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Has Hacker News always been full of USA style right wing cultists?

jacquesm 5y ago
No, this is a thing of the past couple of years, starting ~2016 or so. Before then it was much milder here, it's a very slow trend so easy to miss but if you've been here for a shorter period then it may seem like it has been always so.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  A problem made worse by the fact that it literally does not even require a pulse to have an account on HN. It would take minutes to add even a captcha check for account creation and maybe an hour tops to require email validation before allowing comments. They don't care. I suspect it goes even further - that making it trivial for bots and PR manipulation makes HN look a lot busier than it would be if they put effort into validating accounts.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That's incorrect afaik. The reason why it does not require an email address is because there have been instances where very valuable information was supplied regarding company internals by 'noob' accounts, so consider that a feature. As for bots and PR manipulation: HN expends a lot of effort to reduce these, so your argument makes no sense. There is no benefit to HN to seeming 'busier', the pay off in HN is that it is a community of people that YC (the parent company of Hacker News) can tap into as the feedstock for each new batch of companies that gets launched out of YC. This means that the community is the pay-off and being 'busy' or looking busier than it really isn't in any way a requirement for that, in fact it is a distraction. The fact that you've been here only for 30 days is telling (though you may have been lurking for much longer), you probably should check your assumptions about what HN is and how it functions until you've been here a bit longer.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s been getting worse too. Covid was absolutely an accelerator on this; each successive news article on Covid and the research for a vaccine or anti-viral got progressively crazier.
Ardren 5y ago
It's definitely been getting worse over time. There are people in these comments suggesting that only people who think global warming was already true become climate scientists. Or that people only push global warming (and vaccinations!?) because they want to control people. It's disheartening.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

No, this is a thing of the past couple of years, starting ~2016 or so. Before then it was much milder here, it's a very slow trend so easy to miss but if you've been here for a shorter period then it may seem like it has been always so.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
A problem made worse by the fact that it literally does not even require a pulse to have an account on HN. It would take minutes to add even a captcha check for account creation and maybe an hour tops to require email validation before allowing comments. They don't care. I suspect it goes even further - that making it trivial for bots and PR manipulation makes HN look a lot busier than it would be if they put effort into validating accounts.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's incorrect afaik. The reason why it does not require an email address is because there have been instances where very valuable information was supplied regarding company internals by 'noob' accounts, so consider that a feature. As for bots and PR manipulation: HN expends a lot of effort to reduce these, so your argument makes no sense. There is no benefit to HN to seeming 'busier', the pay off in HN is that it is a community of people that YC (the parent company of Hacker News) can tap into as the feedstock for each new batch of companies that gets launched out of YC. This means that the community is the pay-off and being 'busy' or looking busier than it really isn't in any way a requirement for that, in fact it is a distraction. The fact that you've been here only for 30 days is telling (though you may have been lurking for much longer), you probably should check your assumptions about what HN is and how it functions until you've been here a bit longer.

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s been getting worse too. Covid was absolutely an accelerator on this; each successive news article on Covid and the research for a vaccine or anti-viral got progressively crazier.

Ardren 5y ago

It's definitely been getting worse over time. There are people in these comments suggesting that only people who think global warming was already true become climate scientists. Or that people only push global warming (and vaccinations!?) because they want to control people. It's disheartening.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]