Ask HN: Is HN becoming more an existential crisis echo chamber? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is HN becoming more an existential crisis echo chamber?

85 pointskungito54 comments

I feel like there is more and more posts about existential crisis and anxiety. I don't know if I'm noticing it more because it's resonating with me or are these issues becoming more prominent. I feel like the general sentiment here is atheism and maybe nihilism from people in tech who have more money than they need and now they don't know what to do next. It could be it's just me projecting as well. What I'm asking myself is is it becoming unhealthy for me to come here every day and read about these topics because they could be amplifying my own issues and there isn't really an answer to these questions.

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HN is not changing, but people are - the last couple years have been tough, and people are thinking more deeply about what they want from life, what they need, what boundaries they will set with work, family and friends, and in general just who they want to be and how they want to live their life.

So people are expressing themselves more strongly, and some of those expressions are questions more than answers. We're all coming to different conclusions at different times, and dialogue in general is getting more intense in the world.

So yes, HN may be amplifying your own feelings. And if so, and it bugs you, maybe lay off HN for a while. I doubt HN is the only place you will experience this, though. I'd recommend being mindful of how any community makes you feel, and make a conscious decision whether or not you want it to be part of your daily life.

I log into LinkedIn a few times a week. The posts are a parade of fakery and insincerity. Compared to that, HN has much better discourse, because the focus is on your ideas, not on you personally. There is no careerist agenda at work on HN. I have not gotten the impression that HN is an existential crisis echo chamber (it's an echo chamber in many ways for sure).

Maybe you are clicking on posts that are of the existential crisis echo chamber kind. Or perhaps wading into debates in the comment section that heighten that feeling.

You could see if desisting from commenting (or even reading comments except on purely technical topics) and reading non-technical stories helps improve your experience here. It's really what you make of it, not just what the site provides.

Humans are still human, even here on HN. I think dang has said stuff like "When it's pouring everywhere, it gets wet in here too." Or something along those lines.

HN suffers more these days from Eternal September than it used to because it's bigger than it used to be and I'm guessing it likely grew a lot during the pandemic because so many Reddits grew dramatically while everyone was working remotely and social isolating etc.

I'm guessing it will calm down again some at some point. It's certainly been bumpier than usual the last couple of years.

I try hard to avoid engaging with the stuff I don't want to see more of. Sometimes that's hard but it's in the guidelines and it's a best practice etc.

HN used to be a more balanced place, but the broader "techlash" of the last ~5 years has fully engulfed it. HN is a negative and cynical place today. Discussions about future developments are dominated by the bad things that are happening, will happen etc. In fact in many instances you will not even see positive articles about a particular topic.

Someone working on an exciting new electric aircraft? Discussion is about how they're a fraud. Tesla ships a million EVs a year? Discussion is about how terrible they are. Big tech releases new product? Complain about privacy. New kubernetes feature? Kubernetes is complicated crap.

If this is the dominant disposition of people here, is it any wonder it bleeds into their broader views? I've started spending more time in more balanced places like Twitter and Reddit. I still read HN, but with the understanding that I'll only see one side of the story here.

> HN is a negative and cynical place today. Discussions about future developments are dominated by the bad things that are happening

Funny you feel this way because I've seen the opposite. Any real discussion of the severity of the issues facing us getting quickly flagged and down voted. A bit of cynicism is okay, but saying "look we're in big trouble here, and tech might not be the answer" is met with pretty strong aggression.

For example any article about serious problems related to climate change is immediately flooded with "this is fine" comments, and anyone proposing that we may be facing severe problems in the near future is down voted or flagged immediately.

HN cannot handle the possibility that our future is not as bright as we though when we got into this industry. A bit of mourning is completely understandable, but the rapid denialism on this site make visiting here an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

Well discussing future technology would be interesting if it was realistic. Electric aircraft are not and probably never will be. Tesla does not have a special advantage over other car makers. California has trouble even keeping its electric grid powered all the time. Big tech is building a surveillance infrastructure that would make Orwell blush and at the same time stiffing innovation. Historically innovation has almost always come from small companies.

I’m picking out two statements that seem questionable. The rest of what you say, I am in agreement with.

> Tesla does not have a special advantage over other car makers.

This seems like the least accurate of your statements. Tesla has a very different engineering culture to other car makers and a very different outlook on what it is trying to achieve. Culture is impossible to replicate.

