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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation.

On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about.

A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new users... weren't. I don't know what happened. Maybe Quora suddenly became a fad with the pre-teens in India? Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.

The platform didn't digest this well. Quite a few topics that used to be interesting suddenly became filled with garbage. I stopped watching many. Now I seem to just get bombarded with WW2 trivia, which is ok I guess, but I kinda miss "the old Quora".

It's an awkward subject but the parent's comment can't just be discounted as racism.

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Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new users and old users and the number of new users is overwhelmingly larger than the old ones. This should have happened when China started getting internet, but I guess their government policies coupled with less number of English speakers than India prevented it. But this is not the last time this is happening. After the Indians settle down, I guess next will be Africa and we will start again.

When AOL first created its portal to Usenet newsgroups in the 1990s, there was a similar effect.

Very true. Funny anecdote:

I used to be an avid reader of alt.best-of-internet. When AOL put newsgroups online, alt.best-of-internet was at the top of the alphabetical list and suddenly got a deluge of nonsense. Please to AOL went unheard.

Someone got the brilliant idea to keep a thread bumped to the top whose title was:

OFFICIAL MESSAGE FROM AOL: WE WORSHIP SATAN

I don't know if this was cause/effect, but shortly afterwards alt.best-of-internet was hidden or moved to a less conspicuous location in the UI and the deluge stopped.

If you're okay with pointing out that statistically Indians are much more likely to make stupid answers, what's wrong with saying statistically blacks are much more likely to commit crimes.

Choose both or none.

Crimes are/ might be more likely to be committed by blacks, in some countries. Being black doesn't make you more likely to commit a crime.

> Kids online are generally insufferable from all cultures.

Hey man thats ageist! I know X kids that are probably smarter than the average adult!

Maybe we should have a conversation on ageism now.

Maybe we should. Because assholes of all ages tend to be blamed on kids - thirty years old someone being toxic on the internet is assumed to be teenager even when his/her age is known.

The follow up question is: if we truly assume it is all kids being jerks, why do adults dont voice disapproval the way they would in real life, but rather sheepishly enable it? Role modeling and it takes a village and all that.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

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