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This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consi

• elorant 7y ago
  ... the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility. What kind of power do you think we have? We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence.
  • jacobush 7y ago
    Because we are busy building Facebook. Or some other similar facet of online life.
  • ckris 7y ago
    > What kind of power do you think we have? Not having power, or having less power than before, makes the discourse even more important. > We can't even convince our friends and family to stay the fuck off of Facebook. The idea that people should stay off Facebook is part of that narrative. That is how the industry can claim that they are changing the world, but at the same time aren't to answer for any of the changes. > Aside from the fact that some people from our industry have a shitton of money I don't see us having any kind of social influence. Social influence isn't so much what is said and done in isolation, but what is and isn't accepted. Things like what you see as a problem, why it is a problem and how it should be addressed influences what happens next.
  • chris5745 7y ago
    I understood this to mean the power of appreciating the societal consequences of technology, and the responsibility of educating others about those consequences, both positive and negative.
    • jp_sc 7y ago
      That's not power, that's a curse!
      • raxxorrax 7y ago
        Especially if nobody listens anyway.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    People like us, we are the trendsetters online. It won't be quick, but Facebook has signed its own death warrant.
  • manigandham 7y ago
• azangru 7y ago
  > HN's prevailing attitude (e.g. cloudflare-shouldnt-ban-<x>). Funny, I thought HN's prevailing attitude in the case of the recent ban of 8chan was, hell yeah, good riddance to those reprehensible twats. (Which, personally, annoyed me, because I believe that even the deplored should have a space for communication.)
  • whiteopinions 7y ago
    Why do you think this? Almost every top comment was critical of cloudflare's response for a variety of reasons.
    • octonion 7y ago
      "whiteopinions", really?
      • whiteopinions 7y ago
        What are you inquisitive about?
        • nkurz 7y ago
          For starters, why did you choose this username? From your comments it seems like you've been here for a while. Why a new account?
          • whiteopinions 7y ago
            Because I like the username. What's wrong with it? >Why a new account? Because I wanted the username.
            • nkurz 7y ago
              > What's wrong with it? Well, it's certainly going to cause many people to discount your opinion because they presume you have an racist agenda. It looks like a username consciously chosen to create offense while being plausibly deniable. Please be cautious of causing harm to a community for sake of social commentary. Needlessly creating offense is a negative, but maybe you can figure out how to use the dissonance to turn it into a net positive.
• belorn 7y ago
  A good test to see if a topic make sense to discuss on HN is if people are willing to calmly discuss the merits of it. The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who does not share the same perspective is not welcome in the discussion and the environment from that confrontation produce the opposite of thoughtful and substantive discussion. Political discussion does not need to end like that and many topics which does not have the above property do pop up in HN.
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    That might have few false-positives (being wrong when we say "this is good for HN"), but the false negatives would be huge. There's plenty on topic that still devolves into flame wars. Off the top of my head, these seem clearly on topic but discussion devolves: Vim vs Emacs. Javascript vs anything. Static vs dynamic types. Apple's keyboards. OpenAI.
• resters 7y ago
  > But as this article shows, abdicating the responsibility by keeping the topics sterile is similarly suspect, in the sense of fiddling while Rome burns. I believe a willingness to confront the ugly sides of technology with some courage of conviction would eventually be recognised, even if it may occasionally involve a bit of a mess. Absolutely true. The failure of mods (and even pg?) to recognize this is the single disheartening and cynical thing about HN. PG gets it half right in his advice to "keep your identity small" when he observes that people cannot argue rationally about something that touches on their identity. But the other half (which PG and the mods get spectacularly wrong) is that what we think of as "political" beliefs, characterized by groupthink and lack of scrutiny/falsifiability, are typically held about every topic other than an individual's area of expertise. A mature HN reader skilled in technology, is least likely to undergo an emotional/identity-driven flight of fancy about political issues pertaining to technology. An immature HN reader will either be naively apolitical ("Oh, I just build AI tech, it isn't my concern that it's being used to round up refugees for execution") or will turn off the technical insight in favor of loyalty to some political group (repeating talking points, etc.) Of any community I've been a part of, HN offers the best hope for grounded, rational discussion of important political topics surrounding technology. Just as someone who stands by and does not try to stop a lynching is guilty of doing nothing, the HN mods ban on politics and punishment of those who try to discuss political topics are in fact making a very strong statement of their political preference, which is that controversial or troubling aspects/implications of technology or tech firms simply be ignored. With the advent of Palantir (which has had lots of stage time at Startup School), defense technology became cool. Google under Schmidt became a major lobbying force and defense contractor. Facebook is not far behind, etc. HN mods are constantly surrounded by stories of "successful" firms in the defense contractor space, and just as it is viewed as cynical to be dismissive of the worth of "another startup doing social picture sharing", it is similarly viewed as cynical to question the good citizenship and motives of a firm in the defense/surveillance space. HN (and HN mods) are a product of the surrounding culture. As a share of GDP, surveillance and defense spending has never been higher during peacetime. In other words, it's a bull market and HN is ultimately a beneficiary of the growth of surveillance and defense tech. Hence its interests are overwhelmingly right wing when it comes to suppressing criticism and threats of that tech. There are other politically relevant areas for discussion besides the ones I've focused on in this comment. I chose them simply because I think they are top of mind for a lot of people even though the difficult philosophical and political issues relating to them are under active suppression by HN mods.
