https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.
Not sure whether to agree or disagree.
Ah yes, I remember this article. Oddly enough, this is a major reason why I still enjoy browsing HN. There are few places left that cover a variety of topics while also encouraging this open style of discussion.
Someone needs to do a deep cognitive study of how memes, especially in image form, affect cognition during discourse. Whatever is going on it seems obvious that their presence immediately reverts people to a juvenile junior high level of discussion at best.
They also seem to lead to the development of this kind of obscure signaling culture hive mind. I don't even know how to describe it. In Star Trek TNG they called it the "borg songs," the sort of emotional-cultural carrier wave that pervaded the Borg collective.
Meme-dominated sites like 4chan immediately turn me off. I find that whole style creepy and culty and gross and it feels like some kind of soft mind control technique. I felt this way long before 4chan became "Stormfront for nerds," but the fact that this style if discourse would create an environment compatible with that way of thinking doesn't shock me at all.
Sometimes people are really cool. Sometimes people are fools. The fools make good points sometimes. The cool people can be the worst. The roles are fluid. I've had my fool moments.
dang, who I assume is a cyborg driven by several different mods, generally makes good calls. There aren't many places online where I feel like I can point out a problem to the mods and not worry about being called an idiot. Or banned.
You could even argue that being "apolitical" actually means that your political opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, which other people may disagree with. For instance, some people believe that selling water is unethical because it's a basic human need which you should always have free access to -- saying that the status quo is acceptable means that you don't think that for-sale water is unethical. There's nothing wrong with that opinion, but it is an opinion (and a political one at that).
Make a polite, clear-headed enough argument for something like eugenics and people will upvote you. It's troubling, but I can make a pro-socialism post under the same conditions. It's an uneasy peace.
I agree with this. I see Cultural Hegemony (domination-justification stories) being very strong in unexpected places. Family members or close friends who indirectly benefit from the artificial scarcity mechanisms (in SV especially Intellectual Property) that make up the various social class realities of rentier capitalism [1]. What seperates me and a mother of three in Bangladesh, who is getting paid starvation wages making the designer clothes I wear [2], is that I was lucky enough to have been born in the global North, in an upper-middle class family. I was able to grow up on the inside of the fort, and benefit from a rich inheritance [3].
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706668
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004
Sorry if that sounded snarky—I don't mean to pick on you personally, and I don't disbelieve you. But the perception is explicable by the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
How can we know for sure we are right or even on the good side, whatever "good" means?
From that perspective, the lowest common denominator is that bad is what harms humanity, e.g. by disregarding human rights. Human rights then becomes the new frame of reference, meaning that something can't be good if it's not within that frame.
when you're the USA, the world looks biased to the political left ...
(I looked at your comments and the ones I saw are not only fine, they're exactly what HN is for.)
I do think of writing about HN, but not a blog post, because I can't think of a good reason. I don't enjoy writing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431262), at least not that kind of thing. Somehow I maneuvered myself into a job that is basically being a writer...of that kind of thing. Writing because you enjoy it, or were born to do it, is the best reason; failing that, it could be a means to an end. But what end?
I do intend to write about HN in a different way. There are core moderation topics I've been posting about and returning to for years now (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang). I'm inching my way towards distilling those comments into mini-essays, or discrete paragraphs, about the principles of HN: what kind of community we want HN to be and how to get there. I think there's an opportunity for a step change if we become more conscious as a group about what we're trying to be and why.
The "why" is critical because the rules here can seem a bit lame if you think of them only as constraints. Many creative minds are the sort that don't see why they should respect arbitrary constraints. For such people, the way to win them over is to derive the rules from first principles: to show how it's in their interest to follow them because that's the way we get to have, and keep, an interesting community over time. That's what I try to do in moderation comments, at least on good days: not to scold people, but to persuade them.
My intention is to distill all that commentary into a series of posts that can form sort of the case law, or midrash, or zoography, of the core topics around HN community. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I already do that by linking back to previous moderation comments using specific keywords. Some examples:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There are at least a dozen of these. My idea is to consolidate that material into little essays that interpret, explain, and basically act as hermeneutics to the site guidelines. Then maybe, in the future, I won't have to type out a whole new comment on $topic; I can just link to the canonical explanation. In other words, I intend to write more in order to write less! Other than that, for learnings and patterns about moderating HN, your best bet is to lure me with the right kind of beer. Or just ask a question here.
If that's an actual offer, I'd be happy to buy you a drink when the quarantine is over.
Thanks in advance for all your moderation efforts that make HN the site we all love to use on a regular basis.
I'm curious if you've ever considered writing a blog post about some of the things you've learned from your years of moderation? You spend so much time on HN, you must have seen lots of patterns and have lots of insights on...well, everything that gets posted on HN to everybody that posts on HN. I'd genuinely be interested in reading it if you ever did.
Cheers, a semi-anonymous HN user