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Comment by siquick | Hacker News Reader

3) Silicon Valley is often a culture of cortisol, of rushing, and of fear of missing out (FOMO). There is also a mono-conversation of tech that is near impossible to avoid (much like entertainment is some parts of LA), where every dinner has some discussion of rounds of funding, investing, and who is doing what with Uber, Amazon, or someone else. This can be dodged, but it takes very real and consistent effort. I don't want to spend 20-30% of my daily mental calories on avoiding the mono-conversation.

Sydney has this problem, except the conversation topics are real estate, what high school you went to, and gym memberships.

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I had someone ask me in a job interview what high school I went to - I was about 35 at the time. Needless to say I got the impression he was someone I didnt want to work with and I discontinued the application. And yes this was in Sydney...

Reminds me of when I meet new people in a "night out" type context and it feels like everyone vying to work in different forms of status signaling into the conversation.

Some cultures arent like this - I lived in the Netherlands for a while (and im sure some Dutch HN readers could comment too) but if you meet someone and ask them what they do straight away they are likely to answer you with "Why so you can judge me by it?"

I avoid asking people where they work or what they do for as long as possible, and instead try to focus on interests and hobbies.

I've heard too many conversations in S.F. that follow a kind of judgement ritual. If you work for a startup in a popular field (e.g. A.I.), or a major tech company, then you pass. Anything else and the conversation just stalls.

Replace "Silicon Valley" with "Hacker News", and it sounds like a decent approximation of what HN is.

Really? I feel like HN is a bunch of people trying to fight against that.

I think the mono-conversation group is present on HN, but I feel like it's balanced out by a pretty substantial group of people who have made a conscious decision to live somewhere other than SF or NYC because they don't agree with the culture.

Every once and a while I see a comment deriding the ability of people who live outside of silicon valley to make a meaningful impact on the world, and it is heavily downvoted without fail.

I think that's a good thing personally, because HN would suck if it was merely a SV echo chamber.

Some topics are a guaranteed Groundhog day with the same arguments over and over again, for example:

    - free market vs. regulations
    - Bay Area housing issues
    - Google's evilness, ad-based Internet economy
    - Facebook's evilness, benefits of deleting one's account
    - Apple's design decisions
    - is Bitcoin a bubble or not
    - holy wars between programming language camps
    - any kind of US politics
    - diversity in tech

I've learned some interesting perspectives from these discussions but they are mono-conversations that I try to avoid nowadays.

HN seems very well constructed for being a mono-culture. Every story is only active for a day or so. And a lot of what people know about the issue is going to be from the previous stories. Both when commenting, but especially so when voting. So for every iteration of an issue the most prevailing opinion is going to get more and more established. While it will become more and more work to dissent. At the end you find yourself holding opinions that you don't really know what the came from or if they are even correct, just that other people seem to agree with them.

What would we like to talk about instead? I'll start:

- File formats and open protocols are dead, everything is stored in someone else's database. How do we regain the ability to switch providers and interoperate?

- The web has petrified as a medium. Only the few big giants can now evolve it, and all but one does so in direct competition with their own walled garden. Does anyone care?

- Mobile devices: How do I make them useful? Are there apps that aren't toys for kids? Tricorders, not mini TVs plz.

- Anyone wanna let me in to their secret clubhouse? I don't bite, I'm just a sperg who values truth as a terminal value over high school antics and who lacks the energy to chit chat about trivia to meet people.

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