The poster, a European, said that one of the things they liked about HN was that when the discussion drifted too deep into an SV-centric view, people from other parts of the world would often provide a useful corrective that would then be upvoted.

I appreciate that too, although as the treatment of the poster's comment demonstrated, it's not perfect. I think too many SV orthodoxies are vigorously defended here. The poster gave a footnote with a short list of what they called "Silicon Valley mindcuffs", and I suspect that's what got the instant downvotes.

It's actually fascinating to observe how the "tone" of HN varies through the day. My impression (I haven't carefully analyzed) is that during the morning in Europe you tend to have more left leaning points of view politically and more advocacy of Stallman-esque Open Source.

Once the US gets online though the political spectrum of opinions shifts right and towards Libiterianism. You also have people working at places like Google and Facebook adding their 2 cents, which tends to lead to "moral outrage" (European) vs "here's the reality" (US).

Less common are understanding of legal issues, typically common law needs at least one case to clarify an issue as opposed to positive law countries; the right to bear arms is a big one, so is American-style freedom-of-speech.

More specific are things like: non-American universities provide a good education, non-American companies can innovate meaningfully, tipping is omnipresent in services, keyboard layouts, American references in literature, sport, movies, etc.

One of the latest obvious examples of such mindcuffs outside of HN is Apple’s announcement around battery replacement: it’s impossible to find conditions that are not meant for the US market. You can redirect the offer to local stores or find it there. That is actually quite typical of Apple, in spite of 60% of their sales being outside of the US.

I have made the mistake to point at similar mindcuffs on HN and I will not do it again.

Also aren't political views geographicaly tied?

The SV way of thinking is present to some extent in most urban people of similiar socioeconomic class. A plumber from SF will not necessarily take the same things for granted that a programmer from SF will.

It is not really the power of tech that we should be worried about, but instead the power of investment without regard for anything other than shareholder returns. Google and Facebook could be better companies if they didn't have to sell their users to their real customers.

Business models shape the space of architectures that companies are incentivized and disincentivized to make. For people that don't like the current landscape of addictive free technologies, I'd say Silicon Valley has a business model problem, not a technology problem.

I venture that the technology is usually already there, but the business exploitation is what's different in the dominant companies.

I'm rather skeptical of Facebook though. I think there are major issues with its current incarnation.

Sure, but GP was talking about technological disruption.

Do you think it's worth it to make a location-based social activity layer for existing social forums like HN? So people could meet up, date, hire for jobs etc.

No one's actual location would be revealed. But when people post something, others would know they are probably nearby.

There actually was a startup in DC that was doing something like this, called SocialRadar. They had a lot of funding but failed due to lack of adoption. They had a real name policy and didn't have any of the same problems that Yik Yak did.

P.S. I didn't downvote vote