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Comment by hermannj314 | Hacker News Reader

The angry, insecure and unwell are over-represented in technical forums.

I find I am typically only browsing this site when I am not ready to present the best version of myself (tired, bored, demotivated).

I don't know how we end the cycle of cruelty in our industry.

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"The angry, insecure and unwell are over-represented in technical forums." no, they're over-represented on all forums

This could be more agreeably written as “yes, and”. You are not disagreeing with his statement.

Yes, but this is a technical forum ...

"The people worth listening to leave, and the ones who can't leave stay and rot the place."

It's partly just a numbers game, innit? There are about 5.5 billion on the internet. IIRC about 3 billion of them speak English. Even a tiny percentage being profoundly unreasonable means there are millions of them. Sooner or later you will come in contact with some of them.

Or to be more eloquent about it: being instantly connected to everyone on the planet also means you're instantly connected to every fucking asshole on the planet.

> The angry, insecure and unwell are over-represented in technical forums.

* the internet.

The vast majority of the internet is spurred by ragebait/loneliness-bait in some way. It skews heavily to the mentally ill.

They are over-represented everywhere. We live in society where being martyr is highly valued, others are not allowed to ignore it and set their boundaries. If you do, you are an asshole and have no empathy.

> I don't know how we end the cycle of cruelty in our industry.

Actually have consequences for it? When industry leaders like Linus act like assholes constantly but are given cover because they produce something so valuable, will always produce a situation where being empathetic becomes a social proxy for being weak or untalented

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