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Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

Wow, people used to nearly worship Seth Godin, it's pretty refreshing to see a whole lot of disdain for this article here :-)

I think there's something to his point about marketing. There probably is a way for companies to pay a little less but still attract the top talent by selling the job better. But then, why hasn't anyone figured this out and started doing it? Maybe financial workers, CEO's, laywers, and engineers see through it?

This part is just hilarious, "an industry-wide tax and trade salary cap will actually help these organizations." I mean, I guess maybe he really is feeling like this sort of regulation would be a charitable thing to do? It's actually a terrible idea though.

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> it's pretty refreshing to see a whole lot of disdain for this article here :-)

This is Hacker News. World peace and Star Trek-style wealth and post-scarcity could be achieved and we'd still have an overwhelmingly negative Hacker News comment section nitpicking the way peace was achieved, or lamenting that life was better with poverty and the threat of war.

I'm pretty sure it was hacker news roughly 15 years ago that introduced me to Seth Godin. Or maybe it was Slashdot. Either way, there was a time when engineers were excited about starting businesses and were drinking up everything they could about marketing because we knew we sucked at it (and probably because PG told us to).

That time is not now. Now HN is half corporate boot lickers defending the status quo, like the temporarily embarrassed billionaires they are, while the other half are using HN as a political soap box to rail against San Francisco or the current federal administration or last year's HN icons who have since fallen off of the pedestals HN put them on.

It's become mostly a joke where perhaps 1 of 10 comments are insightful and hacker-y, the inverse of what it was 15 years ago when intellectual curiosity and, you know, hacking, were seen as more important than preening and demonstrations of social status.

HN is becoming Instagram or Twitter. It's nearly fully degraded to NextDoor levels of discussion.

So what is the next HN?

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