This is very similar to the advantage Apple had in early 2000s, and is very real.

> Historically innovation has almost always come from small companies.

Does it? What makes you say this? It’s hard to think of examples.

Apple is a great example of innovation coming from a small company at the start. Although to be more precise, it was the application of somebody elses innovation they got right (and more importantly, got the timing right). It took Apple and the other personal computer companies a couple of tries to get their product fit and pricing right but when it happened they created an entirely new market segment. The only really big player in that segment for a long time was Tandy.

Big companies all start small, they innovate their way to big and then start crushing innovation in every way they can in their market segment, which makes them stagnant and leaves room for new innovations from small companies to take over. It happens over 10, 20 and even 50 year time frames depending on how good the big companies are at crushing innovation (buying them out, pricing them out etc).

As a small company, your best bet is start in some niche they don't notice until you get big enough that you can't go away any more. Which brings us back to the Apple 2.

Yes, it’s almost the only example anyone can think of, and yes, I agree that the Apple 2 was good product innovation and identified a new segment.

However that segment was transient. The business use case in the medium term was far better served by the IBM PC, which all but eliminated the use of the Apple 2 as anything more than a home computer.

The Mac, of course, was largely based on innovations made by Xerox, then a giant corporation, who licensed them to Apple on ludicrously favorable terms.

This was an example of Jobs as a great dealmaker. Of course Apple built on top of the innovation they bought, but without Xerox there would have been no Mac.

Well then, compaq is another great example. Quickest company to a billion in sales at the time. Built an IBM clone on venture capital and IBM ignored them until they were first to market with a 386, managed to kill the PS/2 architecture and became.the industry trend setter in desktops for a decade.

Every american household had an RCA product at one time, dominant electronic manufacturer torn to shreds by upstart Japanese minnows who became giants (Sony, Pioneer).

Tandy, once a minnow, then an innovative giant in PCs killed dead by Dell and other startup clone makers.

Yahoo and AOL murdered by a tiny startup called Google.

Digital Equipment Corporation, once giant killers themselves in minicomputers, a segment they defined with the pdp and vax machines, slaughtered by upstart Sun Microsystems.

The examples are literally endless.

These aren’t examples of ‘innovation’ coming from small startups at all. All you’ve really shown is that startups can be successful sometimes, and simply ignored the fact that large companies keep going and in fact do keep innovating.

Take Google for example. AOL wasn’t murdered by Google at all. It was murdered by the internet. Yahoo, wasn’t murdered by Google either. It simply made bad investments.

Google on the other hand, came up with one excellent innovation as a startup. But everything else they have done, they did as a giant company.

Google proves that almost all innovation comes from large companies.

Maybe pick up a book now and again.

Google did stop innovating, all the subsequent progress they made aside from gmail was acquisition of startups. Android being the most obvious one.

Yahoo and AOL were killed by google, i am old enough to have seen that play out live.

> Maybe pick up a book now and again.

Maybe try reading the HN guidelines.

> Google did stop innovating, all the subsequent progress they made aside from gmail was acquisition of startups.

Obviously false. They bought technologies from startups, but those products didn’t stand on their own. Maps is the obvious example.

> Android being the most obvious one.

If you had any idea what Android was before Google bought it you wouldn’t say this. I do. I saw it.

> Yahoo and AOL were killed by google, i am old enough to have seen that play out live.

Do you even know what Yahoo and AOL were?

Yahoo was a web directory, and later a portal. That wasn’t killed by Google. Indeed Google was offered for sale to Yahoo for $1M. What killed Yahoo was just not being good at business.

AOL was a dial up information service that pre-dated the consumer internet. It had groups and communication services and in fact everything it needed to be Facebook.

Failure to adapt to the internet killed AOL. Not Google.

I see a lot of similar themes across Reddit, LinkedIn, and I assume other social media (I don't use those though). I think society is in existential crisis more than HN is in existential crisis. People are re-examining their relationship to work, capital, and community in the face of everything going on in the world.

I made this comment recently. Common complsints/existential concerns/societal level criticisms are showing up in forums all over the internet. It’s definitely not just HN

Pay attention to your emotions when reading HN (or any social media app for that matter). If things you see regularly ignite a bad feeling or adverse reaction in you instead of interest or joy it is probably wise to lay off it for a while.

Or at least seek out different perspectives. HN is very rationalist/materialistic, and it won’t have the most useful wisdom for everything under the sun.

