I’ve been saying for years that spite should be viewed as a primary metric for social media. The higher the volume of spite, the more harmful it is and the less useful it is. Hacker News is heading in the wrong direction.
I think there are still good conversations happening here, and I really appreciate the efforts of moderators to keep HN hacky.
However honestly I think you could mark these changes that we see in the tenor of discussions on HN around how active Musk himself has been at doing things that many of us don't like.
It's one thing to not like him because I am generally anti-capitalist and I'm super skeptical about the actual goodness of his products or see his companies as mere plays to get listed in the S&P500. I never have expected folks on a venture capitalist form to find that position intelligible.
It's another thing when he does a bunch of political things that large sections of folks here actively don't like. A lot of the folks here like the US for its humanistic, empathetic, and liberalized culture.
My point (and I have one, so you don't think I am merely being spiteful) is this:
the actual content and degree of that dislike might be important to register and dismissing it as simple spite might miss an important point.
In 2012 many tech companies might look quite benign to many people, whereas after the acquisition of Twitter, the ketimine-fueled ideological tweeting, the attempts to influence US politics, and the fallout from DOGE might seem to many people worth some actual outrage.
And further, that ourtage might seep into all the other ways we describe other technologies: Flock certainly doesn't seem benevolent, ICE->Trump->Vance->Thiel/Palentir might seem pressing, and LLMs might seem less like a really solid autocomplete and more like a way to automate mass surveillence.
So my point is that while it might be tempting to dismiss the anger that people feel as simple social media toxicity and irrational gestures towards strawmen, if we accept that people have legitimaet grievances behind their anger then that metric might stand in for real changes in the ways that the discussions around tech increasingly feel political in very direct and material ways.
Understanding that shift has been one of the more useful things that I've gotten from reading comments here.
Turns out the clienteles of the two platforms aren’t so different after all. The only difference is what triggers them.
I understand younger generations are feeling very disaffected and hopeless. I feel for them. I don’t really have a solution for them and don’t have the power to change it so I’d rather tune it out. Yeah, that makes me a selfish jerk. Ok, cool.
I.e., sometimes you just can't separate politics from everything else.
What I see on HN is AI, AI, AI, and then some more AI. Basically nothing else gets any traction, which is frustrating.
I think, in general, the optimism towards tech has degraded a lot in the past couple decades. Which is to be expected, as everyone who sells technology is finding new ways to abuse it every day. Especially for things like AI, it doesn't help that the most optimistic people are basically saying "yeah this is world-ending". The culture-shift isn't unique to hackernews, it's top-down from the entire tech industry, as the tech industry shifts from "cool stuff for nerds" to "tools of mass oppression". That's just sort of what happens when you pump enough money into a sector in our type of economy.
The reason AI gets so much coverage is that this is a tech forum.