Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephen | Hacker News Reader

The comments on this thread are terrible.

I don't know enough about him to pass moral judgement, but it seems like many others think that they do (after a quick scan of Wikipedia, meh, that's good enough).

It just seems crass to be flippantly judgmental when the guy just died, and in response to his last elegant / humble / insightful "post" to the world.

I'm also confused at the implicit viewpoints that, IMO, are at odds with the HN/YC ethos of "individual hussle/initiative/hack your way to huge growth/etc". I.e. if Pickens wasn't from another generation and another industry, I think he'd fit in very well with the HN/YC types (disclaimer/ha, I'm making an assumption that I just chastised others for doing).

Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.

View on HN

I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people, companies, technologies etc. I used to think it was mostly just specific things, like anti-Musk sentiment because a lot of people find him grating, but I now think its mostly just a reflection of the general anti-tech that's very much in vogue.

I also think it's a one-way street, because it's very asymmetrical. It's super quick, easy and satisfying to burn someone because they appear to be a hypocrite, but quite hard to make the counter-case, because reality is often messy and grey (such as this guy, who was both an oil man and a wind energy man). So fewer and fewer people will bother to do all that work to reply to negativity, which will naturally lead to more voice/upvotes on one side, which makes it even more onerous to reply etc.

I agree with this sentiment. Being on here for 6 years now, the overwhelming perspective is love to hate along with the mob rules. Go against the mob and you will be downvoted to oblivion. Ridiculing someone that cannot depend themselves is just a new low in moral character amongst HN users.

I don't think it is anti-tech, so much as anti big money. Tech isn't as sexy when you realize how it is funded. Tech use to be about people working in their garages and striking rich on hard work, perseverance.

Tech is the same as it ever was, trying to convince yourself otherwise is rewriting history.

> I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years

Replace "HN" with "the world" and I'd agree with you. I think your average person is so exhausted by the shrieking of the the online naysayers that they just reduce their involvement. For example, I saw an article recently about Andrew Yang's very intelligent, classy response to those racist comments from that prospective SNL comedian, and then he was pilloried for "pandering to the white vote". While lots of folks came to Yang's defense, it was just sad that they had to.

I often think that the Internet has fundamentally altered the "freedom of speech" calculus in that it allows people to say outrageous things for attention, but largely ignore the negative consequences (i.e. social opprobrium) of those statements. I have no idea what the solution is, but I don't think it will get better any time soon.

I suppose you'd have to look back and see what's changed in the world (and particularly in the lives of HN's primarily American demographic) to understand why this is happening. I'd be more explicit in my suspicions as to what that is, but considering the tone of the parent and grandparent comment, I imagine that I'd be courting a very un-HN-like argument in doing so, so I'll hold back. Suffice it to say that the willingness for people to "shriek" at things they hold prejudice to, regardless of the actual facts, didn't so much "change" into its current paradigm as it was "unleashed."

I agree with you, but I'd also argue the very act of "unleashing" can in fact multiply that negative sentiment in individuals where it would otherwise stay relatively tame.

For example, I saw a mini-documentary recently about people who may have harbored what I'll call "questioning/prejudiced" views, but then fell down the YouTube rabbit-hole of full on racist/Nazi/white-supremacist videos and turned into full-on racist conspiracy theorists.

Those people here are not anti-Musk but anti-Musk-holydom.

It's more than "anti-tech sentiment" - in many cases, it's darkly hinting that democidal totalitarianism would be a good idea. (Or at least that the extreme left deserves a fortieth or fiftieth chance to implement all its ideas, and maybe they won't produce democidal totalitarian regimes this time.) And it's everywhere now, not just on HN.

I do not think the change in tone/civility and is due to the 'comments' only.

The change is also due to the topics and topics sources constantly pushed into the discussion (often by very high-karma participants).

HN has basically become

NYT/BBC/WallStreetJournal/Vox/Slate/BuzzFeed discussion forum (for anything relating to environment/economy/politics).

Seems that more reasonable technical (although, narrower in scientific scope) discussion is happening on lobste.rs

In there, there is also publicly viewable moderation log, that helps to understand/evaluate how moderation decisions are made.

To me the change started happening in about 2014 where public deplatforming/takedowns became normalized in Software tech sector.