> HN is very rationalist/materialistic

I find the opposite to be true when it comes to any real existential threats. HN simply cannot stomach the possibility that the future might not be so bright after all and will generally go through amazing contortions to avoid seeing what's happening in front of their eyes.

Stating the climate change is happening, and will create unprecedented catastrophe in our life times will win you immediate down votes and flagging.

What's hilarious to me is a few years ago, when things looked fine to anyone that wasn't paying attention, HNer generally enjoyed ranting about their love of stoicism. Stoicism doesn't really get put to the test when things go well. As soon as the fact that our world is increasingly entering a state of collapse started to become more widely apparent, that stoicism went right out the window and was replaced with panicked, borderline insane denialism of all sorts.

The only statements about the world that are allowed here now are some variant of "this is fine".

In my experience it was the real rationalists and materialists that started looking at the big picture years ago and saying "hmmm... this doesn't look quite right"

I'm an environmental studies major. My father fought in the front lines of two wars (edit: including WW2) and was twice decorated.

I'm one of the annoyingly upbeat people saying things like "We don't actually know that. We don't actually have as much hard data on historical climate as we pretend we do. If you think we know what's going on here, you have much more faith in human mental models than I have."

Actual temperature recordings by humans go back to about 1850 and we were delayed in discovering the hole in the ozone because our computers were told to disregard "zero" as an error in the data.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record

We have mental models for the climate based on things like ice cores and inference but, no, we don't actually know and Jurassic Park is silly not because of the genetics but because the atmosphere was thicker back then. We know that because dragonflies and the like were huge, with two foot wingspans and our current atmosphere would not support them in terms of respiration and probably not let them fly, as a guess.

The respiratory system of dinosaurs likely would be insufficient to support them in this day and age because the atmosphere is too thin. They would gasp for air like a fish out of water.

This detail is generally overlooked and typically mocked and dismissed if you bring it up.

General understanding of past climate on earth is not as sure fire "We know this for a fact" as humans like to imagine. There is a lot we don't know and one of the truisms about actual science is that real science is open to learning "We were wrong. It doesn't actually work that way."

Science is our current best understanding of reality and it is full of incomplete info, erroneous ideas, etc and anyone who is actually rational actually knows that.

And anyone who actually knows anything about people and getting things done in this world -- like businessmen -- knows that if you don't bother to try to fix it, it doesn't get fixed. If you run around screaming "The sky is falling!" and trying to prove that and convince everyone you are right, that tends to be self fulfilling prophecy.

So if one is actually concerned about the future, one focuses on solutions, not on hand wringing.

The world has been on the brink before and survived it. What humans broke they can sometimes unbreak. But that doesn't happen if your only goal is to convince everyone "We broke it and it can't be fixed."

> "We don't actually know that."

Arguably one of my main areas of personal study is the limited ability of science to under stand the world, so I'm not one of the "the science is decided!" people.

There's a bizarrely implied bias here in your statement that I've pointed out in past which is "we don't know so things are probably fine". I've been surprisingly close with a famous climate scientist who also holds this controversial opinion. I'm not convinced. The data I've seen right now is that our climate is breaking down quickly, in ways we have not expected, and we tend to underestimate the negative impacts of what we don't know on the future of our species.

> "So if one is actually concerned about the future, one focuses on solutions, not on hand wringing."

Only the naive optimist paints the pessimist as one who is obsessed with "hand wringing". I'm not remotely interested in panicking, or despair, but rather learning to find methods of survival in a quickly collapsing society. It's visibly happening this moment and in more ways than just climate, you don't need models to or predictions to realize what's going on. Which brings me to an even more important point:

> I'm one of the annoyingly upbeat people

I don't think you're the people I'm talking about. Politely disagreeing with my view is not the problem. The issue is with a huge subset of this community that will down vote and even flag content that scares them.

My concern is that people in denial lead to strange behaviors and become increasingly dangerous as they need to become more aggressive in their denial to maintain mental health. The mental health of people unable to accept our current situations is degrading terrifyingly fast. Myself and all of the other people I know who saw all of this long before the pandemic are dealing with things reasonably well, after all we knew all of this was coming decades ago.

There's a bizarrely implied bias here in your statement that I've pointed out in past which is "we don't know so things are probably fine".

You are reading in a bias I don't have.

