Hacker News Reader

Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results.

I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back.

I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.

It's not a disagreement about the goals - it's a disagreement about the focus and the tactics to get the goal we want. I want more than some system that serves a handful of highly technical niche users (arguably poorly) in a mostly centralized fashion. I want a path to actually achieving the goals the cypherpunks of the 90s web originally set out to achieve.

I mean, I'm active on Mastodon this week and I'm boosting it because it's having its moment. But I don't disagree with many of the criticisms of it. But it doesn't really matter, because this is something having a growth moment right now and it's overall a positive thing and it's something that can actually be built on.

Mastodon itself is fairly meh software. ActivityPub itself is reasonable as a potential starting point, though it won't satisfy the purists.

In the meantime, we are potentially seeing the beginning of an exponential growth curve on Mastodon. It could fizzle out. But it's a net positive thing, from the POV of this old wizened/grouchy Internet veteran.

> it's a disagreement about the focus

So what would you like to focus on instead?

Something like Urbit - actual decentralized computing where users really own their stuff.

> I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.

Email seems pretty successful by any measure…

All this really needs is an overlay (app or something) so people don’t have to care about the underlying technology. With all the newfound interest there’s probably someone working on such a thing and other people looking for somewhere to throw a bunch of money to cash in on the new trend.

Just look a the pandemic and WFH, video conferencing went from some niche thing to something my 70 year old parents were doing on a regular basis to keep in touch with the family. The first month or so it was a bigger mess than the current twitter exodus and an almost direct comparison.

IDK, having the beeb give a pretty balanced overview doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Unfortunately nobody cares about that and just want to go on about how Elon is the worst human ever.

People have been bringing email up a lot, but it’s really a good example of why federated systems end up centralizing and fail to accomplish their goals.

Almost nobody runs their own email server, the few that do struggle with not getting blacklisted by Google and the tiny number of other companies everyone else uses.

Even the tiny number of highly technical users that persist despite that are communicating almost entirely with people on gmail anyway. This is a failure.

It’s a failure for the same reasons mastodon will fail: spam is a hard problem, servers are too hard to run, centralization has UX advantages that can’t be overcome without changing underlying problems with the software stack (dependencies, general complexity, how updates are deployed across a federated network).

Urbit is trying to do this, as far as I can tell nobody else is taking it seriously.

HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all.

Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be stress tested.

Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?

In my view, its basic idea is wrong. Mastodon reduces the connection between communities and will have worse "free speech" problems when it reaches the twitter scale. If money could solve everything, google+ would still be a thing today.

You make it sound like a company running a large Mastodon instance scaled across hundreds of thousands of nodes couldn't make changes to solve whatever "free speech" problems. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that they couldn't make changes and contribute to the code upstream to solve many of these issues.

I think you've got it a little backwards there.

Smaller communities are easier to moderate. Reduced interaction with other communities means that any one person can only have a limited effect before a remote moderator intervenes.

What happens when a toxic community starts causing problems in the wider network? Quite simply, they get cut off from the network. Every individual user can block an entire instance. Each server can also block another instance. There is also precedent for ALL servers to block one particularly bad instance.

You probably can't prevent toxic communities from forming. Since it's an open protocol, you also can't prevent certain political parties from setting up their "free speech" instance and doing what they do. But you can cut them off from everyone else just trying to have a good time.

The community structure should tend to gather like-minded people together. That would mean some instances becoming intensely toxic. Which is what we have seen happen. On the other hand the isolated structure makes it easy to just ban that entire community with one button.

Mastodon has some structural problems, and instances do not scale well. Mastodon.social is run by Eugen (who created mastodon), and he's had to disable core features of the service (local and federated timelines) just to cope with the sheer number of users.

AFAIK, it would take significant work to rewrite the software such that it scales the way Twitter does.

Is there a historical precedent for this? An distributed version of a centralized system winning? My only example is email and it's horrible.

Hackernews isn't for hackers.

If anything, it's geared towards software engineers, most of which aren't anything like "hackers" and can swing fairly convervative on many topics.

