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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

I can tell the world is getting squeezed. This has been posted to HN several times in the past 20 years, and it usually receives a great reception because of the hacker ethos involved, the love of lan parties, and the success in tech. It's just cool as hell.

This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all. Money isn't the point: some people have it and some people don't, and that can change over time. What's interesting is how you use the money. And in this case, designing a living space around hosting lan parties is a really interesting hack! I like the fold-away keyboard monitor setups especially.

You didn't have to write about any of it, and yet you did, and you keep the post up, and it continues to be something interesting to discuss. So thank you!

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> This is the first time it's been posted where most of the comments appear to be resentment that you could afford to do the project at all.

Despite the negativity, I'm glad that we can at least talk about the topic of wealth and privilege on HN now, rather than comments pointing it out being flag/voted down into oblivion. I don't harbor any resentment about OP's home/project, but I can totally understand the resentment from others, especially in these times, and it at the very least deserves to be mentioned.

By contrast, I think that every post on HN doesn't need a bucket full of crabs complaining that they can't do the same thing. It's not intellectually stimulating.

You don't think questions of how we design our societies, who gets to benefit from it, how power is distributed, of systems design and how we relate to each other socially are intellectually stimulating?

May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?

I don't see any of those discussions. I see people complaining that Kenton is "privileged", that him enjoying himself his somehow harmful, that his house is too big, and implying that all is a problem; with little to no specifics on how or why.

You're completely welcome to make a post that raises those questions, but I think its irrelevant here. I don't think its productive for every fun project posted to have an inquisition in the comments on whether or not the project deserves to exist.

> May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?

It's against the guidelines to make swipes like this.

Fair point on the swipe, apologies there.

I find it frustrating that people cannot have a conversation about what enables a project to exist without people going shhh just look at the shinies.

To me, it is a very surface level uncritical attitude directly counter to the hacker ethos of looking at how systems work.

We tend to examine projects by their inputs and outputs. I don't think it's fair to exempt capital and resources, one of the key inputs, from examination.

That's not to say this isn't a cool house or the person building it did anything bad themselves, they're just an actor in the bigger incentive system.

Hey, at least _this_ post isn't full of comments complaining that it was written with AI.

I feel bad. I posted a negative comment (under a different user name) one of the other times this was posted. I was in a bad spot in my life - still am, but I'm getting better.

Your only human (i think), it happens to all of us at least some of the time. If your willing to acknowledge and admit it then your already doing better than most. In addition to giving yourself a break we should all try to give others a break because you never really know what a stranger could be dealing with.

HN drew me in years ago because it had a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and deeper conversations than you'd find in other places popular with tech nerds. There was an overall culture of technical optimism, which I like to sum up as:

Learn cool technology, build cool things, meet cool people.

Now, HN is one of the more pessimistic communities I frequent. Most posts are berating or belittling the author, the technology, someone's politics, other commenters, capitalism in general, and so on. It's all so tiresome to read and the amount of time and energy wasted doesn't hold a candle to whatever the AI companies are doing. It's gotten to the point that I pretty much never scroll past halfway down the comments page, because that is almost always about where the useless and most whiney comments tend to start. It used to be lower, like 10-20%. It may be creeping up even higher.

I would love to find an online community where the pessimists don't rule the roost. Haven't found it yet, but if anyone wants to drop me a hint, my contact info is in my profile.

> HN drew me in years ago because it had a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and deeper conversations than you'd find in other places popular with tech nerds. There was an overall culture of technical optimism

I feel like people are much more pessimistic towards technology in general, vs. the days you're referring to. Big Tech was still "cool" then, the wealth divide wasn't as big as it is now, social media wasn't (as) toxic, and AI wasn't actively making everything worse.

Nowadays, it's hard to be optimistic for how technology is progressing. People do hack away and share interesting, fun, and (often) useless projects, and those still draw less pessimistic discussion. But these are the exception, among other news of how technology is getting worse, or making things worse.

So I guess my point is, it not so much that HN or the community has gotten worse, but there's just less to be excited about in tech these days.

