I love you, HN, but you're toxic (2022)
kg.dev
kg.dev
A lot of people think they are offering "free information" on the internet, but what they are really doing is offering a transaction: "I'll tell you what I think but in a manner where I present myself as higher status than you." [There are the exceptions, particularly here on HN, where somebody is infinitely humble and patient of course, especially on certain topics]
You'll meet a lot of people outside the internet who are interested in doing this too "Let me overexplain X to you" (e.g. Mansplaining). Which conveys again two things -- "free" information, but actually on the condition of presenting oneself as "the teacher."
I think on the internet, where there are 0 barriers to entry, ANYBODY can post an offer, no matter who bad it is (let me peddle a stereotype as brilliance and see who bites).
Someday soon, if we want, we can have a version of HN where every single comment is rewritten by GPT4 to be friendly/positive/deferential but equally informative.
I like to call those color arguments because it’s no different than arguing over which color is best.
EDIT: I agree with your overall post, though.
> Even many replies I'd pegged as obvious, blatant misogyny turned out to have been people eagerly offering me gifts of information bewildered that I rudely rejected them.
(It's interesting to consider the other way too.)
i find that this is the value of being here, not being right, wrong, but hearing another view. when it's civil, it's great. when there are dumb questions, we all learn something.
i was feeling bad the other day because someone i met said it was weirdly direct of me to compliment his sense of humour, i guess in this context it's better than being direct about someone's flaws.
I've tried to steer people more towards the fact that we can and do disagree on subjective terms. Sometimes it doesn't always work though and those people are simply not open to the idea of a different perspective.
I have had to leave way more of those conversations than I ever had success with trying to explain this.
Reading the comments increases the noise but also allows for a broader set of perspectives.
I was diagnosed very later in life as both adhd and autistic. When investigating what these things are I realised that the impulse control impact and attention to detail have lead to that behaviour earlier in life and likely affects a lot of people here. I try to temper that these days or at least to think about it more. Although, my reaction and patience to the horrors that politicians put us through are less tempered :-)
Understanding it can make it less be seen as toxicity but to understand where it comes from and take the good bits away.
The article seems to imply that kindness/correctness are somehow mutually exclusive. Even if that wasn't the author's intent or belief, it certainly seems to be the way some commenters conduct themselves.
Not mutually exclusive, but orthogonal.
The post and comments herein talk about being correct but at the same time being unkind. By this point in my career, I can still appreciate unkind comments that are still correct on technical grounds -- at least I learn something if I set aside my ego and be patient with the other party. However, the big problem I observe is that many comments are unkind and untruthful/incorrect. These comments have no positive value to the community.
I spent some time thinking why these comments exist. I agree with other comments herein that there is a sense of superiority coming from the commenters explaining their purportedly superior view. Unfortunately, this sense of superiority spills over to other fields that the commenters are not experts in; their wrong comments would still be unkind.
The tech bull market since the 90s created an entire generation (or two) of programmers making 6 or 7 figures with brand names who feel superior across other domains ("everything is software", "physicists are idiots to be replaced by ML") Nerds revenge came true, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, the software engineering has been highly influential in our world and so are the engineers therein. But life is more than software, and other people, including experts, exist, too. And it is this hubris that makes HN less wonderful than it can be.
apropos: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1831:_Here_to_Hel...
I suspect you're right and it boils down to the fact that a lot of us tech types have substantial pride. Worse, we support a substantial amount of our self-worth from being knowledgeable and correct, and so of course we have to both demonstrate and defend it. I recognize that truth in most of my real-life nerd friends as well as myself even as I try to temper it.
I don't know what the solution is for a community like this that will always be filled with people of so many unique stripes and neurotypes. Other than striving to argue our disagreements from curiosity instead of superiority.
It seems, to me anyway, that we have the whole gamut of humanity here.
Im pretty much non-judgemetal when it comes to people and the negativity does not offend or impact upon my self esteem.
There are of course a lot of banal meaningless posts, which I persoanlly like, because I can apply some off hat humour and reply accordingly.
Like life, some things interest me some things do not.
I embrace difference.
Toxic? not at all.