However, I also agree that this type of change at HN, accelerated in more recent years.

I've been flagging mainstream news topics hard all year, but I think there's just a few of us actually trying to keep the site to its stated goal.

The level of discourse around those topics is abysmal.

The stated goal of Hacker News is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Mainstream topics allowed from any source so long as they meet that criteria or presents "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." This site has never been exclusively for technical topics. Flagging stories merely because you don't find them interesting, because they're mainstream or because they come from a mainstream site is an abuse of flagging privileges. You can just ignore such stories, hide them, upvote the content you would rather see or post more of such content.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. _If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._

Highlighting added for emphasis.

Probably, not definitely. Mainstream news covers plenty of stories which would be relevant here.

If you don't believe me, talk to the admin and the guy who made the site[0]. The problem here is not the mainstream nature of articles being posted, but the low effort being put in by commenters. Plenty of tech-related stories have plenty of garbage comments as well. Most of the discussion around RMS has been a dumpster fire.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

Right. I'm not saying definitely no politics, but there's a ton of political content that is not really that interesting (like the two stories that were just on the front page about the US drone strike killing pine nut farmers in Afghanistan that are sliding down the ranking fast). It has been a growing trend. Maybe I spend too much time on the site, but I usually see most of the threads that get flagged/dead.

And I agree with my parent poster -- lobste.rs is a much better curated feed of interesting topics to me -- I'm not on it yet, because I sort of feel that I've made an investment here in the community.

I’ve had a hard time understanding and using lobste.rs

When I visit the site it seems like I need to already know what community to join. Which sticks me with the problem of not knowing which to join. Googling was not helpful.

Is this the sort of thing that I have to know someone to invite me and kick start me into use?

I guess I’ll eventually get around to joining irc chat to get an invite. But I suppose this is useful for filtering out slackers like me who can’t figure out how to join :)

> there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people, companies, technologies etc.

I've been around HN for almost 10 years now and what has happened on HN is noteworthy. In the "old" days, Hacker News was literally called Startup News and startups and the whole optimism around them was celebrated. Even though there were some famous examples of kind of chopping down an idea -- it wasn't done in some kind of anti-capitalist, political way, but in a typical "nerdy" kind of way. Here's probably the most famous example:

> I have a few qualms with this [Dropbox] app: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue. 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? [1].

Now, if we did a Show HN for Dropbox today, the negative comments would be something similar to this:

"Why would you want to store files on a cloud on that generates a huge carbon footprint and support some VC-backed "n-ist"* company that doesn't support government-owned health care and only exists to make profits for shareholders? And besides, there's $preferred_Javascript_framework that can do it without having to conform to the anti-competition walled garden or have any need to use S3 and support Amazon's unfair labor practices."

The "old" way wasn't questioning the act of making money from an invention (capitalism,) while the "new" way has gotten all kinds of pseudo-woke. It seems like "new" HN has become severely anti-capitalist and more interested in shitting on the very system that created (and continues to create) some of the most important, useful technology the world has ever seen. There's a lot of nonsense, for sure (i.e. Juicero,) but then again there was a lot of nonsense in the 1800s [2] and other periods of great technological accomplishment. It's normal to have a bunch of noise with the signal.

We literally can order almost anything from anywhere and have it brought to your door. There are cars that drive themselves. There are aircraft that fly themselves. There are affordable watches that you can use to make phone calls and actually do an ECG. That's amazing. But rather than critiquing the tech in typical nerd-debate fashion (like old Hacker News,) instead there is a distinct group that would spend time attacking Apple's tax strategies or Amazon's carbon footprint. That's significant because it marks a change from the days where companies like Apple were seen as "creating the future" instead now, they are seen as "obligated to pay for a country's social programs because they're so big." That's just nuts. Rather that promoting tech companies of all sorts and sizes and promoting the creation of the future, instead a lot of words are written demanding that those companies pay more to governments. That those companies should somehow be penalized or punished for being successful (from building things people want and find very useful.)

