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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

"Perhaps most worrying is the single-mindedness of the Internet hive mind that has, over the past few days, eaten up every word of Elon Musk."

Very untrue. From the beginning, a lot of people found fault in Musk's twitter and CNBC performances, and its clear in ensuing discussion here and elsewhere that people who initially sided with Musk are adjusting their views based on the blog post and the NYT defense.

This isn't to say that there aren't Elon evangelists, but the response wasn't as uniform as the visceral reaction to SOPA

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I was looking mostly at 1) Reddit, 2) Hacker News and 3) Twitter. I saw very, very few signs of critical thought that questioned Musk.

But yes, I am certain I am not the only person to see that Elon was exaggerating when he called the article "fake."

It's hard to read these sources to determine the nature of the hive mind because the sorting algorithms gives higher weight to a few people with a lot of karma or popularity, so if you just looked at the top post you would see those people and erroneously conclude that the Internet agreed with them.

On twitter, for instance, you are most likely seeing tweets from popular people (which is not really representative). On reddit and HN the position on the page isn't representative of the pool's view.

I brought up the same problem in the thread regarding HN hiding stories: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226147

If you see it from ppl who have lots of karma/popularity or popular ppl on twitter is exactly the point. These people are singled out because they have been promoted by others who agree with them. Just the same if someone who had the opposite view were upvoted/popular they would be singled out.

The claim was that he saw very few people question musk. And I am saying that its true if all you did was look at the first few comments. If you actually read the comments deeper in the discussion, you find a bevy of critical posts.

I don't disagree with what you are saying in general but I am refuting the claim about the quantity. My complaint is really with the algorithm used to determine what shows up at the top here.

I think there's something to be said about all the critical thinkers that have simply not yelled loudly about their opinion on the subject either way. And I think everyone who's yelling should consider that before they generalize entire communities.

Both you statement and the authors are based on there field of scope. Without knowing each it cant really be said ether way which is true. Here on HN it has been pretty 50/50 as far as i can tell.

Given that the author posted it here, I assumed HN was part of this scope. And if you think it's 50/50, then at least one part of the hive mind wasn't zealously defending Tesla.

We shouldn't mistake the HN hive mind, which is pretty firmly pro Elon Musk, with the internet hive mind which is pretty firmly indifferent to (a) Elon Musk, (b) the NY Times, (c) Tesla.

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