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Emotions are flying high in the comments, because the world (including the virtual one) is changing fast(er) and not in the best direction.

There is also great disconnect between the tech billionaires and the real problems in the world.

The numbers they base their worldview on are carefully curated and the story is of course that 'things are greater than ever', but the rest of the people (especially outside the US) are felling it very differently.

Proof of that is Brexit, Trump and populists + nationalists winning in many countries - voted in by people who are finding it hard to adapt to the fast-changing pace of the tech-driven world, in which they have no shares or say.

Compared to 'real' problems that the world faces, self-driving cars are, in my humble opinion, irrelevant. From a passenger's perspective, self-driving vehicles have existed since forever - called buses, trains or taxis, so I don't see how the passenger experience will dramatically change when it's driven by a computer rather than a human.

From the perspective of the owner of a self-driving fleet, though, this is a potentially fantastic business.

Of course profits will be largely shared by a couple of shareholders and some leftovers offered to the engineers in the form of yearly salaries and maybe some equity, while the rest of us will get a new bill each month for the miles/seconds driven.

I know it because I experienced it myself as an engineer in a company in which Mark made billions, while those who built the whole thing received scraps from the deal.

So I think the OP post is understandable - maybe the tone was a bit harsh, but the main points I find hard to not agree with.

well, the world is better than it ever has been, but it feels worse. objectively, we all have a higher standard of living, longer life expectancy, and more opportunities for education than generation in (known) human history. what we (as a whole) don't know how to deal with is having access to the internet.

> Compared to 'real' problems that the world faces

What problems are more 'real' than 1 million people dying each year from car related injuries?

While I think Andreesen has some interesting things to say, Matt Wulfeck has a valid criticism. These are people who have been around when lightning struck but now they think they make the rain.

Don't forget, Andreesen has had his share of spectacular failures too. He just had more resources to bet with going forward from them.

Anyone other than me find it funny that Mark not only talks to a very small circle of people for "validity" of his ideas, he's proud to have figured out how to avoid even that in this article?

I only came to HN somewhat recently, around 2 years ago, but I've started to notice a very major change in the culture of this forum lately. There is so much vitriol and blanket insults being levied at anyone and everyone.

I am a woman. My experience of the forum has vastly improved during that time.

I am not saying that HN does not have problems. When I arrived, it had a real sense of community that it seems to mostly lack today, but that sense of community and mutually respectful conversation was reserved for the privileged few, some core group of members. It was not extended to me. I experienced all kinds of drama.

I do what I can to promote genuine mutual respect for all parties. I think there is certainly room for improvement in that regard. But I sometimes wonder if the changes HN has seen in terms of that initial core community apparently deteriorating were a necessary prerequisite for positive changes, such as being more welcoming of women. And while I sometimes wish that atmosphere of respectfulness had not been lost, I do wonder if its preservation would have continued to exclude some people, such as me.

I never quite know how to feel about such thoughts.

I am a man so obviously I've not had the same experiences as you with regards to feeling excluded earlier on but I'm kind of mixed in my overall feelings. I've been here pretty much the same length of time as you and I agree with you that some stuff has definitely improved. Any topic dealing with women or minorities of any sort use to be truly dreadful places to view the comments in. Now they are just kind of dreadful but the bad is hugely outweighed by great comments.

But the general feel seems a lot meaner these days. There are less specific attacks against race/gender/sexuality/etc but more general attacks against anyone and everyone and I think it has a compounding effect. I know I am certainly less kind on here than I use to be. It's that drive towards the negative that made me all but stop posting on Reddit since I didn't like the person I was when commenting there. It's having the same effect here. Every Show HN/talk/release seems to be more than 50% negative these days.

I'd love to see someone run a sentiment analysis on the comments here though to see if it's just that I'm seeing more negativity or if it really exists.

I mean we all remember drews first dropbox post and the whole "Why not just use rsync! this is stupid" type comments so maybe I just have rose coloured glasses.

Dude have you tried rclone?

I had an initial negative experience on Reddit a few years ago and rapidly abandoned it. I recently returned. I have debated blogging about some of the differences between Reddit and other forums I have participated in. My second go round with Reddit is proving to be vastly different from my first, in a good way.

I think the world is still learning to interact effectively in online forums. There is still plenty to learn about how to make that work effectively.

Reddit: No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

When I first joined ten years ago, most discussions were highly technical, or oriented towards doing a startup with no politics on either side. The politics stayed in their own threads.

I agree that the forum has been on a ten year trends towards slipstreaming in politics, ideology, and dogma on more and more articles. They follow very similar templates: a standard liberal rant about how we need more benefits for the people or a standard libertarian rant about how the markets will take care of it all. As a result, it becomes less interesting because the points made are similar.

