4 ms·
It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
by paul 18y ago
It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc.
- mattmaroon 18y agoVery.
- prakash 18y agoI made some comments about this, YC is slowly but surely going down the reddit way. Unfortunate, since there are so many smart folks that make insightful submissions and comments.
- benjamincanfly 18y agoI'm interested to see how HN avoids its eternal September. I'm optimistic. There's more than one way to go about it.
- run4yourlives 18y agoSorry, but all your comment does is pretty much confirm the article. Dismissing criticism as "trolling" is exactly what a cult member would do. Even invalid criticism warrants a proper rebuttal, if at the least to educate those leveling the criticism as to their errors. The fact that it has risen to top stop this morning only serves to illustrate that there are many things about the YC process that people don't particularly enjoy. Why those things are either a) misunderstood or b) essential to the process is the way to properly comment on the article. EDIT: Wow, look at the downmods! So much for discussion being valued!
- pg 18y agoI think you may be mistaken about which Paul you're responding to. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul
- run4yourlives 18y agoI know it's "gmail Paul", but my comment still stands. I thought your comment was a more appropriate response, to be honest.
- staunch 18y agoI think the only reason it hasn't been killed is that "silencing critical voices" would be added to the list of offenses. That doesn't bother me at all though. That's just not a good reason to avoid killing a weak troll post.
- pg 18y agoI don't think it's as bad as it might seem. I'd rather have this on the frontpage than lolcats or accident pictures. In fact, I think some of the people who upvote or submit things like this do it as a way of keeping News.YC good. They don't want the site to degenerate into an intellectual monoculture. That doesn't mean they necessarily agree with everything it says. Back in the 1960s, the Communists used to get so many votes in French elections that some people in the US worried the country would align with Russia. But as Laurence Wylie pointed out in Village in the Vaucluse (great book btw), most of the voters didn't actually agree with the Communists' policies. They were just voting for them because they worried that the dominant party was getting too powerful. Really they were voting for diversity.
- abiek 18y agoWhat falls in the deemed YC monoculture and what lies outside of it?
- dfranke 18y agoI think trying to resist the monoculture is a mistake. Your stated aim for the constituency of the news.yc community is "the 10,000 best hackers and nobody else". If you achieved that aim, you'd have a monoculture. It would be a slightly different monoculture than the current one and less in your image, but a monoculture nonetheless. If it's even possible to move away from monoculture without moving toward Digg, I don't think it's worth the risk of trying.
- nostrademons 18y agoIt could be that in order to get the 10,000 best hackers, he has to resist the monoculture. Good hackers usually get that way because they're curious and like to learn new things. It gets boring when the same few dozen people submit the same thousand articles.
- dfranke 18y agoI'm talking about a monoculture of values, not of abilities or interests. "Curious and like to learn new things" is one aspect of the monoculture that I'm referring to. It's a relatively uncommon attribute.