This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
It's also important to remember that (rightly or wrongly) a lot of these culture war issues are really touching a tribalism nerve rather than really touching on the issues themselves. To a lot of people, the EV debate amounts to "those _other_ people trying to force a change on _me_." Mind you, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to look at these sorts issues, but I think that's how it plays out for a lot of people. I had a real-life friend who was very anti-environmentalist, and his view was effectively that it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people.
We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.
That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!
HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.
Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.
HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.
[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
But your comparison to HN radicalism to equating tech billionaires as HN users themselves flips my whole comment upside down.
I don't know much about the political biases here but I like to think that most people are pro open source and that they dislike the manipulative characteristics deployed by some infamous tech billionaires or those companies. Usually I think that's the case unless of course someone might have a bias themselves I suppose.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
They are also very sneaky in their predatory nature at times so the average person either doesn't know the extent or doesn't look out for alternatives (Open Source) and other issues
Most people on Hackernews are able to realize predatory nature of Big tech (I think) and are usually very supportive of Open source.
Personally I may be wrong but one of the most common things we can discuss in Hackernews is the extent that big tech or such aspects genuinely harm the average person.
If we try to talk about this nuance or other related topics with friends and family, they suffer from the same issue and as such Hackernews becomes a place where people discuss this more frequently
I don't know if this counts as radicalism but a lot of my political viewpoints stand from that one of the easiest ways to bring as such good points is when country can support Open source and can fight against unethical practices in a fair and square way in general.
> [1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose. I feel like hackernews is much more on the knowledge side of things so much so that I feel more confident about knowing certain projects or gluing things together and just this make shift attitude of make things work and curiosity with great influence to Hackernews and I cannot be thankful of it enough
Perhaps I try to be more agreeable though and see other person's perspective because I may be wrong I usually am and I think I just get this kick in having an agreeable conversation in the end. I think I can treat hackernews as a book for open source projects which are cool and interesting tidbits. I have found some really really great software which I must not have found if it were not for Hackernews and I am grateful for it
Ooh I got a question
Let's rephrase it this way, What would you prefer more, if your child used HackerNews or used tiktok?
The reality of the situation is that in many places like Reddit or even twitter which are radicalized, firstly they become echo chambers and secondly, instead of being radical for bringing change for all people (Think focus on open source but I think its not a radical idea but still) but what ends up happening in those places is that they literally treat each other as another species and the rift grows even further and secondly that they also mostly don't have ideas but rather ideologies to implement.
In this sense, Hackernews is far more effectively radical atleast in my opinion. I must admit that I am a little surprised about the comment of HN being radical because usually, its mostly knowledge based and sure there are some political comments but nobody's forcing somebody to acknowledge those
So in essense, a lot of people are being radicalized, either some just dont know how to approach things or they try to focus absolutely on the us vs them dynamic where the major systemic issues are just not focused on (inequality,poverty etc.)
The world is radicalizing also because its leaders are usually radicalizing it too.
I must admit that the world feels like on the brink of war and no this time its not hyperbole. There are systemic issues in world and instead of addressing them, we are trying to force the focus outside these by all the recent political issues happening and I am not even sure if somethings can be done or the domino has fallen already and I am sure I must not be alone in this when we see massive wars erupt all around the world.
To be deliberately flippant but making a much more serious point than it should be: migrant laborers in the USA.
For the most part they're just honest folk trying to make a buck while a bunch of cosplaying superheroes wander the streets trying to hunt them down.
Middle aged curmudgeon here. And the older I get the more I realize that the hyperliterate technomagical credential flinging you see in the comments here is... basically just trolling. We do it to make ourselves feel smart.
Sure sure, we all want to imagine ourselves geniuses changing the world with the power of our intellect. But that's hard, and most of us settle for getting in a good barb or three in the comments.
I think I can agree with you that perhaps sometimes comments might be getting barbs (first time I heard this phrase, I guess a still lot to learn xD) but also that this behaviour isn't rewarded in the context of an article or anything usually.
Most articles are about coding related software and the pretext around it thus makes comments mostly helpful, or atleast have genuine reasons that one can weigh against
And that behaviour is what's rewarded even in somewhat political posts on HN as compared to something like reddit which might not be helpful in a general stance and especially so in its political posts (or anything related to it)
The tragedy of it all is that it completely misses the point. Politics is in service of the common good of the polity. True loyalty is to that common good as an objective good. Loyalty to a party is a false loyalty, as parties are not proper objects of loyalty. They are merely convenient political instruments, not the objects of the good pursued. Things become doubly absurd when this party loyalty remains intact despite a party’s errors.
> it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
The fact is that environmental issues - like almost any political issue - can be used by any party to push an agenda in parallel to the actual issue. So, here, environmental concerns can be used by any party as a cudgel and an instrument, whether negatively (e.g., painting all environmental concern as subterfuge in order to push through policies aimed at private profit at the expense of quality of life) or positively (e.g., stopping critical projects proposed by a political opponent by commissioning bogus ecological studies to create impediments).
Of course, that’s different than the extreme position that all environmental concern is part of some conspiracy (the Left has its own share of analogous conspiratorial crackpottery).
This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
I see a lot of people who conflate "my opinion, which is the correct opinion just won't fly here, so how can you say the community does a good job of self-policing?" I really don't agree with this. Any community is going to hold some opinions you disagree with, and will hold some bad or even wrong opinions. What I generally (but not always) see is HN upvoting comments that are thoughtful and intelligent, not necessarily ones that I think might be correct.
Whenever I see one of those I like to post Yong-heum Lee, who really did 500 miles a day in an Ioniq 5: https://www.hyundaimotorgroup.com/en/story/CONT0000000000176...
But as you say, facts are of limited use in debates any more.
To be clear, that's an average of about 500 miles a day, for almost 3 years.
Can you share more? I read his book years ago, but haven't heard/read anything since.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Political_view...
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010 (I would say my views have not changed much, but the party's priorities at the state and local level have).
Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership, they would cozy up to someone who they think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
> the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism
You can say Mamdani is a socialist. You can say the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism. But you can't say both. If Mamdani is a socialist, then replacing capitalism is not the core tenet of socialism. If the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism, then Mamdani is not a socialist. Those two things do not go together.
People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.
A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.
You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.
And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
The main argument was that democrats policies were detrimental to their business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&t=11s
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
My account isn't that much old but I was lurking around for years and I can say that quality of content and comments has significantly dropped in last 5 years. I'd guess it's because people running away from reddit settled here, because HN serves more generic stuff - with help of notorious spammers who surely get paid for uploading content from big media outlets every few hours.
> The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
He's a billionaire. They come pre-radicalised and detached from reality by default. A body don't get to be a billionaire by just going with the flow and not having any particular interest in influencing the world around them.
For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think". For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.
So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
Edit: At this time this is my most heavily downvoted post. I'll leave it up because I think that itself is interesting.
Do I agree with your post? No, I think >50% is too high. Do I think you should be downvoted? No, I don't think your comment is in bad faith or inflammatory.