The thing about the forums (and probably why we're here on HN) is that they were personally run, cared for and moderated by people who were good in their field, who cared about the environment they were cultivating. This was especially true in the dialup era when sysops literally read every comment and hung up their modem on people who were spreading something stupid. It led to a culture of total free speech and tolerance, as long as you found the right place to meet your peers, and as long as what you were saying made some kind of intelligent sense. That doesn't exist in any social media platform today. Social media rewards people for saying the dumbest possible thing that everyone else will agree with, or else the dumbest thing that will anger people.

For context, we're on the old web and the BBS forums right now. Upvoting is a modest improvement. The way a place is run, the culture, is everything. Twitter is the Carnival Cruise. Smart speech is always on the leaky freighter. People with smart phones forget that the internet was for nerds, outcasts and rebels, while they were absorbed in TV. The nerds and rebels haven't disappeared. (We just need to stop the really angry ones who took over retail and software).

Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often.

HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better.

I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect.

I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical - and critiquing logic in the form of code is immune to emotional arguments to some extent, even though those arguments arise around the borders of what code is used for.

I have a kind of similar view about Judaism and Buddhism. You can argue endlessly about the state of the universe but you have to agree that logic is logic. Weirdly, we live in a world where that agreement is vanishingly rare in everyday discourse.

>I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

Why is "ideology" a bad thing? I have ideological positions that can't be rationally derived from first principles: universal human rights, belief in freedom, belief in tolerance. Why are people with strong values and beliefs mere drones, while the people in the "centre" are the rational people interested in solving problems?

> the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical

There is nothing apolitical about this. Accepting the current broad system and ruling class and trying only for "small fixes" is a political position.

You're assuming that technologically-focused folks "accept[] the current broad system and ruling class" and have only small ambitions. Neither of these assumptions seems especially warranted.

I'm simply following the train of thought put forward by GP.

@luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion.

I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But ideologically, anyone who has no ideology except answering logical problems fits into a category that is always going to be reviled by people who have a political agenda, because their answers won't necessarily comport with what you want them to look like.

There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism.

I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly likely that your ideology is influencing your logic (which does exist for all ideologies even if we don’t agree with it).

I see your point. Reasonably, people will have opinions about individual matters, and these add up to having "politics". But these are not politics as an identity, or politics you push on others through persuasion, or a set of pet causes, or whatever passes for debate on Twitter or news outlets.

You may be right that the group I'm describing skews south-east into center-right libertarianism (although I'm pretty far southwest myself). The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day. What I'm saying is that to run the machine you actually have to be post-political, and the third group in modern culture are the people who can switch tabs as necessary, or just don't care because they're more concerned with making things function.

I'd be excoriated as being "privileged" by most progressive ideological friends for even suggesting that there exists a neutral position free from racial or historical advantage; and maybe it's not free of those things. But it exists and it attempts to be neutral to the extent that the biggest debate in the country right now is about what some website should or shouldn't censor, while the government itself can barely function, and the people who work for that website only care about making it more responsive and profitable. There is clearly a third group of people to whom most of the left/right debate is just unserious noise. As far as their day-to-day reality, we probably don't disagree that much on what that consists of.

> The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day.

This isn’t true though. The very platforms you’re talking about have many employees that are keeping the systems running and also steeped in politics. There are tons of very overt and loud neo-liberals in tech. Same goes for leftists and libertarians.

You seem to dislike social media activism. Fair enough, but like I said it’s orthogonal to one’s politics and technical competence.

> I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

The difficult problems haven't changed much in hundreds or thousands of years. What happens when "people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems" have spent a few centuries actually doing this?

Yep, ideologies. That is, semi-consistent sets of beliefs, assumptions and values that explain why things are the way they are, how they ought to be different and (sometimes) how to go about making the changes. I know it can seem hard to believe, but it turns out that even when extraordinarily smart people think about difficult problems, they don't all converge on the same answers.

If you want to start over from scratch ever generation, be my guest. In your rejection of ideology, you're really just throwing away the work done by our ancestors.

We don't need to throw away everything, just the stuff that we can't reach consensus about. The rest is what we generally call Common Sense.

So, no liberalism, no marxism, no capitalism, no Keynsian economics (probably no economics), no psychotherapy, no rock music ... the list is long for the things we can't reach consensus about.

What's left tends to be not so much "common sense" as "the stuff that supports the status quo, whatever it is", because human psychology tends to have a strong pro-status quo bias.

Couldn't we also say that stripped of their dogmas, these are all useful lenses? They're tools we have access to. Options. We've also collected a lot of information about when they might and might not be the appropriate device, or when they might even be harmful. The idea isn't to throw out history, nor to maintain the status quo. It's to solve individual problems using the best tools for the job, without getting emotional or activistic or wearing a t-shirt or waving a flag or joining the cult that revolves around the tool.

> to solve individual problems

Individual problems like:

* how do you distribute a resource that isn't evenly distributed on the planet?

* what, if anything, do you do about the variation in abilities across different people?

* what, if anything do you as various people in a community start to gain (and wield) more power than others?

* how do you address free riders?

There are so many more. The answers to these questions are not "right" and "wrong". They're not even of the form "this is best compromise we could come up with". The answers someone feels are best will be highly dependent on their values, which we know vary significantly. You can't just wish away the differences between what an eco-socialist would say about these things and an anarcho-capitalist. They are real differences, representing fundamentally different ideas about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the purpose of society and much more.

And as I said above, people have thought about these questions for centuries, and their answers generally fall into distinct groups (even if they are not all identical). We call these "ideologies".

> The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

This is a gross simplification that ironically lacks logical rigor. As long as you live in a society and have opinions about how it should work, you have politics. The two dimensional left/right spectrum is less than helpful. The quadrant model that includes authoritarian->libertarian is slightly more useful. The “politic free” group you’re speaking about are presumably the classic center-right libertarians. It’s definitely an ideology.

I think I'd sign that, yes. I wonder if there is a road back to this era…

The Fediverse is basically organized the exact same way, with federation as a purely additional layer on top of the individual content hosts.