I've never been part of an online community in which veterans didn't feel that the community had "lost its way". Sometimes they're correct, and sometimes not, but I would be shocked if ten years of success didn't radically change something beyond what you'd have recognized then.

The reality is that stasis leads to the stagnation and death of any community, and it's the only way to avert change. If you're into frontiers though, the good news is that there are always new frontiers.

It's not a lost cause. Most of these destructive effects are unintentional. Indeed they don't feel destructive at all, they feel like standing up for what's right. That is why people post and upvote them. And in fact they are standing up for what's right, but unfortunately doing it in an way that is destructive of the community and thus does more harm than good.

It's possible to recognize this pattern and choose to change it into one that has positive side effects instead of negative ones. Many HN users have done so. I had a long process to go through myself.

As for the culture of the forum having shifted recently, it's society at large that has become more vitriolic. This is not unique to HN, nor can we expect to be immune from macro trends. We need to assess this accurately to have good options for reacting. If a boat is lurching because of a stormy sea, the problem is not in the boat. Unless the sea smashes the boat altogether.

This effect always seems to come with popularity. Once upon a time, Slashdot had some amazingly insightful discussions, leading to a growth in popularity, which led to increased noise. That noise led to increased cynicism and eventually burnout. The same thing has sadly happened to every popular tech news site I know of.

The secret is to keep searching for a new place to have high quality discussions. You never know where it will pop up. (If it's a place where people expect to find it, then all the popular kids will go there and make noise.) I wouldn't give up on HN yet though, it still has quality discussions most of the time.

I'm finding myself going back to Slashdot as of late. It's quality is not what it was once upon a time, and there's still more trolls there than I'd like, but now that it's not popular it's surprisingly easy to find good conversation (and the trolls are usually well moderated)

I would disagree with HN having "quality discussion". I've honestly never seen dang come down on someone where I agreed with it.

I've seen him moderate people because they're posting too much "anti-this or anti-that". Not because of their behavior, but because he didn't like what they were posting.

And this community is aware that dang will do that, so you watch them flag ideas that absolutely have no reason for being moderated.

To be quite frank, I don't really like HN's community, I mostly lurk for the interesting things that get posted, rather than the discussion that comes afterwards.

HN is about backrubbing discussion, I don't know that I'd call it good or quality discussion. That's not to say you don't see good discussion here or there, but in general? no, absolutely not.

dang has come down on me before over my behaviour and I've had to agree with him in all cases that I was acting like a jerk.

I'm with you. HN eternal september'd at least 6 years ago. You'll note pg doesn't participate at all anymore. He used to be a regular.

> I realize that me posting this isn't going to do anything.

FWIW, comments like yours are helpful to people like me in that they provide the assurance that I'm not alone in largely disagreeing with the sentiment expressed in the top HN comments in threads like these.

Also, I'd like to add that I think the GP post was a good reminder to me of "Hey, you're right. Everything doesn't need to be a comment battle." It's easy (at least for me) to get caught up in these kinds of battles, even if they're not full-fledged "flame wars", and miss the point of useful discussion where both sides learn something. Thanks for this reminder.

I'm confused about your argument because it seems essentially an appeal to restrain discourse to agreement with Andreesen. Anything else is "hijacking" or "superfluous soapboxing"? You even go so far as to characterize him as a ho-hum guy under undeserving attack, even though he himself feels free to publicly attack things like anti-colonialism in India when it serves his business interests.

You may feel that the level of discourse has declined, but our social context has shifted quite a bit too. In an era of extreme wealth inequality, the tech industry and venture capitalism have taken on new and perhaps darker connotations. It's fine to walk away from that discussion, but I don't think doing so is to the benefit of understanding the reality of our circumstances.

While your comment is over the specified age limit, please note that comments lamenting HN's decline are advised against in the guidelines. [0]

The comment you replied to was relevant to the article and it articulates a valuable perspective that I actually wish we saw more of on HN, more skepticism toward the established VC/startup investment process. It's especially important because YC's involvement with HN has made it a nexus for many who are infatuated with startup culture and unwilling to countenance criticism of it.

FWIW, my account claims to be 3173 days old (or "8.715 average Gregorian years" according to WolframAlpha) and I don't think what you're describing is anything new, or that it's bad. The comments have always been the star of the show at HN. The articles are treated as catalysts because they are. HN is about the discussion that occurs on HN.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I thought the points made by the parent were really relevant. especially as things move more and more towards letting founders cash out early and then take years longer to get to IPO.

I think we could much worse than to start moving away from the SV VC startup mentality which is so dominant.It's become ridiculous. Think about how many stories you see about some guy who is living in a van in SF because that's what you have to do now.

100% agree. People fight their own little personal battles (unrelated to the article) in the name of pride and internet points.

The comments sections are almost impossible to read because the signal to noise ratio is getting so large.