I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion (because circa 2019 Hacker News,) but I feel like the problem here is that as Hacker News went more international, many of the afflictions endemic to Europe have become a bigger influence here on Hacker News. The indefinite pessimism of Europe [3][4] has infected this community specifically and much of Silicon Valley in general. Essentially the indefinite pessimists have pushed out the optimists. Perhaps there's some hope though and the pendulum will swing back to the Definite Optimism of the 1950s and 1960s -- guys like Elon Musk, the late Steve Jobs and a few others seem to have been trying pretty hard to bring back the excitement and optimism of building the future. However, for every Musk, there are dozens of "leaders" who care to preach Doomsday predictions and FUD rather than moving full speed towards building something really cool and useful. Airplanes are a canary here. Flying from Singapore to London used to be considered amazing. Now instead of celebrating human mobility at a scale never before possible (and taking advantage of the opportunities that brings for peace, understanding, and commerce,) instead people lament the carbon footprint and shareholder value of the airline.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil [3] https://zakslayback.com/pessimism-optimism-definite-indefini... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/03/european-count...

* where "n" is race, sex, gender, class, etc.

Thanks for posting this, it's much more in-depth and well-thought-out than what I posted.

I think the older HN was more balanced - ie the famous Dropbox launch thread had both "cool, my mom will love this" and "lame, I already do this with rsync". But even on the more general topics of climate change or capitalism, there was a decent mix - I remember one of the very first articles on Jacobinmag made it to the front page. Even if you don't subscribe to any of their ideology, it was still good to get exposed to it and consider it.

I guess the worst thing that I could say about HN today is that it is not as interesting. As discussion becomes more monotonous and predictable, there's fewer new or surprising things that get brought up. I also think it's not really HN-specific, but a small website getting caught up in the zeitgeist.

> The comments on this thread are terrible.

Those comments are all now dead or nearly so and I wouldn't have even seen them if your comment weren't calling attention to them. Please don't do that. Just downvote or flag them and trust others to do the same. Otherwise we end up having another discussion about HN instead of about the submission.

> Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.

Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just go look at any HN submission of any remotely controversial figure and you'll find terrible comments. It isn't new.

Fair! Thanks for the reminder.

You're right; I was very early into this thread, when those comments were still at the top.

And also the mobile app I use doesn't have a down vote button, so my "I want to react" urge had to go through a new comment instead of the voting itself. I'll flip over to chrome and down vote there next time.

Agreed. Currently reading the biography of Disney, and it’s so depressing to hear he was the punching bag of every writer, journalist, critic, and university professor throughout the 60s.

Was Disney the conformist racist simpleminded backwater troglodyte they claimed, or were they?

It’s hard to not be bothered by the pettiness of the “cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat”. But I once felt hacker news had fewer of those voices.

Are you reading the Gabler or Thomas biography on Disney?

Gabler

I've read both, and am re-reading the Thomas biography now. I recommend you follow the Gabler version with the Thomas version:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/526061.Walt_Disney

I did after reading this article: http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Essays/Diane_On_Gabler/Diane_O...

Ok will do, thanks for the link. So far my impression isn’t that the book is intentionally negative, but appreciate the additional context.

Having read several bio's of Disney, I'd say he wasn't.

The worst factual criticism that can be pointed at Disney was he was overly sentimental for a past that never was. He painted American history in such a way to present a "smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism".

He was very much a man of his time, he wasn't known to use racial epithets - but was racially insensitive like most men of his era - he had several jews in his inner circle, and none of his employees (even the ones who didn't like him) would say he was anti-Semitic - but he allied himself with anti-communist groups that had a strong anti-Semitic bend to them.

I would argue on whole, he left the world a better place than he found it however, the technical improvements he and his company introduced to the world of animation left a huge and lasting impact felt the world over.

Our culture seems to have just gotten angry all the time and at everybody. Probably not healthy. Definitely a waste of emotional energy.

I think the fact that your foundation of historical context requires a need to consult Wikipedia to know who/what T. Boone Pickens was is a good predictor of that negative knee-jerk response given popular culture today as so much of it relies on minimal historical context.

Don't come here for the political commentary. Do it for the technical commentary. At least when it is not completely incorrect bullshit.

But the latter has always been an issue here. And there's still enough insight to keep me coming back.

Because he was terrible person who tried to con people out their water under guise of clean energy. He's best forgotten.

Hacking is the playful application of ingenuity, or achieving things the experts in the field thought were impossible. Pickens, whatever his merits, didn't do that and didn't value it. Hacking is not tricking people and ripping them off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com