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> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is

> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is describing are people who have very little knowledge of the topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on some narrative that appeals to their bias. The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is. Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct comparison. Ex: Sure, [insert person or company] is successful, but it's because they prey on [insert moral failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!

alphan0n 2y ago
>I would argue the opposite… Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being Steve Jobs. We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from extensive exposure.
smolder 2y ago
I never intended to be the next Steve Jobs, I just expected that my dedication to learning and building useful skills would be rewarded in some sense. Things aren't that simple, of course.
- tylersmith 2y ago
  Why did you expect that? Why would someone reward your personal choice in dedication?
  - elliotec 2y ago
    A reward does not need to come from “someone”, and usually doesn’t. You should expect reward from dedication because you’ll get it. Not from some god on high or some random person called Tyler Smith. It’s from yourself or the fruits of your labor.
  - quataran 2y ago
    Many people expect ""rewards"" in the form of making a living, having a stable salary, maybe supporting a family. Why would someone reward a personal choice in dedication? Usually because it's useful to them, economically.
  - smolder 2y ago
    I had a much more utopian and somewhat deluded outlook growing up. It was based on the things adults told me, e.g. at school, in the boy scouts, and elsewhere, or absorbed from fiction with a utopian outlook like Star Trek TNG. I think there's an impulse to shelter kids and instill hope in them which can foster a blindness to the dog-eat-dog ugliness of the world. Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out! I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.
klyrs 2y ago
I love it when the community psychoanalyzes itself
BikiniPrince 2y ago
[flagged]
lxgr 2y ago
So the only reason somebody might criticize somebody/something is... jealousy? Can you really not think of any powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given the opportunity?
- pembrook 2y ago
  I'm not saying the root of all criticism is jealousy. Obviously there's legitimate utilitarian value judgements to be made on any particular human activity. However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
  - necovek 2y ago
    That's a bit tautological: in any popular forum, there are going to be "a lot of people pretending they are making 'highly rational' value assessments" — or really, doing anything at all. HN also has a lot of the "other" type (those who are rational but honest and objective), and the main distinction should be which of those dominate. And I'd argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their comments and upvotes/downvotes. Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of person: someone who critically looks at most things, and is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with free and open source software or academia than from ever wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
    - pembrook 2y ago
      Agreed that it’s definitely not everybody. But it feels like the “sour grapes” cohort is the fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all discussions that direction. HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently. The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb masses!
klik99 2y ago
The HN community is way more diverse than that, though you're probably spot on for a slice of the community. At least in my experience they are nowhere near the majority.
TMWNN 2y ago
>The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is. Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is well known for being very anti-HN). <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826280>
robotstop 2y ago
I never went through a phase of admiring Steve Jobs, and to me the word "hacker" still has connotations of alleviating oppression. This post amounts to "you're just jealous!" - a total cop-out given the myriad ways this website and the people on it are /making the world worse/.
fragmede 2y ago
Comparison is the thief of joy. -Theo
naming_the_user 2y ago
I think that this may apply to some people but as a blanket statement it feels incorrect because there are tons of counterexamples. Plenty of very successful people that I know personally think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news. Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals that I do respect.
mihaic 2y ago
I've seen what you describe often, people that are simply bitter and spew hate. But does jealousy and bitterness invalidate their point of view? I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still generating revenue and still alive but practically failures for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of business model and distribution, all the classics. The second one I think should have been much more successful were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach this conclusion. I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and unfair? Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most success stories in the startup world have no more merit than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings to exist?
- gizmo 2y ago
  It's on you to figure out how the world actually works instead of taking the words of people who fell into riches for gospel truth. It's a hard lesson to learn, especially if you have to pay the price of watching your startups fail despite your best efforts. Sour grapes and bitterness is how people react when they discover, years too late, that they badly misplayed their cards. The anger is then directed at the injustice of the system when in reality what held people back was not that the game is somewhat rigged but a failure to understand the actual rules. Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos creation, specifically designed to draw attention away from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR narrative and hilariously distorted.
  - mihaic 2y ago
    Sure, put the blame on the individual instead of acknowledging that the lies we were fed in our youth held us back.
MyThoughts100 2y ago
This has to be one of the most thoughtless comments I've read on the thread. You don't know about the lives of other commentors but are happy to make huge generalizations about them and in the process commit the same thinking error that you're accusing them of making. Do you not see the irony in that?