My position is closer to that Men in Black line about "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Korilian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable planet." Though I don't agree with the rest of it that "The only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they do not know about it!"

The society that is collapsing is a society with a long track record of oppressing various groups, including women. I happen to have been born with girl bits so I view that as not entirely a bad thing and, in fact, a potential opportunity for my life to maybe suck less in the future than it has for the past 56 years.

Edit: and have an upvote. I'm always happy to engage in good discussion.

I don't disagree, but when was the last time you saw a BMW ad at the top of HN.

Ads? I think materialistic in this context values preparation (takes $) over hope that public policy becomes less profit driven (takes activism over generations).

We like stuff but nerds may know better than anybody that it doesn’t make you happy.

I think they're referring to materialism, the philosophy that the only thing that exists is matter and it's movements/changes. In other words, it's the belief that there is no soul or supernatural entities.

Some people spend more time researching javascript frameworks than the meaning of life.

A lot of HN posts seem to be people expressing anxiety about becoming successful or being disillusioned about being successful. I have thought a great deal on the topic of success. If your atheism or nihilism doesn't give you the answers that you need then I would consider looking elsewhere.

If you mean “existential” as in existentialism, then no. I don’t see many quotes from Dostoevsky, Sartre and the like, not even Herzog. This is marigolds and sunshine compared to the 1950s, when it was a fashion statement to be morose and despairing until it was globally discovered that angst was unsexy and boring.

If you mean midlife crisis sorts of things, then part of it is probably you and part age demographics, in that it is something that folks in their mid thirties tend to slide down into for a time. HN may be underrepresented in the enthusiastic youth and mellowed oldster demographics that provide more of a balanced perspective. There is certainly enough wisdom literature to read for the mellow perspective. Babysitting kids can cover the youth end.

The Whole Earth platform The WELL was (is?) pretty good at that better balance in days past.

Tech forums like HN tend to be more resonant cavity or optical resonator than echo chamber, and that is one of their unique value-adds…it can be sparkly in certain good ways. Tech forums aren’t really designed for echo chamber stuff, which makes the occasional attempts at astroturfing, influencing and the like that occasionally slip through the cracks risible and ineffective…another value-add.

Or maybe you just need more fiber in more diet.

Wait, you guys are getting too much money?

Me used to have too much money when single. Now there's a wife and three kids to feed and educate, and a mortgage to pay, so that things have changed, slightly... (still a family really does help with existential questions, if you ask me; Nowadays I don't bother very much about existential crap)

I feel like my next step is definitely having kids with my loved one but I'm afraid to make that step while having unresolved existential questions. Don'r want to have kids to "fix" myself but I do feel like my body is yearning for that next biological step

It seems like you are looking at your thoughts as a part of yourself. They might just be a phenomena triggered by your current circumstances in the same way a sneeze can be triggered by dust.

Not sure that things are that deterministic.

If you're around SF then very probably yes. Outside of the US very probably no.

Do you mean very recently? Because the change of tone is normal around the holidays; it will go away.

Yeah, haven't noticed before this whole holiday depression trend

I can also confirm that in the past I noticed during not so busy times more of such posts. At the same time I was also wondering about all the posts in the recent days. But really, this isn't a normal year. Usually I would hardly be on HN during this time, probably it's for others the same.

I relish HN for its sanity and focus. Emotions and politics will inevitably creep in everywhere as we are human. (well, sometimes I'm accused of being a robot, but I promise my Vital Fluids are H20/carbon/iron based rather than Vulcanic or positronic...)

There is another site, that, um, starts with an A and rhymes with technica, that has gone completely the other way and used to be awesome and now is more politics than facts.

Very happy to start my day here.

The pandemic has changed a lot about life, doors that were previously shut are now open. People's previous lifestyles have gone away and in some cases are not coming back. Many doors have been opened through remote work that were previously closed. For both good and bad, social pressure has been removed for most activities as both a motivator and a detterent.

This leaves many open questions around what one is intrinsicly motivated to do.

It's been that way for a few years, in my opinion. HN was the only social network I would somewhat participate in, but I realized it's more the same. I just think it's more intellectualized, thus slower on the uptake that the canary died since we're all engrossed by the smell of our own farts.

Anxiety and existential issues really plague tech in general. Pretty sure most of us grew up on the propaganda, "technology will save the world". While it's true like 30% of the time, the other 70% is a dumpster fire with ticket sales and someone trying to make NFT sales from the tickets as well.