I think it's less pessimistic and more aware of its limits now and thus not as impressed

When we were all younger it seemed the sky was the limit

But we've gotten wiser and realize the ceiling with tech like iPhones and PS5

Hedonic treadmill just goes in a loop of experience. Consumer tech is just attention seeking codependency on the part of corporate

The real cool stuff going on with tech is in domains like regenerative and longevity medicine; see Michael Levin at Tufts for truly sci fi Wolverine healing type mind blowing ideas

I personally still feel like the sky could be the limit, i have so many insane scifi fantasy type ideas for the future of tech but honestly i dont really want to see any of them become a reality because i know that with our current political socioeconomic system that tech would be used to abuse a large amount of people. The way i see it society is headed towards techno feudalism and the better the tech the more difficult it will be for the serfs to escape.

Ive got so many crazy tech fantasies though, im actually afraid to describe them for fear of giving the ruling class more ideas.

> HN drew me in years ago because it had a higher signal-to-noise ratio. > Now, HN is one of the more pessimistic communities I frequent.

It doesn't mean the signal has disappeared from places like HN. It just means the noise has become much noisier, and now it's much harder to find the signal. And it's true not only for HN, but for all forums/communities I've used over the last ~15 years. Kind of a natural process, I think: more people on the internet, more people in tech -> less quality in discussions on average.

I'm still trying to find interesting discussions and useful information, but taking more conscious approach: not reading every article from frontpage or using some kind of ranking system to select content for me.

I built a small tool for this and use it myself (e.g., I found your comment using it :) ). If you're interested, you can try it: https://knoless.app

I just found HN not too long ago and i really like the insightful discussions, it reminds me of reddit before they started banning and censoring everyone for any disagreement with extreme left politics.

I remember i was banned from every single front page subreddit for asking a question about mask policy during covid. I think one week they said masks provided very little protection and they were in limited supply so individuals should stay home and save the masks for healthcare workers and then the next week they said everyone should wear a mask even if you have to reuse an old one for a week straight and even if your entirely alone. So i asked why the sudden change from one week to the next and might have said something like the previous advice made more sense to me and got banned from basically all of reddit.

And that was when i finally managed to kick my reddit addiction. So now i stumble across HN and it seems just like an early reddit except with one main community instead of a bunch of smaller ones. But i see a very similar trend already in the few months ive been lurking and the few weeks ive been commenting, ive seen what looks like political based moderation rather than conduct based.

Im all for keeping discussions civil and engaging but when you try to control which arguments are allowed to be made or block anyone from making a decent argument to favor one side over another then i lose all interest in anything discussed there because you cant have a discussion when one side cant speak. Thats why reddit is so empty today. You can have empty memes and pointless joking around but you cant talk about anything real unless your just a ranting raving lunatic because thats what you become when you dont have anyone to push back against your crazy ideas. Echo chambers are full of lunatics because echo chambers create lunatics. So if you want to keep this space full of actual discussion then dont allow it to become an echo chamber which means you have to defend the right for people you disagree with to have a voice in this space even if its just so that others can explain to them where they may have overlooked something when forming their argument.

Politically i find myself in the center because i tend to disagree with democrats about as often as i disagree with republicans but i can understand where they are coming from and often agree with the idea but i disagree with the implementation. But in my experience the only people who try to stop me from speaking are democrats. The only sites which have a censorship problem are run with a clear democrat bias. Personally id rather have a hate filled platform where people are free to discuss and associate than a locked down platform with no disagreement or hate or mean words where people arent allowed to talk freely.

I value civility but i value the freedom to discuss and thus the freedom to think about and articulate ideas far more.

> But i see a very similar trend already in the few months ive been lurking and the few weeks ive been commenting, ive seen what looks like political based moderation rather than conduct based.

Good moment to pull specifics from hn.algolia.com. In my experience on the site it has the best moderation on the internet. Not every site moderator is interviewed by the New Yorker.

>But in my experience the only people who try to stop me from speaking are democrats.

Go comment with an independent perspective under r/conservative and watch what happens.

Taken from another forum where such money is thrown around, the correct response is "congrats and fuck you". Not much point in argument beyond that.

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