Re:Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago
by jacquesm on Monday January 14, 2013 @06:23PM
(#5057355)
> So if anyone deserves criticism, it's the Hacker News community for not showing a more compassionate side.
This is a general problem, not just for HN. The internet in the aggregate suffers from excessive binary thinking.
Everything has to be black and white, without room for colour or even shades of gray. So discussions tend to create their middle ground not by proportional movements but by jerks to +100 and -100. The more polarized the subject the stronger these reactions will be. Anything involving politics, a brush with the law, religion and so on will create those responses with a high degree of predictability.
This is a general problem, not just for HN. The internet in the aggregate suffers from excessive binary thinking.
Everything has to be black and white, without room for colour or even shades of gray. So discussions tend to create their middle ground not by proportional movements but by jerks to +100 and -100. The more polarized the subject the stronger these reactions will be. Anything involving politics, a brush with the law, religion and so on will create those responses with a high degree of predictability.