The Internet Is One Big Grey Pill | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Is One Big Grey Pill

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39 pointsnyodeneD37 comments

Taking the article seriously, what if this grey pill revelation is just a big red pill that discourages other red pills in disguise?

You can easily read the article as being self-aware of this possibility. It seems to me to encourage exactly that kind of awareness.

My first thoughts exactly.

This was very hard for me to read.

The "tweet storm" form of writing actually made my eyes hurt.

I'm sure the author has some interesting ideas, but the format was so painfully irritating for me to read, that it detracted from their overall message.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer essay-style long form content.

and while you are having fisty cuffs with content format, you are completely being what the content was urging everybody not to be.

I agree, but I wonder if it is merely the format, or the lack of thought and/or editing of their writing that the format implies.

Is the numbering here just imitation of the form of propositional logic/philosophy or is there some other reason for it?

I think each entry is supposed to be tweet-sized, and it's supposed to be read as a sequence of tweets (numbered so that Twitter's web site doesn't mess it up).

Oh my God.

That's quite possibly the worst reason to divide up a paragraph that I've ever heard.

Even this is an understatement. I would really have loved to read it in paragraph format. As a numbered list it got tiring.

Yep, you're right. From the about section: "A weekly dose of breaking-smart ideas for individuals and organizations based on ongoing research. In tweetstorm form."

I thought so too, but I measured one of the paragraphs at 210 characters. Which can mean one of two things. Hopefully, it's unrelated to Twitter and there's another perfectly good explanation. Alternatively, it's inspired by Twitter, but was never actually Tweeted. It's a self-imposition of the twitter style, which feels both disingenuous and in poor taste.

I got a very strong Wittgensteinian vibe from the structure, which I'm guessing was their goal.

it's a fairly common style, when you want to indicate that this is a string of thoughts rather than an essay. the first time I remember noticing it explicitly in techblog writing was "the cluetrain manifesto", but I'm pretty sure it was already prevalent when that came out

Re:the giant comment chain about moderation, it looks like transparency is something that HN's moderators desperately need right now.

After reading this, the motivation behind his Gervais Principle series makes more sense.

Ummm, does the style and the content of this e-mail / article remind anyone of the random philosophy essay generators?

Just googled "random philosophy generator" and there's apparently like a dozen of them nowadays.

Sounds to me like the author is complaining people disagree with him on the internet.

Meh, some of it rang with me. It brought me back to times when I was neck deep in a few conspiracies with some friends. When we were together it was an echo chamber. Eventually I did some more independent research and found not all we believed was entirely true.

I guess I grey pilled myself?

Please stop creating a new account for every comment or two that you post. HN threads are supposed to be conversations. People have conversations with other people, not random-access snippets.

HN allows anonymity and trusts users to make good use of it. This is not a good use of it. If everyone used HN this way, we wouldn't have usernames at all—just comments without authors. That would be a completely different site.

Mods regularly ban accounts which post comments they disagree with, they'll state it breaks guidelines but the truth is they just don't accept certain speech here.

Dead honest, I've been considering doing the same and just digitally signing the ones I want to preserve identity on.

The current state of HN moderation and management is quite bad. I see no reason to treat them with dignity and respect (as an organization).

What are your complaints about moderation?

> The current state of HN moderation and management is quite bad. I see no reason to treat them with dignity and respect (as an organization).

We must be missing something important if that's true. I have the same question nkurz posted. If you'd prefer to answer it privately, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

Hacker News allows pseudonymity which is a different thing. True anonymity would be using 4chan over Tor which, as you said, produces a different atmosphere.

I'll do that as soon as you stop censoring people that disagree with your and PG's agenda.

In the mean time I'll continue to evade browser fingerprinting and post from new IP addresses. You can't keep this place as your personal echo chamber as much as you would like to.

See, the thing is, they don't censor based on "disagreeing with their agenda". They censor based on how you disagree. If you're going to be a jerk, you'll get censored. You won't get censored for not following the party line.

Maybe you were crossing more lines than just "the party line" and didn't realize it...

I have repeatedly found that not to be the case. And of course, I have no way to prove moderator abuse/ overzealousness because of how opaque the moderation is on this site. To some extent you'll just have to trust me, unfortunately.

Why don't you just post links to examples of moderator abuse? If it's so rampant as you say, that shouldn't be hard.

How do you propose that I link to deleted posts, muted accounts, and threads that are removed from the main index? Those aren't things that I can just link to evidence of. Perhaps from your end, but not for the rest of us.

Nothing is deleted from Hacker News unless the author deletes it themselves or asks us to. Everything else can be linked to. Hence my question.

If a post is marked [dead], only users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile will see it, but that's trivial to turn on, so anyone who wants to read such comments easily can. And of course users are free to vouch for [dead] comments, which in most cases promotes them back to normal status.

Since you've made many accounts on HN, presumably you know all this.

Dang, the commenter you are fighting with is right.

I had my account hell banned by posting "too many articles about Snowden/NSA".

PG even modified the HN code to automatically friction-drag (partially flag) articles of such content. He simply blocked content which didn't agree with his viewpoint.

I lost nearly all respect for HN over this.

I am a solid citizen here (my comments are solid and regularly upvoted), yet my account is hell-banned primarily for my views.

I personally believe this is proof that "peak-HN" and "peak-YC" has already occurred.

Given that I can see your post, I don't think you can be hellbanned (presuming that I understand hellbanning correctly).

My account has various drag-coefficients on it - which "dang" can see ... all of which hamstring my ability to participate (anywhere near) equally on HN.

What's a drag-coefficient in this context? What, specifically, are you seeing that's somehow preventing you from participating equally?

Why don't you move to a site that fits your moderation expectations?

https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep

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