Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

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Undersandly, the conversation in here revolves around the technicalities and semantics of net neutrality. But this isn't an issue of technology. It's a political issue, or worse, an ideological issue. It's not about the empirical truths of net neutrality, or the collective intent of those who created, and those who continue to develop the technology that has woven itself into the fabric of humanity. It's about idealouges imposing their ideals on every facet of our lives, regardless of the facts.

The sad fact is, this is yet another grim attack on net neutrality by nefarious agents who see the web as something to be dominated and bent to their will exclusivley for political and economic gain.

Like it or not, the work we do is going to become highly politicised. Are we ready for this? Do we have the moral fortitude to resist the influence that fuzzy, sloppy, and emotive politics seeks to have on our discussions?

I think back to how we handled the Brendan Eich debacle. I (regretfully) came down on the punitive side of that argument. And I participated in that debate with a level of anger and vitriol that embarrasses me now. But whichever side you took, there's no doubt that for a brief moment we were deeply divided. The Brendan Eich story was a flash in the pan compared to what is about to happen.

Should we engage in political debate, or should we avoid it? Can we buck the trend and participate in political debate in way that doesn't tear us apart, or should we ignore it as it happens around us and impacts upon our lives and work? Or is there a path between the extremes, where we can be neither ignorant to our political leanings nor beholden to them?

I don't dare offer any advice on how we should prepare ourselves for what is about to come, I just hope we can all think about how we hope to respond before it happens.

One thing I will say though, being someone prone to highly emotional reactions in all aspects of my life; developing software in teams has taught me the value of "strong opinions, weakly held".

I think the tech industry and HN crowd are waking up too late, and this might be because of the previous HN cultural wave. Initially HN was like the slashdot crows, in that it was geeky and making money of being entrepreneurial was an ideal, and not a way of life.

Eventually that changed as the culture shifted to enabling and succeeding in startups. A lot of the meta culture and crowd is now many steps away from the old hacker roots and far closer to the entrepreneur /wanterpreneur group.

This latter group really isn't in it to get into a political battle, and it makes no sense to get involved in a waste of time. As a result achieving critical mass, or uniting people under political oriented architectures won't happen soon enough.

Maybe it's time to head back to /. ?

im ignorant here. What was HN like initially? I assumed since it was the discussion board of a startup accelerator that it was always pretty focused on that.

Hmmm.

Yes and no. The question/answer is of degrees.

I can't point to a categorical set of submissions/comments to provide you with some perfect bouquet of HN circa 2008 vs 2012 or such.

Essentially it started out more as hackers figuring out how to hack becoming entrepreneurs or making things work - to entrepreneurs or startup founder babies figuring out what to do. So HN was more geeky initially, and the techie perspective of what startups are doing.

Now it's slightly more towards the startup side looking at the tech perspective.

This is all relative. If you compared HN crowd to the WSJ and it's consumers, this site would be far and ahead a site of techies talking tech stuff.

I hope this helps, because this is making a risky argument since it's subjective.

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Part of this is covered by basic theory of websites - initially a site has a simple good or utility, (information, expertise) and attracts only people in the know. They come to discuss their field.

Eventually, if the knowledge allows people to get ahead, your culture shifts, as more people come to the site. Your experts to normal concentration shifts. PG has a good article on this, he identifies what he calls midbrow arguments.

My understanding is that it was originally just a place for people in YC-funded startups (or people otherwise affiliated with YC) to share useful/interesting links and information with each other. I don't associate HN (then or now) with any particular crowd, it's just an ever-evolving nexus of common interests that YC maintains as a public service more than anything else.

I bet it's more focused on geeky interests and less focused on entrepreneurial topics than it was originally. Longtime readers might sense that it's more dumbed down or diluted now, but I suspect that's really just those longtime readers themselves getting more knowledgeable over the years, and HN seeming less revelatory than it did in the past. :)

Example: it seems like everyone I know used to read Slashdot but stopped at some point when they realized how much the discussion quality had deteriorated. What's funny is how different people's timelines are. I thought Slashdot was a great resource in 1998 but felt like the quality of the comments had descended to mostly garbage by 2001. I know other people who are way smarter than me (but a few years younger) who will swear that Slashdot was awesome in 2003 when they started reading it, but lament its downfall circa 2008 or something. The biggest factor in an individual's Slashdot timeline seems to be, they loved it when they were younger, less mature, and less knowledgable, then as they got older and more experienced they started getting annoyed by it. But really, Slashdot's demographics didn't change nearly as much as they did.

