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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Rich Hickey specifically said that some Lisp groups were extraordinarily toxic, and it's something he wanted to avoid in Clojure. (I think it was in his HOPL talk).

Also, I would say that help-bash@ and the bash IRC channel are pretty toxic.

By "toxic" I mean that there's just a general culture of negativity, insults, hazing, and assuming the worst. There's definitely a thing where computer nerds try to one-up each other, and highly technical or obscure topics like Lisp and bash tend to bring that out.

I have a memory of comp.lang.c being pretty bad too, but I didn't participate for that long, and this was long ago.

Honestly it's funny to me that people think HN is toxic, because it's not even close to those forums in my mind. (well maybe that's because I almost never read the politics threads on HN, but still)

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> Honestly it's funny to me that people think HN is toxic, because it's not even close to those forums in my mind. (well maybe that's because I almost never read the politics threads on HN, but still)

I strongly agree. I was reading the archive of an early infosec group the other day, the culture was extremely hostile. 70% of the posts were insightful technical discussions, the remaining 30% was full of personal attacks and name callings, merely reading those posts made me want to throw my computer out of the window.

I'm not saying HN is great, but to give a sense of scale: on HN, that type of posts would be flagged to death almost immediately.

I think what people sometimes mean when they say "HN is toxic", is raging incompetence paraded with confidence (and getting upvoted), which I've seen many a time here. Similar to reddit.

Infosec seems to have its share of angry people in general. One notable blog you’ll see on here from time to time generally has informative or moderate content, but the comments always seem to be a bunch of pointless shouting at things not really related to the post.

> Rich Hickey specifically said that some Lisp groups were extraordinarily toxic

This is an interesting topic I try to stay away from here, for obvious reasons, but so many lisp communities I’ve seen seem to form around these cult of personalities or have the most, err.. eccentric members. More so than any language I’ve seen. People like to joke about Haskell programmers being cult like, but I’ve been down some really wild rabbit holes with lisp.

Ironically I recall some allegations against Hickey a while back that if true would land him in that category.

Well, as the saying goes...it takes one to know one ;-)

That's interesting, I also came to the conclusion that lisp communities skewed unpleasant. I think it's because they tend to be people (men as it happens) who are older and were around at the time of the original IRC culture, which was quite aggressive / countercultural / unprofessional compared to modern professional standards in tech.

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