You hit the nail on the head: the cynicism. Cynicism isn’t a morally neutral stance. Assuming everyone else is arguing in bad faith and in favor of their crude short-term political/economic interests. Asserting that all property is theft and that the system is rigged. Dismissing those who disagree as gullible or stupid or (themselves) cynically trying to manipulate people. There is so much of it here and it comes from every angle. It is disgusting. That people who are here tend to self-identify as high-IQ does not help.

> Asserting that all property is theft and that the system is rigged.

There is definitely a discussion to be had about property, smarter people than us have had it for at least 150 years (even more, if you include the discussion between Locke and Filmer), don't see anything that cynic about it. I'd go on to say that even Cynicism itself was a really interesting philosophical school [1]. I do agree that that there are some people on this website who still take the IQ thing seriously, but even there, I think that the majority regards it as bogus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(philosophy)

Right, the comment you are responding to appears to be conflating anarchism with cynicism (which is, ironically, a rather cynical take on anarchism).

No, I was referring to a line of thinking very common among folks I’ve met who grew up in post-USSR Russia vis a vis the worldview of many of the people I know who grew up in the USSR before.

The former tend to think everyone is corrupt and that if people have success or wealth or anything, it’s because those people swindled someone out of it or were connected to the right people.

Those who grew up in the USSR tend to have a more meritocratic worldview, where hard work and intelligence and studying for exams will result in a better life.

Maybe the people I know [strike]are[/strike] aren’t representative of those times and places. No matter, you can find justification for either worldview in nearly any situation, whether it’s 1970s USSR or ‘90s Russia or ‘50s America or Trump’s America. Reality is nuanced and filled with thoughtful insights that oppose each other and yet are equally true. The loudest people on HN are not people trying to square that circle.

HN had the audacity to do something other than shower the subject with unapologetic praise. An actual discussion occurred rather than a congratulatory twitter echo chamber.

I'm actually a really disappointed in Josh's response. I thought that his open stance on what he'd been doing would mean he'd being open to people criticising what he'd done. He doesn't need to agree with that criticism, but dismissing the whole site as toxic based on that disagreement just feels flippant.

From what I've seen and participated in, the discussion mostly centered around whether this was a good deal for everyone involved and whether or not a greater proportion of a company's success should be attributed to it's employees. At least in my eyes very little of it focused on Josh personally.

> I thought that his open stance on what he'd been doing would mean he'd being open to people criticising what he'd done

His goal in publishing this information seems to be to foster a community of transparency. To that end, his actions appear entirely consistent.

Put another way, what additional information do you want him to convey? His goal is to accurately and openly convey information, and he's basically laid it all out on the table.

You're free to have an opinion on whether his actions were right or wrong, but don't expect him to engage with your criticism when that takes a lot of time and effort (and is not part of his goal).

> His goal in publishing this information seems to be to foster a community of transparency. To that end, his actions appear entirely consistent.

I think his goal was to help people. The goal of many people in HN comments is to ‘be right’. It’s a cultural thing. What we prioritize, how the community started etc.

I think HN has ‘trying to be helpful’ forces in the long run. There are ideas, content, links to new information that are helpful. But it’s not the priority compared to what many people think is decent. If you look at other online communities that’ll be pretty self-evident.

But again I think the key to HN is it has no direct interest in being helpful. Only as secondary effects. There’s nothing wrong with that - just as there’s nothing wrong with an incubator with a certain philosophy or writing essays that you think are insightful. In the long run, they help. But they don’t prioritize human decency or kindness and there are a lot of false negatives (startups missed in YC, entitlement and biases in some essays, dismissal of what isn’t clearly the right comment, etc).

It’s a cruder world that way. Take for example the culture of ‘X, Y, and Z read drafts of this’ that everyone has emulated. I used to admire that. Team building and acknowledgments! But it’s also encourages a culture of not being open and trying out new ideas. Living in fear of new ideas that will be rejected etc.

And that is something Josh had the balls to reject. There’s no hiding behind his Harvard / MIT connections. There’s just honesty and transparency. HN and YC people could learn a lot from that bravery.

> You're free to have an opinion on whether his actions were right or wrong, but don't expect him to engage with your criticism when that takes a lot of time and effort (and is not part of his goal).

I don't expect him to engage at all. I do think he should be able to handle dissenting opinions without merely dismissing the whole site as toxic on twitter.

> without merely dismissing the whole site as toxic on twitter.

You are aware that he's not, not by a long shot, the first to have that opinion? There's _way_ more than an element of truth in it.

Maybe I just have a high bar for what qualifies as toxic, but most of the thread seemed to be a reasonable discussion of what had happened.

Obviously some people have made some incorrect assumptions at varying points, but I haven't seen anything that would remotely qualify as toxic.

The HN community is full of incredibly intelligent but often young tech-centric people. I used to be part of the latter, but the reality is they lack a huge amount of context and experience. Being a talented developer-employee, even an early employee is jut not the same as being the founder / maker / starter. I sincerely doubt any of these people spent every single day of the past seven years worrying about the fate of their entire company; if you did, you're an incredible employee but you should have been running your own gig.

On HN every action by anyone is seen as some evil plan.

Apple wants to alert users to genuine / non-genuine batteries (to mention latest downvote blast). That is evidence of how evil apple is (not even considering how many folks were getting screwed by all the trash batteries going into iphones pretending to be real).

Zoom is so evil for X/Y/Z reason - except zoom is actually easy to use which is what most non HN folks care about - so their "evil" is just optimizing for different goals in some cases.

The negativity and the myopic focus on personal need / preferences really highlights sometimes how just out of touch with the rest of the broader world HN can be.

Toxic has become a synonym of "I don't like that"