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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

There was always a bit of cynicism and criticism on Hacker News, but lately it is at a completely different level. Almost every comment on every submission is negative, if not of the work itself then of some tenuous political implication, and usually not a very original or interesting one. Overall the attitude of valuing progress and working towards invention is completely gone, replaced with the dominant cynical, pessimistic and conservative tone of academia and legacy media.

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Maybe people here are annoyed at google (and other big tech companies) for their recent (and not so recent) actions, and just don't care about stuff like this? Imagine if any other group of people, who continually screw other people over and have enough money to get away with it, came together and made something like this. Imagine they continued to not address any of the things people are upset at them for not addressing, and instead just said, "but look, we did an art."

I can only speak for myself, but I strongly believe I'm not alone in my refusal to look past google's bad actions because they made something neat. I'd much rather they start providing real customer support for their products and stop trying to ruin the open internet.

Also,

> conservative tone of academia and legacy media

Can you explain what you mean by this? I have heard people deny there is a liberal bias in these things, and I have heard people say that these things indeed have a liberal bias, but only because "reality tends to have a liberal bias". But I have never heard anyone actually claim it's biased the other way. I know it's off topic, but I am just so curious. It feels like that Slate Star Codex piece about people subjected to the same things coming to exact opposite conclusions, with each person being totally clueless about how the other person could disagree. (I cannot remember what he called it.)

Maybe not the best choice of word, but I think that people who call themselves "liberals" actually have very conservative goals, in the sense of being against change. They might come around to a type of 'yimby' when it comes to building apartments or whatever, but e.g. the opposition to meritocratic selection processes in guise of equality among identities is actually about preserving inherited wealth and social capital. This manifests in lots of areas as a default dislike of any major technological change, because that usually implies the risk of mobility between socioeconomic strata.

I agree. Curious, I started looking at the specific comments and commentator's post histories to see when they became active. As the tone changed, like minded people became comfortable and emboldened.

(By the way, your use of the word conservative, while correct, is likely to be misunderstood by some.)

The negativity might be warranted because we are actually running out of time with the climate emergency. It's a pessimism rooted in something very real and something very terrifying.

So sorry if I seem a bit negative. I'm going to work on my garden as soon as it warms and enjoy my family.

P.S.

It's not academia that has conservative views, but the workplaces most people here occupy as they crush any radical idea quickly and efficiently.

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