Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place.

At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.

View on HN

Your point is that the hacker ethos involved ... Fewer people being excited about programming? I don't think we experienced this on the same planet.

Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI. The wrong turn we took was letting business overtake joy. That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.

> That's a decision we can undo today by opting out of that whole ecosystem.

Ah yes, we'll also skip out on eating too.

There's a mountain of software work you can do that doesn't involve participating in this rat race. There's nothing that says you need to make 500k and live in silicon valley. It's possible to be perfectly happy working integrating industrial control systems in a sleepy mountain town where cost of living is practically nothing. I am well qualified to make that statement.

I think that the ratio of weirdos doing stuff remained constant through the population, it's just that the whole population is now on the web, so they are harder to find.

Not to mention 20 years ago I personally (and probably others my age) had much more time to care about random weird stuff.

So, I am skeptical without some actual analysis or numbers that things really are so bad.

You get a very different crowd if something is a (unprofitable but) fun hobby vs being a well-paying profession.

This is because in Web 1.0 times, only weird hacker types were capable of using the internet effectively. Normies (and weirdos who were weird in ways not related to familiarity with and interest in personal computer technology) were simply not using the internet in earnest, because it wasn't effective for their needs yet. Then people made that happen and now everyone is online, including boring normies with boring interests.

If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.

> If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.

That’s not what was said. What they said is that they wanted more people doing things for the pure joy of discovery, and to make that happen, everyone needs to have more free time and less financial stress or be able to make fun stuff WAY faster, like with LLMs!

> Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI.

True. And to some extent, I've seen more 'useless but fun' projects in the last year because they can be done in an afternoon rather than a week. We need more of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com