My biggest internal screaming moment came when a year or two ago someone showed an API to save trees. The HN community was oddly positive about it. So stupid me asked some questions.

"How?"

"Because it would."

"But how???"

"Youre just a bigoted boomer that would never understand."

I hate this planet.

Someone else explained how it was better than someone else's idea about creating a resource for people to learn about local trees, identify at risk tree species and how to grow their own/take care of them. My screaming continued.

And you get this with a lot of specialized fields like civil engineering and agriculture. Know python? You're an expert in all things apparently. Someone with 20+ years experience in a practical field is an idiot to someone with 2 years of python dev work and a year of failed Apple app store projects. Sadly, I'm not even exaggerating. My mild dyslexia makes python impossible for me, so I guess I'll never learn life's secrets. Maybe I am the idiot afterall. All I know now at 34, Henry David Thoreau was right. I just wont focus on beans as much. I think I'm going to make my own line of sheep cheese instead and give it out to friends. Then try doing weekend gatherings to drink, eat and be merry with them. Farmers, even though broke and exhausted, tend to be far happier with life in general.

HN is definitely not an echo chamber; we see here quite a variety of positions on many controversial issues, and the great thing about HN is that we often see really good and well supported arguments on multiple sides of an issue, because if you can't support your argument with some verifiable evidence, you'll get downvoted very fast.

HN does, however, have its own version of the Overton Window[0], meaning that some positions are outside of what is acceptable to argue and those get shut down fast as well. This is the case both on technical issues where it is probably driven by the range of acceptable opinions among the Silicon Valley elites, and on social issues where it overlaps quite a bit with the mainstream media's Overton window, but maybe has a somewhat more libertarian spin (again, because that's common among the Silicon Valley elites).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

I wonder about the churn in the user community. If the community doesn't regularly refresh by attrition and new-joiners, then it must be aging. If that were the case, you'd expect to see quarter-life crises, mid-life crises, etc., reflected in the posts at predictable points. The pace is accelerated, of course, because we're on internet time.

Has anyone else reached a point where online tracking (aka surveillance economy) has become debilitating, online, outside a forum such as HN?

Interacting online, searching, just clicking a link, has become....exhausting actually, because of the sense of being tracked. For an ad.

It is dehumanizing.

The internet has become like Cheers: A place where everybody[1] knows your name[2].

-----

[1] Or at least everybody big - all the FAANGs.

[2] And your occupation, and your shopping habits, and your family, and your car, and your address, and your hobbies, and...

Honestly lobste.rs[0] is better now, for tech related posts.

However i appreciate HN a lot more for having a non restricted account creation method, whereas lobsters has a cult like method of adding members :(

These days I use HN more from its newsletters then its feed to filter out the non tech content.

I usually try to ignore the social/non-technical related posts as much as possible, but i guess a forum is only as good as what people want from it, and it seems people here want those things more these days ? Eitherway im good, I just explore more sites where I can get great content.

Also happy new year everyone !

[0](https://lobste.rs)

Look into the social science of marriage, parenting and middle management. It was bleak before the pandemic and odds are it's become worse.

Care to elaborate or post some references? I’m curious to know what the relationship between middle management and marriage is.

No relationship implied. Here is a link concerning middle management: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-re...

As for the social science of marriage, I don't have a link but recently read in a textbook how marriage satisfaction consistently declines year after year for both partners. With men's satisfaction dropping faster in the first few years with women's overtaking them by year 7 or so.

Here is a chart that is similar to what I am referring to: https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology2ndedition/wp-c...

2021 will have been the first full year many did WFH. As much as some like to praise it here it's bound to be taking a toll on others.

Many people are down in the dumps around the holidays and that's without the added stress of a pandemic.

I think it’s a general ennui in society for our privileged white collar engineer class.

Tech has reached that awesome level. You can afford most material enjoyments in life that are good bang for buck. Etc. There’s nothing left to do.

In a yes or no title the answer is always no

HN is a complete echo chamber that quickly bans viewpoints opposing the dominant techbro ideology which is hollow and induces existential crises upon the briefest reflection.

There is definitely a bunch of sophomoric green spam on here. For example: The sky is falling. Ice is melting therefore people will not have enough to drink. Nevermind that water vapor and percipitation increases with temperature. There is plastic in the ocean. Nevermind that it is mostly inert like sand. Etc.

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