No, I know what you mean - I'm accounting for that.

Forum history and human behavior on the web is my hobby subject.

In this case I'm not saying it's become smarter or less earth shattering. I'm saying that the average focus has shifted, as a cultural shift in the community which come so here.

You can get an idea of front page by using https://news.ycombinator.com/front

> Front page stories from today so far, ordered by time spent there.

> To see other days, add a day to the above URL in yyyy-mm-dd format. Example: front?day=2016-06-20.

>You can get an idea of front page by using https://news.ycombinator.com/front

But not to find out what HN was like initially (which was the GP's concern); try a date before 2014-11-11 and you get "We don't have this data before 2014-11-11."

It's funny that we're so divided on what to do about this, because when the plan by big ISPs to start discriminating based on site popularity was announced, basically everybody from right and left was outraged by those plans.

Then it became some kind of political football and people were divided up on how to respond to it.

Pay close attention. This is how people manage to kill normal sensible ideas.

The attack comes on several levels, all of which are dependent on having at least some website/newsite which is willing to repeat your claims.

Your audience can be broken into 3 buckets (several more, but 3 is enough for a demonstration)

1) The first bucket is non-experts but intelligent. Tie them down in various plausible sounding arguments, primarily designed to appeal to people who dont't know the subject, but can make out logical sounding arguments. These people become your rank and file who serve to sound convincing and tie up experts

2) Experts - With your rank and file, tie up all people who know the subject, or increasingly develop methods to keep them distant from actual contact with people. Over simplify their arguments and try and engage Experts in the arena of PR.

3) Everyone else - show that experts are out of touch, or just lie, advertise the benefits and leave out the risks. Point out that experts are currently in debate and cant settle on the benefits (thanks to your hard work).

The general 3 steps to spreading FUD

Yeah, that's the thing. It's not hard to turn right & left against each other, then the lobbyists profit off of that. Just had to get each side to want to use the problem for their own political ends and divide us over how to address it.

But I think we should try to remember and go back to the fact that essentially nobody likes what the ISPs want to do at all. If we could find a more agreeable way to address it and not let it get twisted to further other agendas, I think most people could agree that it needs to be stopped.

The lesson I've learned is that this is no longer the world for the open exchange of ideas. Mostly because people are already waiting to subvert your arguments.

This is dealt with by PR, advertising and focus groups.

The big mainstream political topics might be getting more intertwined, but don't think for a moment that means we weren't already heavily politicized. It's been that way for at least as long as I've been paying attention. So many overlapping opinions can feel less political when the people that would disagree aren't paying attention (or dissent isn't noticeable).

We've spent the last decades proving that there is no soul and no ethics to be found here. Just sleazy after the fact rationalization. Morally bankruptcy extends all the way into the design of software. We abuse the unearned trust of users that have no option but to come to us for tools. And devour our own when they stray too far from the fashionable perspectives.

The end of net neutrality makes us face the possibility of someone doing to us what we did to the nobodies: forcing ourselves into the middle of their day-to-day business and instead of just facilitating what they want to do, finding every single way to extract money from that privileged position.

Like the man who worries about the possibility of his country becoming a police state to distract himself from the fact it already is, we debate topics as if our little slice of the world hasn't already been hollowed out. Even if we don't like that Eich was run out of town, the fact it happened feeds the lie we tell ourselves: that we have the ability spot actual wrongdoing and act meaningfully to stop it.

The system didn't need anything more out of Eich, so he can be disappeared over $1k to Prop 8. Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg have overseen the destruction of privacy as a human value, but they're fine and nobody cares all that much about losing it. The system needed privacy to go.

In 50, 100, 200+ years, when people look back at our time now, who do you think will be seen as more malicous? Eich or Zuck? How long until golden boys of tech turn out like Christopher Columbus? A reductionist and simplistic fairy tale about his amazing contribution to our history has eventually swung. Now all you see are people that continue to "bust myths" about this monster, long after everyone has stopped believing them.

> I think back to how we handled the Brendan Eich debacle. I (regretfully) came down on the punitive side of that argument.

Can I ask why? I know many sober, moral and analytic people who got themselves quite riled up and (in my eyes) burned an accused man before the facts were all in. I understand why any angry crowd saturating a company's dial-in board would make any employer say "I don't know what's right or wrong - but you are a costly employee to keep on!" To me, that seems like the opposite of justice-seeking behavior.

But, I've been told, that my views on these things are too blinkered, and I'd like hearing it from your perspective (esp. now that you've calmed down!)

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