It's good that the phrase "Cultural Revolution" hasn't been poisoned, say, by some grotesque and cataclysmic series of events that scarred a whole generation in one of the largest countries in the world, or the title of this talk might have been considered in rather poor taste.

I understand the reaction, but this comment breaks at least two of the HN guidelines: the one that asks you not to snark, and this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On the subject of snark, I am not sure that it is possible to police it fairly without removing value from the site. I am also not sure it is possible to police snark fairly in any circumstances, due to how nebulous a concept it actually is. Many of the figures this community puts on pedestals would have a very hard time conforming to the snark guideline. I reckon Fritz Zwicky would have lasted about a week.

I'm not sure it's possible to police anything fairly. But most internet snark is dreck and has a degrading effect, so we do what we can. Were it to take over HN, nobody interesting would stay here anyway.

It's a mistake to compare other contexts, such as writers or scientists sparring amongst themselves, to an internet forum. A large internet forum is a mile wide, an inch deep, and never far from a swamp. It has its own odd dynamic and needs to be managed accordingly.

>A large internet forum is a mile wide, an inch deep, and never far from a swamp.

Fair enough. That is a very good way of stating your predicament, I can't really fault it :)

> scarred a whole generation

That's a rather optimistic way of putting it, unfortunately. The senseless destruction of cultural heritage that went on during the CR, combined with the sheer scale of it, makes it a civilizational-scale disaster. (The silver lining, I suppose, is that people are finally growing comfortable with this assessment, though for obvious reasons this is not something that will ever be admitted publicly - at least not until a _long_ time has passed from the actual events, and some sort of closure has been independently achieved.) THIS is why the title of this talk is offensive.

Edit: And to be very clear about this, I'm not even assuming bad faith of any sort on the part of whoever was involved with this talk. But it's a fact that people will take offense to that title, and that this is something they should be warned about.

The inclusion of "@ Startup Grind Global" at the end, doesn't particularly help matters.

edit - all in all, never mind namespace collisions, this is a slow motion car crash of nomenclature and everybody involved should serve some sort of penance and promise not to name anything more important than a houseplant ever again.

I feel mildly insulted by the title for this reason.

I once saw a nut-milk company at a Whole Foods giving out red hats that said "Let's Start a Cultural Revolution!"

They can't access YouTube anyway to watch this video. /s

Those who have a habit browsing HNews are likely to have a working VPN.

haha that's so random. What sort of great leap of logic lead you to write this?

I dunno, awareness of world history? "Cultural Revolution", to those who have even a fairly basic grasp of Things That Happened Outside Startup Land, is always going to be inextricably linked to China and 1966.

I think the person you replied to was looking to make a "Great Leap Forward" wordplay.

Given that the revolutionary history of modern China shared adequate similarities to be mapped to a entrepreneurial context of narration, the first 30-year of the communist reign after 1949 looks too much alike a fundamentalist Marx-Leninist experiment, and the revolutionary practices quickly transformed to doctrinal fanaticism leading to disastrous outcome.

How not to critique someone else's use of language, volume 1.

i don't want a cultural revolution!!!! please god no!!!!!