• craftyguy 7y ago
  > But when hot-button issues intersect with technology, the HN readership is in a position of power, and shouldn't routinely be spared the anguish of being reminded of their responsibility. Which is exactly how we end up with endless articles and 'discussions' of boeing 737s on 'hacker' 'news' by people who think they are pilots and aircraft designers (hint: they are none of those). I would bet the vast majority of people on 'hacker' 'news' are not responsible for any of this, they just like to beat these topics into the ground, uncorrecting each other along the way.
  • lordgrenville 7y ago
    I really dislike this gatekeeping. Threads on aviation in particular seem to draw people with a phenomenal amount of knowledge. Even if they're not professional pilots/plane designers, just very well-read amateurs, why is their information less valuable? Encountering people with insane amounts of niche knowledge is one of my favourite aspects of this site.
• jasim 7y ago
  The political discussions that make their way into HN are very US-centric and that excludes me and countless others who actively participate here. A lot of such discussions are not real enough to me - they are problems of a much more privileged world. If we were to have truly political discussions, we'll need to include all the other countries of the world, which none of us would want. There are other places where political conversations are dime a dozen, but no other place like HN for technology, and things that "gratify one's intellectual curiosity".
  • mikemotherwell 7y ago
    I was shaking my head in disagreement, until I read: > If we were to have truly political discussions, we'll need to include all the other countries of the world, which none of us would want That's a really, really good point, and I'll keep it in mind when political topics arise.
    • ckris 7y ago
      I do think it is an underappreciated point, but also arguably why politics should be part of discussions. Not having to talk politics is really something that is earned. It is when you have a solid enough foundation to your field or profession that you feel secure enough in to not have to address it. In computing or software, we don't really have that. So people run out of vocabulary rather quickly, ending up in arguments like nationalism or free speech because there often isn't an intermediate layer of something like regulation or duty that you can be discussed by everyone. That is ultimately more a factor of the "everything goes" attitude, because if "everything goes" everything is also relevant to the discussion.
  • rossdavidh 7y ago
    Hear, hear. The job of HN is not to discuss every topic worth discussing. It is to discuss those topics (intelligently) which few (if any) other places on the internet have discussion of by an informed group.
  • dosy 7y ago
    That's like saying because we can't fix everything, we should fix nothing. There's no need to include everything. HN is selective. It's in English. The reason it can't have posts about the responsibility of SV towards the tech and social impact they make is because that would pierce the veil of fake narrative that supports SVs continued unexamined influence. The reality is the mods are not the tip of the spear. There are others mods above them who intervene to set policy and crush off plan posts. A truth this place can never acknowledge.
• evo_9 7y ago
  Totally agree, my only wish is the mods would 100% stop editing the original link titles. They should respect the original authors title for starters, and the new title isn’t always better. Whether or not the title is click bait-y, well leave they to the community to decide (aka if the article has merit etc) It’s also confusing if you've already clicked on it and checked it out - suddenly there is another similar interesting story - oh wait nope it’s the one I already checked out.
• ssalazar 7y ago
  > Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia. Indeed, I will happily fan-boy for the New Yorker here, they usually succeed in capturing the nuances of topics I happen to be familiar with. Gell-Mann seems more applicable to mass market news outlets; whereas NYer writers will often spend months -> years researching a subject.
• slavik81 7y ago
  I don't think Hacker News is diverse enough for most political conversations to be useful. There's biases just because we're heavily skewed towards engineers, but there's subtler problems too. For example, how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective. Hacker News cannot solve all the world's problems. Not even all the problems related to technology. It's ok to focus on the things we can do effectively. HN isn't the only forum to discuss important issues.
  • dang 7y ago
    > how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective. I can't say I know what that is, but are you sure about this? The HN community is overwhelmingly not in California, and comments about California seem to me to skew to the critical and negative.
    • slavik81 7y ago
      I'm not sure, but I would eat my hat if it's not the single largest voting block. The influence is not about praise or criticism, but what is easily understandable or what resonates with lived experience. There's a lot of different people on HN. I don't mean to say we're all the same. It's just that voting is a low-pass filter.
      • dang 7y ago
        I was going to say it's for sure not the single largest voting block (but don't eat your hat! that can't be good for you). But I suppose it depends on how you define "block".
        • nkurz 7y ago
          Inverting the question, do you think it would be possible to do accurate geographic clustering based solely on HN voting patterns (ignoring time of vote)? I'm doubtful. I think the problem with calling California the "single largest voting block" is that it's so far from homogenous. While California probably has a slightly different ratio of clusters than other states/countries, I suspect the clusters themselves are essentially non-geographic. It would likely be the biggest fiasco in the history of HN, but it would be wonderful to see what patterns could be pulled out of the private voting data if you were to make it available to researchers.
• RobertRoberts 7y ago
  >...while not ignoring the problems I find this the crux of the issue at large, there is no such thing as "no problems". Therefore, what was the point of this criticism in the first place? (in the article, not your comment) It seems to me, the author didn't like that HN actually allows open discussion and respectful (mostly) sharing of opposing views.