This place isn't old school slashdot. If anything it's more for people that just want to get rich in tech at all costs.

I'm not new here, and.. well ... It's always been a mix of both, but that mix seems to have shifted in % and tone in the last couple years especially. Maybe reflecting broader culture wars issues.

But there used to be a much broader consensus in the industry among nerds about responses to this kind of thing.

Empathy to fellow software engineers in our tech industry is one thing I would expect re: the twitter layoffs. I worry about apathy about license violations for the license that literally made Linux (and therefore huge swathes of the modern tech infrastructure) possible. Again, not recognizable to me is the dismissive sneer about new possibilities in social networks and tech.

And yeah, perhaps Mastodon is annoying/frustrating to these people precisely because it isn't a monetized money making scheme.

FWIW I am one of those "software engineers" you mention and did my decade in a FAANG. But I only got that title because of the time I spent as a hacker-nerd in my teens.

I'm trying not to paint too much of a straw-man here, but it feels like a trend to me, a worrisome one.

You and I must be reading different HN's, because I see an awful lot of people anti-layoffs, anti-Copilot, and pro-Mastodon.

So I wonder if you're actually complaining about diversity of thought? Because HN isn't the "hacker culture" you're talking about from the late 80s and 90's. It's got a whole bunch of those people, but also a whole bunch of everything else.

When people comment, why should they be trying to contribute to "hacker culture" at all? Why shouldn't they simply be offering their diverse perspectives?

And criticizing Mastodon is a valid perspective to have. If people are looking to jump ship from Twitter now, it's important to be realistic about whether Mastodon is or isn't "ready for business" both from technical and consumer perspectives. It's counterproductive to only hype up projects and never criticize them.

> what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?

This is a board run by an incubator investment firm, so I don't really view it as an outpost of hacker culture.

I have been reading here over the past week here about private Amway rail cars, underperforming CEOs being replaced, notes about Stripe/Twitter layoffs. Most of this is peripheral, or even unrelated, to hacker culture, but I don't really read here for Hacker culture.

I've seen a lot of hacker culture in the past few months, and a lot of innovation, not necessarily here, although there's been references to it here. For what I'm interested in a lot of it has been based around Github recently, but it varies over time.

I don't see the angels, incubators, VCs, startup founders, FAANG business development and product managers, and occassional programmers talking here to have much influence on hacker culture one way or the other. I'm sure a lot of people hacking on stuff have read this board, or even commented. Not all - I know a lot of very good programmers who never even heard of this board.

A lot of people on Hacker News are unfortunately very focused on money so they don't see the value of things that aren't.

You have to understand a lot of people own Tesla's and Tesla stock and they feel attacked personally seeing anything succeed that might affect their stock or opinions of Musk. By seeing other people be successful that might take away from Musk's success, they feel like it will affect their potential to get richer.

> Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s?

The revolution eats its own children. The games industry used to be the target of hacker attacks, and cracking games, pirating them, was more fun than doing damage, according to the self-image of the 80th, 90th, 00th. Who would have guessed that such a spirit could also turn against its own community, in a community where manipulation and deception took place even in the past, as long as it served one's own goals? There has never been good and evil. Only feasible and delightful. I regret it, however there is only so much we can do.

fwiw when I say "hacker" I mean the other sense of the term. Not cracker/phreak.

But someone who 'hacks' on software. Unix hacker is an old but long lasting stereotype.

> A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work

Thankfully you're here to dramatically increase the quality of commentary.

I do have a pet theory that between GPT-3, various parsers, bots, 4chan influx we saw tendencies that eventually took slashdot and other forums down. I personally try to keep HN spirit alive, but I will admit it has gotten harder lately.

It would be sad news for me, because I see HN as last bastion of real conversation online.

> based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote

You complain about comment quality and then fall for that level of fake news? Congratulations, you found the problem.

> Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much?

Demographic shift which did affect the hacker culture. It's not that hard to spot the image of an average hacker of today. But I'm not gonna go into details - it would be like setting fire to a dumpster.

classic "they disagree with me so the commentary is biased" take