vs in opposition to some other group.

The Libertarians were especially mushy in their supposedly beliefs, and no two agreed on anything other than everyone else was wrong. Kinda like the various Christian sects.

Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose.

You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center.

And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness.

Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network

https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Educ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center

See, e.g., Philip Mirowski's The Road From Mont Pelerin:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-mak...

Thanks for Mark Ames link. TL;DR: They were always hucksters for hire.

I recently read a magazine article that covers same history as Mirowski's book. Hayek's motivations and strategy for pushing his ideas (take over economics depts in higher ed) are fascinating, instructive. Sadly, I can't imagine how the left could replicate that effort for reality-based polcies.

On mobile, sorry no link handy. I'll edit if I can find it.

There's the related Lewis Powell Memorandum:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_M...

I'm not immediately recalling or coming up with a Hayek reference, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least, and I'd very much like to see what you're thinking of if you can find it.

Ah, good.

At least someone on the Internet recognizes the Mercatus Center for the Koch propaganda machine that they are. It's unfortunate, the influence they have on the GMU graduates.

The Atlas Network's own validation that the whole snake pit is in fact an octopus (a connected and unified entity, not simply a set of disjoint units) is ... surprisingly useful.

I really don't think this is a new / Internet phenomenon, by any means.

I've been re-reading John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, published in 1864, describing the author's conversion from the Church of England (where he was one of the most visible clergymen of the time) to Roman Catholicism. It was written in response to another clergyman making accusations that, not only was Newman being dishonest, that dishonesty was an inherent characteristic of Catholics, and that (based on an uncharitable reading of Alphonsus Liguori) it was Catholic doctrine that Catholics could lie about anything to preserve their faith, and therefore Newman had been a Catholic sleeper agent his whole life, tricking his fellow conservative Anglicans into adopting papist positions until he was ready to reveal himself as a Catholic to convince others to jump ship.

He sets out his response in the introduction, and in it he introduces the term "poisoning the well" to name a logical fallacy: he asserts that his ideological opponent has made it impossible for him to say anything in self-defense, and hopes his readers will recognize it.

This all strikes me as extremely reminiscent of Internet arguments. The uncharitable clergyman is very tribal, and defecting from the Anglican tribe to the Roman Catholic one is an unforgivable offense. And Newman responds by saying, look, you have used a logical fallacy against me. They'd fit so well on Slashdot! But it was over 100 years before the Internet.

(On a side note, the phrase "imaginary Internet points" to describe upvotes strikes me as a thought-killing meme jab itself. The descriptor "imaginary" makes no sense: what would real Internet points look like?)

Real internet points? Amazon gift cards, Google gift cards, anything similar easily convertible into recognized value.

And entirely off topic, but a hundred and fifty years after introducing that phrase, one of my favourite post-hardcore bands of all times used it as their name (Poison The Well). It's funny how that happens!

Poisoning the well is older than either. It has been an antisemitic stereotype with one notable early hayday in central Europe 1350 or something to blame the Jews for the plague.

> I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

In this case, it sounds like it's mocking the idea that the market-based voluntary agreements could solve this problem. Lots of people seem to think you can solve any problem by just "letting the market work."

The market is working very well on advertisements. They grow increasingly obnoxious, and the adblockers keep getting better and more prevalent in response. The end result is either reasonable ads (probably too late for this) or the death of this particular flavor of the ad-driven revenue model.

I fully expect we'll look back on Internet advertising as a bootstrapper for the early Internet economy as opposed to a lasting model.

I'd love to believe that, but I felt much the same way in the double-dickities, when popups and popunders were rampant, and popup blockers started becoming common place. Eventually, only the oldest and least tech literate of people still had browsers that allowed popups, and they started to go away. It seemed like advertising like that was going away, but it didn't, it just changed, and instead of opening in a new window, it just opens as a DIV in the same one. Only this time it's controlled by the same javascript that is required to make the site even work, so it probably won't ever go away.

Cue the rise of ad-blocker-blockers where you're faced with a) allow a possible vector of malware or b) don 't consume the site et all.

Of course at some point there might be ad-blocker-blocker-blockers which will postpone the problem to another round. But do we really want an economy based on an arms race?

> ad-blocker-blocker-blockers

An ad-blocker-blocker-blocker is just an ad-blocker.

Not quite.

An ad-blocker removes ads.

An ad-blocker-blocker detects ad-blockers and refuses to serve content if one is detected. (Instead a "disable your ad-blocker if you want to use this site" message is shown)

An ad-blocker-blocker-blocker masks the ad-blocker against detection, so content can still be consumed.

Etc...

I think that's optimistic. As thesuitonym says, when bad internet advertising is blocked, it evolves into even worse (and less blockable) advertising. We're already seeing the rise of "native advertising," i.e. "pay websites to run ads masquerading as their own content."

IDK really, but i found this article lately:

https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-a...

Make your own conclusions.

I'm not sure one one can make their 'own' conclusions from reading that article it was clearly biased towards reaching the conclusion that Ayn Rand was a writer for 'juveniles' which I don't think is a fair appraisal. I mean I don't agree with her conclusions on the world but I would say the world she has created in her novels are at a higher level than juvenile reading.

Why, I enjoyed this article, particularly the part about rape and the end:

I seriously doubt that Donald Trump is really a fan of Ayn Rand. Her books may be juvenile and shallow, but they’re way too deep for him.

Make your own conclusions, indeed.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Um, I only hope they don't give awards for that.

Salon is a very left-wing site, heavily opinion-based. You get about the same kind of thing when looking at opinion sites from any part of the political spectrum.

It's glorified trash talking really.

Hey, thanks for this link and sorry it got you downvoted by losers who can't take a rant like a man :p

This was probably the best response of all because it provides a plausible explanation why this started only recently. I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until lots of people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago.

> I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago.

No, a group of people have been posting about Rand for years. Here's a thread from 8 years ago people on both sides of the like/dislike divide. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292

Here's a post with over 40 points that's just a quote from Atlas Shrugged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696

But I haven't seen these posts before so your argument is obviously invalid :p

I'm not saying that it never happened but that it wasn't the case that she was mentioned in every other flamewar about politics.

From hn.algolia.com, excerpts from all "Ayn Rand" posts in the last 10 days, except replies to these posts:

Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?

Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land

I had a coworker who was a hardcore Ayn Rand type who had a real harsh point of view like this, until his infant was born with a congenital heart defect that resulted in hospitalization for 3-4 months. [this one actually isn't dumb]

HN is nothing but startup bros, armchair economists, and card-carrying Ayn Rand fan club members.

For an entire generation community-oriented principles, egalitarianism, collectivist ideas, and far-left leaders were demonized as Soviet sympathizers, replaced with rah rah unregulated capitalism, Ayn Rand-ian individualist, and military might. [tl;dr, might be reasonable]

Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.

They do all sound harsh!

I don't even care about harsh, fwiw I've barely suffered through maybe some 40% of The Fountainhead when I tried. What caught my attention was that most of these posts look like mindlessly repeated viral meme. Not that it's anything particularly unusual of course, but boring.