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Today has been a day of hatred on Hacker News. First it was a person naysaying in the sex toy automation thread and now it’s here. The sphere of knowledge and
by t-writescode 6y ago
Today has been a day of hatred on Hacker News. First it was a person naysaying in the sex toy automation thread and now it’s here.
The sphere of knowledge and the sphere of usefulness expand in all directions.
Sometimes usefulness expands in entertainment and pleasure (no one complains about Blizzard employees or Valve employees making games), sometimes they expand into cancer research, global warming research or, yes, in this case, space travel and extraterrestrial discovery.
There are billions of people on this planet and billions of them have the potential to be scientists or engineers in some area of the multi-dimensional spheres of all human knowledge and use.
If humanity must be seen as a hive mind, then it still can parallel process with, again, billions of people and hundreds of millions of scientists.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoI've noticed a decline in comment quality the last months Not sure if I'm correct though.
- t-writescode 6y agoMy operating theory is that isolation from the pandemic has made a lot of people on HN incredibly irritable in the last month or so. I see it at work. I see it on Reddit. I see it here on Hacker News. I’m taking some huge steps back from social media this week, myself, and also taking a week-long vacation. Edit: I’ve also seen it in myself.
- dfxm12 6y agoHow many? 4? 24? 42? I noticed a decline almost Internet-wide since around the 2014 UK elections. I wish an opinion calling space exploration a waste of money was the worst of it.
- howlgarnish 6y agoPeople have been moaning about the decline of discussion on the internet since 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- Tsiklon 6y agoIn less than 3 weeks it will be the 10,000th of September 1993!
- Razengan 6y agoI’ve been noticing that for a couple years, along with downvote abuse.
- rossdavidh 6y agoSo, that sounds like it could be frustrating, but one possibility is to try to find a metric for measuring it, to double-check your sense that quality is declining. Looking at frequency of [flagged] and downvoted leaves open the possibility that it is the sensitivity that has increased, rather than the quality decreased. So, you make a web scraper that brings to you a random sample of HN comments, without telling you the date, and you rate them as to quality. Then it stores the date, and your rating, in a datastore which you can analyze. There, you have just found a nice little project to occupy your mind less frustratingly than before. Once you do the analysis, either: 1) you discover there is no real trend, and can relax 2) you discover there IS a real trend, and you can bring us back that evidence, which would be fascinating
- yongjik 6y agoTrolls gonna troll. Downvote and move on.