Hacker News Reader

Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it might be of relevance to the hacker community in what way social media companies attempt to shape our views and opinions. The mere fact that this may be seen as targeted at one party or another really shouldn't matter (I'm not American and so luckily don't have to choose between Democrats/Republicans, as I find them both pretty dreadful - Republicans more so.)

But the extent to which political parties seem to be connected to social media companies, and are able to get stuff they don't want to be up to be removed seems worrisome in a democracy.

View on HN

The hacker culture of the 90s and 00s is dead.

Many in the community now fully support censorship as long as it's of the opposing team.

This would be unheard of 20 years ago.

It's definitely not dead; there are some amazing projects being hacked on right now.

But I do think it's valid to say that hacker culture is increasingly under-represented on Hacker News, which has, over time, become more and more populated by corporate coders rather than hackers. There's still good hacker content but the hacker ethos of being hostile to the monopolistic power of (big) corporations and fiercely protective of rights such as Free Speech is suppressed (such as by the heavy flagging campaign we have just seen against this particular story).

I don't mean to dump on HN admin with this comment; I think they have fought against this cultural drift but it's always hard to maintain a vibrant, independent-thinking thoughtspace in one place. Inevitably it ossifies and/or moves on to a new space.

(And I'm aware of the "don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit" line in the Guidelines but I don't think that's what I'm doing here.)

I can't speak for everyone who flagged it, but I routinely flag Twitter threads on nontechnical topics because in my experience they're almost always a vector for shoddily sourced news that confirms the readers' biases. Matt Taibbi in particular is someone who I personally find trustworthy enough to tell a story like this. But if I hadn't clicked into this thread already convinced that the broad outline of his story was true, I'd be asking a lot of questions about where Taibbi got his information from and how he knows it wasn't a selective leak to misrepresent the discussions.

Why would you "routinely flag Twitter threads" if they are not obvious spam, dupes, or egregiously off-topic? You are not a guest curator. There is a reason you cannot downvote submissions on HN and the flag button is not a substitute for that.

If you don't like something, ignore it and move on. Someone else may find it interesting. It's not your duty to prevent the rest of the community from reading something you don't like.

It’s not a question of personal dislike. There are plenty of news articles, blog posts, etc. whose positions I think are nonsensical or wrongheaded yet clearly align with HN’s mission of intellectual curiosity. But with Twitter threads on nontechnical topics, in my experience, the intent and effect of posting them is to whip people up into a rage. This not particularly civil comments section is one of the better ones I’ve seen - the top comment as of when im posting this only has two angry exclamation points.

"Corporate coders" is such a perfect, succinct phrase; the antithesis of what I remember from the early days of Linux. It's so well said it requires no further description.

Except so far none of the emails have talked about political allegiance, they’ve all talked about Twitter policies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com