Ask HN: HN comments changed from majority libertarian to majority socialist? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: HN comments changed from majority libertarian to majority socialist?

9 pointssilexia21 comments

I remember when most of the comments on articles generally took a libertarian point of view on tech issues. This made sense as founders and developers are entrepreneurs that wantedto bring new competition and build new businesses.

Now most articles I see have wall to wall pro socialist and pro regulation comments. What happened? Was there a real change of heart by Hacker News commenters or is this AI generated commentary or something else?

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> What happened?

I used to work at a company that payed for Datadog. They seemed like a great business; they gave you an observability layer in exchange for a monthly fee. Great for a growing business, up until they started raising the prices and harassing our people with their sales team desperately begging for us to expand our package. I kid you not, after a few years of this the startup I worked for was paying Datadog more money per-month than the highest-paid salaries on the team. For graphs, we could show to executives. Later we switched to Promethius/Grafana and got the same functionality for pennies on the dollar.

My guess is that HN got their just-deserts; we spent the past 10-odd years enjoying a "disruptive" market that mostly created more problems for us. Now, everyone is realizing it's a raw deal. Startups and big businesses don't want to buy Software-as-a-Service if they're only going to extort their B2B patronage. Users don't want any more subscriptions and loathe the fact that modern technology resembles cable TV packages so closely. Developers are either ideologically committed to fixing a problem or ideologically committed to being paid; the overlap between these two attitudes has been grossly over-marketed.

When the dust settles, the brilliant expectation of competition in an unregulated market has not been realized in America. The most important and innovative flagship businesses are entirely stagnant, or even artificially walled-off from competition.

I've been a cloud skeptic for over a decade and I've essentially been wondering the whole time if the Emperor is wearing any clothes. There are niches where cloud is pretty cool, but the push to move all infrastructure to the cloud seems like a mix of good marketing on the part of providers and a lot of hype/resume-driven development. But once you've put all your infrastructure and data into someone else's control, you've handed them a powerful lever over you, and to think that they won't use that to extract every dollar they can is rather naive.

I look at it in basically the other direction, though I agree that the outcomes of a cloud-dominated industry are still bad. The Internet favors development velocity over everything else; the faster you get your product out, the faster you succeed. Pretty much any cloud infrastructure could be colocated or hosted on-prem with enough dedicated engineers setting it all up, but the constraint will always be velocity. That's why hyperscalars are popular and refuse to budge even with good self-hosting options like Oxide. People that eschew the flexibility of the cloud end up struggling with far more problems than their effort is worth.

It's still worth being skeptical of it all, but I feel like it's a post-cloud world and we're all just living in it. Online businesses suck now because they have to be more paranoid and insidious than their cloud providers are to them.

A better way of looking at it might be that comments became Reddit.

Sadly I just think this is what happens to anything good the larger the user base gets, but maybe I’m jaded

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That is hilarious and makes my day, thanks! There is something that’s both humbling to know I am so unoriginal that I would think something so common it was included in the rules (which I obviously never read, my bad!) and flattering that I would converge on a thought that must be incredibly common after seeing behavior on here that would make me unprompted remember Reddit. I won’t mention it again and I’ll take the title of noob for having thought it :D have a great day and thanks for sharing!

(I hope this all comes off as sincere because that’s my intention, I appreciate your replies!)

Having guidelines that start with "Please" in itself reeks of Redditism, not to mention random users acting as guideline enforcers.

I agree, you may be jaded (beyond reviewing the HN Guidelines).

If you read reddit, it's far, far more awful. The 'top' comments on nearly any posts are attempts at jokes. The post titles themselves often sound made up or attention seeking. Reposts of posts and comments are common place and bots flourish.

HN is certainly not reddit in terms of user generated content.

I've had a desire to post in the "AITAH" sub something to the effect of "AITAH for thinking your problems posted to AITAH are "no shit?!" or just plain made up?". There are plenty of exceptions if you go into the tightly focused topic subreddits, but as soon as it is a general community, like the above or even /r/seattle, it's difficult to read. On top of everything being black and white; one tiny maleficence (which may not be true, could be a video cut to appear that way, for example) and a thread is full of 'off with his head' posts.

I joined HN around 2010 and thought it was highly libertarian then, I think it gradually became more representative of the general community since then.

There's a case now that monopoly power is what kills competition and prevents people from starting new businesses, see

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

where the author uses a very different language than "socialism" (e.g. state owns and controls the means of production which is distinct from "social democracy" which means you have private property but also food stamps, social security, universal health care, etc.) that emphasizes "liberty" from unfair markets, Stoller works with these guys

https://www.economicliberties.us/#

I don't think the comments have skewed more socialist (in the non-pejorative sense) particularly but there is definitely a lot less fawning optimism which I think is reflected in wider society. A lot of the way tech interfaces with modern life makes people unhappy no matter their political persuasion.

See now I see a lot of libertarian-ish and libertarian-ish-adjacent commentary on here and effectively nothing that could possibly be called socialist by anyone who wasn’t already way right of center, but then I also don’t see merely calling for regulation as being automatically socialist, especially in an environment in which unregulated scams are the norm (see the entire crypto space, for example) or when you’re talking about objectively harmful/predatory industries (petrochemicals, tobacco, patent pharmaceuticals, etc).

Agreed. The government preventing the sale of guns to children is not socialism. Nationalising the railways is.

Honestly nationalising the railways isn’t necessarily socialism either, if and when the for-profit companies abandon even attempting to reliably run the damned infrastructure and move to generations of collusion, monopolies, and rent-seeking instead. There’s a point at which rail lines are no different than highways systems or the sea and are better managed as part of the commons even in a capitalist / libertarian system precisely because there’s no way to distinguish one carrier from another in terms of competition.

Segments of the US are drifting further toward socialism (not calling this good or bad or commenting on the size of those segments), so we can expect that to be reflected on HN.

leopards ate my face

> or is this AI generated commentary

Seriously?

I do not think the commentary is AI. But it's a fine question to have in this climate. I'm all for users questioning the authenticity of sentiment in public forums.

HN has the advantage that submissions and comments are all public, also many people fill out their profile, not to mention there's account creation date so it's straightworward to ascertain if the activity is AI-based or there's a real human behind the keyboard.

> Now most articles I see have wall to wall pro socialist and pro regulation comments. What happened?

Interest rates went >0% and people realized they were being f-ed by the techbros and capitalism in general.

I have noticed this too. I suspect as HN grew, it caught the attention of bad actors that want to drive a particular narrative and they actively run campaigns that utilize both paid shills and bots.

I certainly wish I got paid to be a socialist democrat shill! Where's my hand out from the government?! Simply not fair.

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