I would surmise that while 90%+ of guys are porn users, a nearly negligible percent are current or former channers, and most only associate chan sites with fringe groups that took them over.
Has the userbase changed so much? If this is hackernews, what about the general population of developers?
HN is a large enough forum that it would be included in any serious propaganda campaign.
I wish there was a refund for all the wasted time on propaganda.
I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.
Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.
It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.
Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!
How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?
All burned alive at the altar of money.
For real though, IRC is still where old-school nerds are still out there chatting in my experience.
They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.
I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.
But they were and they are in power now.
So this Self-Victimisation which became even more popular on the right then on the left, is outdated. It was false before but today its falsehood is reality.
And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?
The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?
You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.
In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.
https://stallmansupport.org/#intro
and a bunch of HN pages:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3417033
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20989696
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
but can you perhaps post links to text about the other figures?
ESR writes a blog where he extolls libertarianism and is often skeptical of political progressivism.
I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.
We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.
Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.
We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.
But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.
You should look into it, some time.
Besides -- If you don't tolerate intolerance, you're intolerant (of intolerance). So you shouldn't be tolerated. Right?
What on earth are you on about?
The UK is certainly a democratic state, it holds free, fair and transparent elections. Governments change regularly in line with these. The current prime-minister went to a grammar school, the deputy PM went to various 'standard' state schools.
Yes, bad laws and authoritarian impulses can and likely will have far-reaching effects, but that's hardly new or unique to the UK, the US has a history of spying on its entire population as well, from room 641A (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) to the Snowden revelations and Palantir. It also has a load of states adding access restrictions and age checks of one sort or another to the internet.
The people of the UK are largely in favour of these sorts of rules, as they are in a bunch of other places. They may be wrong but that doesn't mean democracy is failing.
This "The sky is falling!" rhetoric is why geeks are very rarely taken seriously in these debates.
They are both types of democracy.
(Yes, the ‘royal’ family should be relieved of all their holdings and tossed out on the street, leeches that they are, but that’s beside the point)
The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.
They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.