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Comment by bwy | Hacker News Reader

OT: At this point, I am so confused at what "drinking the Kool-Aid" even means. People on the Internet seem to use it for every meaning possible. I was surprised to see that it has its own Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid.

And it seems like you mean exactly the opposite of what you've said, based on that definition - you're not drinking the React Kool-Aid, or drinking the anti-React Kool-Aid.

I'm not trying to impose grammar OCD on anyone by any means. Like I implied, I'm probably one of the more ignorant people about these phrases. I just think it's confusing when people say things like "could care less" and "drinking Kool-Aid" when they actually mean the complete opposite. It's very bizarre to me but OTOH I guess it's fascinating that English is just that flexible.

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I think his suggestion is that he is drinking the Kool-Aid while internally questioning whether it is a good idea for him to be drinking the Kool-Aid. Which, I agree, is sort of a contradiction, but a parseable one.

This makes more sense. He's basically saying, "I love this, but let's not get too carried away." I now see where that comment's coming from!

Thanks. Nit-picking again, but drinking the Kool-Aid does mean "unquestioning, ... without criticism" implying that those who are drinking wouldn't have such reservations. That's what I was confused about. Oh well. Language is evolving, what else is new.

It might not have been the original meaning but when you think of a cult member drinking the Kool Aid (that will kill them) they might be a true believer with no doubt in their mind, but they could also be someone who isn't sure but is being led by peer pressure ao on.

When you accuse yourself of drinking the kool-aid, (or discuss yourself drinking the kool-aid), it carries along a degree of self-recognition: "sure, maybe I'm drinking the kool-aid, but at least I realize it".

Every top-level comment so far has started about by saying that this is exciting and awesome. The rest of the comments are full of accolades. That is drinking kool-aid. And it's okay to do that. Now let's get back to our hacker roots and start tinkering to see if this carries any weight. Everything is a trade off in technology - so what are we gaining by using this? And what's the cost? Is there a clear benefit?

Thanks. So another definition of drinking Kool-Aid would be "praising highly" I suppose.

To "drink the koolaid" is to blindly place trust in or unquestioningly accept something (that could in all reality by a solo cup full of poison).

So it's not so much that they're praising highly in and of itself as that they're (implicitly) praising highly because they're buying the hype without questioning it, because it's not like they've used it in anger yet or heard 3rd party testimonials.

I mean, this isn't like a kickstarter project where you have a nice video from some random person and nothing but blind optimism it can actually deliver. This is Facebook open-sourcing a library that has been in their production codebase for multiple years. It solves a specific problem that most developers are intimately familiar with, and has already been praised by people in the tech community who aren't officially associated with Facebook. It's ok to get excited about this :)

Yeah, I mean that's what I was saying I thought the definition was in my original comment. But taken the way the OP apparently meant it, it does mean something similar to "praise highly" or "very excited about." The meaning's evolved.

Still OT, but it is pretty crazy how language develops over time and usage. Different people seeing a word, observing its context, and reusing it in similar context (or a context that person perceives to be similar), and thus potentially changing the meaning of the word ever so slightly.

That said, he did use the phrase correctly, well, sort of. He was saying he believes in React, and then noted some caveats with people's reactions React. Which isn't properly "Drinking the Kool-Aid", but his meaning gets across.

He meant exactly what he said.

Haven't you heard? There are tons of new JS framework being churned out annually, and each time it's hailed as the holy grail to all our problems.

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