alphan0n 2y ago

>I would argue the opposite… Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being Steve Jobs. We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from extensive exposure.

smolder 2y ago

I never intended to be the next Steve Jobs, I just expected that my dedication to learning and building useful skills would be rewarded in some sense. Things aren't that simple, of course.

tylersmith 2y ago
Why did you expect that? Why would someone reward your personal choice in dedication?
- elliotec 2y ago
  A reward does not need to come from “someone”, and usually doesn’t. You should expect reward from dedication because you’ll get it. Not from some god on high or some random person called Tyler Smith. It’s from yourself or the fruits of your labor.
- quataran 2y ago
  Many people expect ""rewards"" in the form of making a living, having a stable salary, maybe supporting a family. Why would someone reward a personal choice in dedication? Usually because it's useful to them, economically.
- smolder 2y ago
  I had a much more utopian and somewhat deluded outlook growing up. It was based on the things adults told me, e.g. at school, in the boy scouts, and elsewhere, or absorbed from fiction with a utopian outlook like Star Trek TNG. I think there's an impulse to shelter kids and instill hope in them which can foster a blindness to the dog-eat-dog ugliness of the world. Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out! I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.

klyrs 2y ago

I love it when the community psychoanalyzes itself

BikiniPrince 2y ago

[flagged]

lxgr 2y ago

So the only reason somebody might criticize somebody/something is... jealousy? Can you really not think of any powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given the opportunity?

pembrook 2y ago
I'm not saying the root of all criticism is jealousy. Obviously there's legitimate utilitarian value judgements to be made on any particular human activity. However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
- necovek 2y ago
  That's a bit tautological: in any popular forum, there are going to be "a lot of people pretending they are making 'highly rational' value assessments" — or really, doing anything at all. HN also has a lot of the "other" type (those who are rational but honest and objective), and the main distinction should be which of those dominate. And I'd argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their comments and upvotes/downvotes. Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of person: someone who critically looks at most things, and is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with free and open source software or academia than from ever wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Agreed that it’s definitely not everybody. But it feels like the “sour grapes” cohort is the fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all discussions that direction. HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently. The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb masses!

klik99 2y ago

The HN community is way more diverse than that, though you're probably spot on for a slice of the community. At least in my experience they are nowhere near the majority.

TMWNN 2y ago

>The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is. Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is well known for being very anti-HN). <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826280>

robotstop 2y ago

I never went through a phase of admiring Steve Jobs, and to me the word "hacker" still has connotations of alleviating oppression. This post amounts to "you're just jealous!" - a total cop-out given the myriad ways this website and the people on it are /making the world worse/.

fragmede 2y ago

Comparison is the thief of joy. -Theo

naming_the_user 2y ago

I think that this may apply to some people but as a blanket statement it feels incorrect because there are tons of counterexamples. Plenty of very successful people that I know personally think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news. Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals that I do respect.

mihaic 2y ago

I've seen what you describe often, people that are simply bitter and spew hate. But does jealousy and bitterness invalidate their point of view? I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still generating revenue and still alive but practically failures for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of business model and distribution, all the classics. The second one I think should have been much more successful were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach this conclusion. I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and unfair? Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most success stories in the startup world have no more merit than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings to exist?

gizmo 2y ago
It's on you to figure out how the world actually works instead of taking the words of people who fell into riches for gospel truth. It's a hard lesson to learn, especially if you have to pay the price of watching your startups fail despite your best efforts. Sour grapes and bitterness is how people react when they discover, years too late, that they badly misplayed their cards. The anger is then directed at the injustice of the system when in reality what held people back was not that the game is somewhat rigged but a failure to understand the actual rules. Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos creation, specifically designed to draw attention away from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR narrative and hilariously distorted.
- mihaic 2y ago
  Sure, put the blame on the individual instead of acknowledging that the lies we were fed in our youth held us back.

MyThoughts100 2y ago

This has to be one of the most thoughtless comments I've read on the thread. You don't know about the lives of other commentors but are happy to make huge generalizations about them and in the process commit the same thinking error that you're accusing them of making. Do you not see the irony in that?