1. "I don't know who would have smart speakers at home. " Most people don't care.
2. GOOGLE is Lord Voldemort.
3. FB is Sauron.
4. Startup life > Big company
5. "Who would live in the bay area. I am happy at my ranch doing remote work."
I am old enough to remember the anti-M$ days. And how Slashdot childishly posted the Gates-Borg image on a lot of articles about Microsoft. Slashdot was a far unhealthier community than HN.
If I feel my buttons are regularly being pushed, then that is a sign of an unhealthy community. That's why I quit twitter.
Just about any thread that mentions China, India, certain "politically incorrect" tech luminaries, race or gender politics tends to devolve into passionately expressed cesspools of toxicity and vitriol. Follow dang's account for a bit, he has to talk people down from the crazy ledge all the time. He's done it to me a couple of times, because this place just gets under my skin sometimes.
It's particularly unhealthy in HN's case because this community has the pretense of holding itself to a standard of intellectual merit and civility above the internet mainstream. We can have intellectually stimulating discussions about compiler design or type theory all day long but wander outside the "technical" box and suddenly people are screaming about white genocide and cultural marxism or spouting QAnon or anti-vaxx conspiracy theories.
Honest question. Worked in a big building.. sat in the kitchen area in the morning while people got coffee, this feels like how people converse.
And if that's the case, why is it so much harder to tolerate that in an online forum? It's less ephemeral than speech? We don't actually know each other?